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Japan has 33k businesses at least a century old
- cyberferret 7y agoWow - that tea house has been operating for 900 years? I thought the previous record was a Japanese temple building company that was around for 400+ years before having to close during the global financial crisis a decade ago?! There is that old adage in multi generational businesses that goes - "The first generation kicks off the business, the second generation builds upon what the first generation did, and the third generation squanders everything the first two generations did". In my 40+ years of business consulting I have actually seen this happen multiple times. There must be something different about the Japanese cultural and philosophical outlook of building a business and handing it over to the next generation to carry on.
- bordercases 7y agoKnowing what your place is in an honorific culture might help.
- roywiggins 7y agoThis probably helps: "Several companies have even benefited from the widely-accepted Japanese practice of adopting adult male workers into the family bloodline to ensure an unbroken succession for the business"
- gumby 7y agoThis technique has saved monarchies (and "lesser" families) around the world for millennia.
- gumby 7y ago> I thought the previous record was a Japanese temple building company that was around for 400+ years before having to close during the global financial crisis a decade ago?! There are banks in Europe older than 400 years as well.
- GuiA 7y agoAnd high schools, and houses, and pubs, and random walls in the middle of downtown, and...
- hnaccy 7y ago> I thought the previous record was a Japanese temple building company that was around for 400+ years before having to close during the global financial crisis a decade ago?! You have the numbers mixed up, Kongō Gumi had been founded in 578 AD so its run was over a millennia.
- gumby 7y agos/millennia/millennium/. Or a chiliad if you prefer.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y agoJapan's Kongō Gumi construction company has lasted over 1,400 years! To give a perspective of the time period of its existence - • It was started just right at the end of Kofun period when Japanese tribes started political centralisation (578 AD). • It has survived unification of Japan under Tokugawa shogunate (1603 - 1868). • It has survived forced opening of Japan to the outside world by the western forces (1854). • It has survived World War I (1914 - 1918). • It has survived World War II (1939-1945), ending in the near total destruction of the country. Yet, when Japan survived to become a Trillion dollar economy; Kongō Gumi Co., Ltd. was liquidated and acquired by Takamatsu Construction Group (2006). What does it take to build a Business which lasts over 1000 years now? Would humanity even last for next 1000 years with current geo-politics, inequality and hatred?
- cthalupa 7y ago>• It has survived World War II (1939-1945), ending in the near total destruction of the country. What part of WW2 resulted in near total destruction of the country? The two atomic bombs were tragic, but the near total destruction of two cities is a far cry from the near total destruction of a country.
- dba7dba 7y agoThere is an old Korean saying which is roughly translated this way: No family stays poor for three generations. And no family stays rich for three generations.
- Danieru 7y agoDo you remember Ship of Theseus? The thought experiment about if a ship which has been fully rebuilt bit by bit is it still the same thing? Japan appears consistent in saying, yes, rebuilding or swapping out components keeps the identity. You see this attitude in "Japan's oldest temple, burned to the ground and rebuilt every 20 years". In the west we might argue that burning a building and rebuilding, would count as a new building. Similar in Japan's family business the lineage can be preserved by adopting a adult man capable of continuing the business. It needs not be common, but it does serve to ensure family businesses will not end due to a failed marriage or lack of kids. In the west this would just come across as giving your business away to another person, yet in Japan it is considered a valid continuation of the family. I do not think this is the single biggest reason Japan has such old businesses, but I think it is a key tool which has preserved many.
- swampthing 7y agoBut in the West, even if you just gave your business away to another person who continued to run it, we would still consider that the same business.
- austhrow743 7y agoSure but you would't then advertise it as having been in the family for a thousand years.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoBut you might still say "family run for a thousand years"
- Barrin92 7y agomore as ad advertisement slogan though. I've never seen someone in the west adopt another adult just to authentically continue a legacy (outside of European monarchies maybe). There is a sense of tradition to these Japanese companies that one doesn't see so often outside of Japan.
- zepto 7y agoBeretta the Italian Gun manufacturer is almost 500 years old.
- huffmsa 7y agoA lot of the firearms manufacturers are over a century old. FN Herstal, Mossberg & Sons, Smith & Wesson, Winchester, Browning, Walther all tick the 100+ year mark. However, most of them trace their roots back to the industrial revolution, and didn't make the transition from bespoke pieces to mass production like Beretta did.
- davidivadavid 7y agoOnly a century old? Easy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
- zisermann 7y agoand most of them anyway are in Japan
- diffeomorphism 7y agoYou entirely missed the point that there is 33k of them. Your list does not even have 1000.
- davidivadavid 7y agoWhat makes you think I missed that point? I was making a playful remark about the fact Japan also has companies that are far older than 100 years old, which I find impressive and interesting. If I was trying to come up with a longer list, I would have said so. I wasn't, so I didn't.
