It was discovered on 5 December 1988, by Japanese amateur astronomers Masaru Arai and Hiroshi Mori at Yorii Observatory in central Japan.
[2] Fugaku is a member of the Flora family, one of the largest groups of stony asteroids in the main-belt.
[9] Fugaku has been characterized as a stony S-type asteroid, the most common type in the inner main-belt.
[1] In March 210, a rotational lightcurve of Fugaku was obtained from photometric observations at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.
[4][5][6] The Collaborative Asteroid Lightcurve Link assumes an albedo of 0.24 – derived from 8 Flora, the largest member and namesake of this family – and calculates a diameter of 5.40 kilometers with an absolute magnitude of 13.5.