In a farewell letter to the Imperial Japanese Navy, Chikuhei Nakajima made an argument that would define his life: Japan was building the wrong weapons. The naval engineer, the third Japanese man ever to earn a pilot’s license, resigned his commission in 1917 with three demands. Japan should abandon giant battleships in favor of an air arm, build aircraft domestically, and hand that work to private firms. A private company, he argued, could revise a design twelve times in a year, while a government arsenal working on an annual budget could manage only one.
He built his company on that arithmetic. By 1939, a Nakajima engine had been formally adopted under the name Sakae—meaning “glory”—and it powered both the Mitsubishi Zero and the Army’s Hayabusa fighter, the plane American pilots called the Oscar. Much of that engine production came from a vast works at Musashino, on the western edge of Tokyo, where the payroll would eventually climb to around 50,000 people. The first challenge to Nakajima’s belief came from Saipan.
On November 24, 1944, 111 B-29s lifted off from newly built Marianas airfields for the first major raid on Tokyo. Their primary target was the Musashino Engine Works. Fifty-seven people died inside the plant that day, and 75 were hurt. The second blow came from within Japan.
In April 1945, the cabinet voted to put the aircraft industry under direct state management, and the company founded to prove private firms were faster than arsenals became one itself. Renamed the First Munitions Arsenal, its inventory at handover included 102 plants, roughly 500 workshops scattered into the countryside, 30,735 machine tools, and a quarter of a million people. The third arrived two days after Japan’s surrender broadcast. On August 17, 1945, the arsenal’s chief received an order from the munitions ministry to stop all production.
The company’s own chronology records the order but leaves off the name of the man who signed it. That gap matters: that day saw a new cabinet take office, and the new munitions minister was Chikuhei Nakajima himself, while his predecessor held the post until the handover that same day. Whether the order that ended the war for Nakajima’s factories carried the founder’s own signature, sent to his own brother, remains an open question. On that same day, the old firm took back its plants and renamed itself Fuji Sangyo, rewriting its articles for peacetime trades like fishing nets, farm tools, and vehicles.
At the Ogikubo engine plant, worker Masaichi Hirai watched the old company shut down. He later described to local historians how, in the ten days before occupation forces arrived, the plant burned every document it held and dismissed the entire workforce, ordering them to leave. Hirai walked out with the rest, leaving the machines bolted to the floors, their tooling still cutting parts for aircraft. The occupation banned aircraft production and even aircraft research.
That left a question hanging over every Fuji plant through the winter of 1945: a factory built to make fighters and fighter engines had to find something else the occupiers would allow, and something nearly penniless people would buy. The fourth message came from occupation headquarters. A memorandum dated November 6, 1945, ordered the Japanese government to break Fuji Sangyo apart on the same terms as the four great family business empires—Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Sumitomo, and Yasuda. In December, Nakajima’s name was placed on the list of men to be investigated for Class A war crimes, the category reserved for leaders who planned the war.
The following month, he was purged from public office. Hirai returned to work on April 25, 1946, among the first former staff rehired as a new union pushed the company to take its people back. He came back to a business with nothing to sell. Wages were paid weekly, going first to the families in the worst trouble.
Men dug steel bars and scrap out of the plant’s air raid shelters to sell for cash, and staff went door to door among the farms selling soap, thread, and sewing needles. The plant tried making engines for fishing boats. They did not sell well. Hirai put it down to a company that had spent its entire existence with one customer—the state—and had never had to sell anything to anybody.
Plant by plant, the company applied to the occupation’s military government for permission to make something new. Ōta asked for electrical parts, small motors, and electric heaters. Motaka wanted tableware for occupation troops and truck parts. Mishima requested scales, farm tools, clocks, small engines, and hair clippers.
Hamamatsu asked for sewing machines, typewriters, calculating machines, and baby carriages. Handa asked for wooden boats. Koizumi, where Zero airframes had come off the line, asked to build bus bodies. And both Mitaka and Ōta asked to build scooters.
The scooter was the answer to the winter’s question. Engineers at Ōta and Mitaka had been watching American soldiers ride a small Powell scooter and got hold of one to study. Company lore says the wheels on the first prototype were surplus tail wheels from the Ginga, a twin-engine Navy bomber Nakajima had built in quantity. The first production machine rolled out in June 1946 with a single-cylinder four-stroke engine of 135 cubic centimeters and about two horsepower, its engine cover made of the same light alloy that had skinned the airplanes.