- distantaidenn 7y agoFun fact: The oldest continuous company in Japan (and the world), Kongo Gumi, was founded by a Korean immigrant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi
- gumby 7y agoAnother fun fact: the oldest monarchy in the world was also founded by a Korean immigrant https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/world/japan-rediscovers-its-korean-past.html https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/11/world/japan-rediscovers-i...
- 2038AD 7y agoAs far as I can tell you've misread the article. The grandmother of one of the emperors may have been Korean but the first (non-legendary) emperor was Jimmu who was born in Japan. I'm also a little wary of that article since it says "Yamato is the name of the family that founded Japan's imperial line" when Yamato is the word used for the ethnic group to which most Japanese belong. I'm wondering if there's a link here to the idea that Yamato people are mostly descended from the ancient Yayoi who took Japan from the Jomon and were probably from Korea (but not the ancestors of the modern Korean people).
- bane 7y agoIt's interesting about growing older. I don't know if this is a function of aging or a change in how humanity recons time. When I was younger, a century seemed like forever. Now it's just 1920 and we have film, music, audio, books and so on from that time period readily available. In many ways 1920 doesn't really seem all that far away to me while 1860, 1870, 1880 (a century from when I was a child) seemed to be forever ago. When I look at film and photos from 1920 I see modern people, people I could see meeting and having relatively modern conversations while when I look at media from the mid 1800s I see ancestors who I share very little with.
- ip26 7y agoWhen you were in middle school, 1920 was 8 or so lifetimes ago. Now it's closer to only 2-3 lifetimes ago. I'd also reckon you can more easily relate to people who lived with older technology, having lived pre-internet yourself. When you are young, everything just is, and it's hard to relate with living differently.
- gibspaulding 7y agoI think the world has at least in many ways changed a lot less between 1920 and today than in the preceding century, or even the preceding few decades. WW1 did a lot to yank the world into modernity: large scale assembly line industry, women working outside of the house, US interventionism, social welfare (the 30's technically, at least in the US), not to mention the entire modern geo-political landscape all happened, v or at least we're accelerated by the war. Obviously they didn't all happen exclusively in the few years of the war itself, however the few decades surrounding it we're certainly a tumultuous time. It seems like if you were to graph the pace of change, there would be a hump around the First World War. I think the coming of the information age is creating another hump, but at the same time it seems like so far, surprisingly little has changed as a result of it.
- drewmate 7y agoI think in terms of change, not all centuries are created equal. All things considered, I think the century from 1870-1970 saw more rapid change than any other in history (including 1920-2020). Planet money did a piece the other week about this idea and how economic growth seems to have slowed down never to return to its 20th century levels. If this idea is true, those in the 1920s share more with us (familiarity with cars, mass media, urbanization) than those just 50 years prior.
- echelon 7y agoNintendo is one of them. They were founded in 1889 as a playing card company. They even had a short stint running love hotels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo
- Forgivenessizer 7y agoGoogle document trove: https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/08/14/google-machine-learning-fairness-whistleblower-goes-public-says-burden-lifted-off-of-my-soul/ https://www.projectveritas.com/2019/08/14/google-machine-lea... Scroll to the bottom, select "Everything.zip" (it's actually named "Don't Be Evil.zip"
- narag 7y agoI was surprised to learn that the place my father used to hang on is 232 years old. It's in a crossroads, but not so frequented today, since they made the beltway and took away parking space that was around. In Spanish, with photos: http://puentechico1.blogspot.com/2020/01/restaurante-el-pajaro-doscientos.html http://puentechico1.blogspot.com/2020/01/restaurante-el-paja...
- chriscatoya 7y agoInterestingly, this feels related to the low levels of entrepreneurship (Japan ranks 4th lowest in the world) https://bradchattergoon.com/japan-and-entrepreneurship-e468a6453bac https://bradchattergoon.com/japan-and-entrepreneurship-e468a... These things are neither universally good nor bad: I do believe the Japanese conception of duty (and how it diverges from an American sensibility) plays a large role in the fact 33k businesses are over 100 years old. As an American this many businesses is definitely an impressive number, but then again, 100 years ago the US was only 143 years old. We’re ~3 lifetimes (8 generations) away from the signing of the Declaration of Independence. ️
- huffmsa 7y agoThe low level of entrepreneurialism isn't 1 to 1 with low innovation though. I think you're right about the sense of duty, it leads people to turning their innovation into something that can help their existing company versus taking it and starting their own firm most of the time. On the flipside, company management seems more accepting of occasionally taking these radical ideas and rebuilding the whole business around them. Nintendo is a good example.