The company called it the Rabbit, and it went on sale to the public in 1947. The occupation-ordered breakup took five years to complete. In the summer of 1950, twelve successor companies emerged from Fuji Sangyo under the Enterprise Reconstruction Law, though that number depends on who is counting. The plan the company filed four years earlier asked to split into fifteen; Hirai, remembering it decades later, put the number at nine; Subaru’s published chronology lists twelve by name.
His own Ogikubo engine plant went off as Fuji Precision Industries, made film projectors and sewing machines, merged with the carmaker Prince, and ended up inside Nissan. Five of the other pieces came back together. On July 15, 1953, they put up the capital for a new firm, Fuji Heavy Industries, absorbing the remaining pieces within two years. Its first car, a 1.
5-liter sedan known internally as the P1, got its public name two years later: Subaru, the Japanese word for the star cluster the West calls the Pleiades, with an emblem showing six stars. Only a handful were built, and that car never reached the showrooms. The car that did came from the drawing board of Shinroku Momose, an engineer who had joined Nakajima in 1942 to work on aircraft. On the day of the surrender, he was one of roughly ten designers still at the Koizumi works.
In August 1949, his group finished the Fuji, the first bus built in Japan with its engine in the back and no chassis frame underneath—the shell of the body carrying the load the way an aircraft fuselage carries it. Momose stood about 5’11”, tall for a Japanese man of his day, and he laid out the interior of his tiny car around his own body. Fuji announced the car on March 3, 1958, and it went on sale that May as the Subaru 360. Ten years later, it went to America, thanks to a Philadelphia man named Malcolm Bricklin who had been selling scooters to gas stations renting them out in tourist towns.
By his own account, the Italian scooters were hurting renters because of hand-shifted gears nobody on vacation knew how to work. Then he found a man in Boston renting out 450 Fuji Rabbits with automatic transmissions. Bricklin put $75,000 into what he thought were the North American rights and sent a telex to Japan ordering a couple of thousand scooters. The telex that came back, as he tells it, asked who he was and said the Rabbit factory had been sold to Israel and was being taken apart.
He flew to Japan, where, he said, the board was sorry for him and gave him a plant tour to make it up. On that tour, he saw the Subaru 360. It weighed under 1,000 pounds, putting it below the line where new federal safety standards applied—he could bring it in without meeting them. Subaru of America was incorporated on February 15, 1968, in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, by Bricklin and a partner named Harvey Lamb, who had already set up the first office the year before in a small rented unit in Balboa Park, California.
The first 360 reached the United States in May. It cost $1,290, about $300 less than a Volkswagen Beetle, with a two-stroke twin of 356 cubic centimeters and 25 horsepower. It returned 66 miles to the gallon and would go 69 miles an hour. Getting to 50 took 37.
5 seconds by Subaru’s own figures, leaving the driver plenty of time to watch the trucks in the mirror. One advertisement sold it with the words “cheap and ugly” right in the headline. Then Consumer Reports rated the car “not acceptable,” and sales fell away. The chronology holds one significant discrepancy.
The last Rabbit scooter came off the line at Ōta on June 29, 1968, according to the company’s own records—four months after Bricklin and Lamb set up their company. In Bricklin’s telling, Fuji had already sold the Rabbit factory and crews were taking it apart when he first tried to place an order, before Subaru of America existed. Somebody’s months are out of order. Memory is the likelier culprit, since the telex has never been published, and without it there is nothing on paper to set against the chronology.
The occupation took Chikuhei Nakajima’s name off the Class A list in 1947, and no charge was ever brought. Two years later, on October 29, 1949, he died of a brain hemorrhage at his house in Mitaka, a few miles from the ruined engine works. He was 65. The Musashino works, where Nakajima built the Sakae, never made anything at all after the war.
The bombers had left it too broken to turn over to peacetime work, so Fuji Sangyo kept it on the books as a liquidation office with a small staff whose job was to settle whatever remained. Every year on November 24, those people held rites for their dead. In October 1948, while the occupation was still in force, they formed a committee, raised the money from their own pockets, and put up a memorial stone on the ground where the works had kept its own small Inari shrine. They set up a second stone at a temple in Musashino for the dead nobody had come to claim.
The inscription counts more than 200 killed inside the works and more than 500 injured. In 1964, the stone went to the Higashi-Fushimi Inari Shrine, and the committee asked the families back from all over Japan for the 20th-year rites.