- chriscatoya 7y agoI generally agree, however I don’t think we should extrapolate trends in Japanese corporate culture from gaming companies. The origin of most of them are gambling syndicates (if you catch my drift) and I don’t think they would reflect the mainstream mores.
- divbzero 7y agoWhile many of the oldest businesses in Japan are hotels, some of the oldest in Europe are breweries [1], e.g. Weihenstephan (1040) and Franziskaner (1397) which both make excellent hefeweizens. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
- minikomi 7y agoFunny, just the other day I bought a hand warmer here in Japan and it distinctly had 1923 as the age of the company on the box. I was struck by how that's almost 100 years now. Highly recommend the pocket warmer by the way. http://www.hakkin.co.jp/ http://www.hakkin.co.jp/
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y agoTraditional Japanese companies (I worked for one for a quarter century) tend to be quite risk-averse. This does mean that they may not have massive spurts of growth, like Apple or Microsoft, but it also means they can weather storms fairly well. Remember that many Japanese companies had their assets turned to kindling in WWII, and survived.
- reustle 7y agoIf I own a reasonably successful business, and want the prestige / vanity of something like "Since 1953", could I buy a small / failing business in some small town and merge the companies? Would my company now technically be running since 1953? I have companies in both Japan and the US. It's a fun though experiment at the very least. I don't think I'd ever execute on something like this, but a software development agency "since 1876" would be a great conversation starter.
- cbg0 7y agoSure, but brand recognition is still much more important than the founding date.
- ghaff 7y agoBrand recognition cuts both ways. Sometimes companies deliberately sunset their brand. For example, Foot Locker today is actually a successor corporation to Woolworth which was an example of what used to be called five and dime stores.
- skrebbel 7y agoOr you could just put "since 1953" on the sign and not buy a company and few people would know any better. Equally disingenuous, probably not much less legal either.
- wodenokoto 7y agoYes, this is exactly what the people behind Abercrombie & Fitch did. They had an idea for a college brand of clothing and repurposed an old, dying hunting brand in the company lineup to give the new brand authenticity and a nice number to follow “est. “ in their branding.
- ghaff 7y agoThere was actually an intermediate incarnation. After closing its high-end hunting/fishing store in Manhattan (gunsmiths on premise, fishing lures for a particular type of fish on a particular stretch of Western river) and going bankrupt, a Houston-based outfit made them a more generic "yuppie-ish" sort of store with connections to hunting mostly as an image thing. Then they were sold and developed into their current form.
- tkgally 7y agoA few days ago, I went into a barbershop in Fujisawa, south of Tokyo, to have my hair cut. When I entered, the sole barber was slumped on a sofa looking at a computer screen. He didn't seem particularly happy to have a customer. The shop was messy, a white cat wandered around, and I had to step over a live turtle in a tank on the floor to get to the barber chair. As the barber cut my hair, I asked him about the shop. He said that it was ninety years old—the area had escaped bombing during the war—and that his grandfather and father had run the shop before him. If someone opened a similarly shambolic barbershop today, it would almost certainly fail, as Japanese consumers are picky about appearances. But he said he had a steady clientele, including customers who themselves were the second or third generation in their families to get their hair cut there. He also turned out to be pleasant to chat with, and I had no complaint about the quality of the haircut. The cost of the haircut was on the high side, and as he lives behind the shop in a house he inherited he must have minimal overhead. He looked to be in his forties. He should have no trouble keeping the shop running well past the century mark.
- bytematic 7y agoIs it part of the culture in japan that you take over the business of your parents? I wonder if that negatively affects the quality of the business to have children running it that don't particularly want to.
- tkgally 7y agoIt has traditionally been a part of the culture for businesses both small and large. In the case of small shops like the barbershop I visited, an often-reported issue in recent years is the reluctance of the younger generation to take over their parents' shops; one result is an increase in empty stores in once-bustling shopping areas. The declining birthrate also contributes to that trend. Larger companies are also often passed down from parents to children; it's no coincidence that the president of Toyota Motor is named Akio Toyoda. In some cases, family succession helps to maintain quality and traditions and to keep the company intact; in others, it can lead to inertia, internal strife, and business failure.
- bushin 7y ago
- bump64 7y agoAnother point I want to mention is that Japan was never invaded on its own territory by a foreign power and it wasn't ruled or politically influenced by outsiders for many centuries. This helps a lot to build and preserve a business. On the contrary if you take the Balkans in Europe every few centuries the ruling power changed. First was the Roman Empire, then the Byzantine Empire, Bulgarian Empire, many other nations come to power for different periods, then the Ottomans, the Soviet Union and in the present day most of the companies and corporations in the Balkans are very proud if they have a history of 20-30 years (after the collapse of the Soviet Union)
- mrleiter 7y agoIt was hit by two atomic bombs.
- 74ls00 7y agoThe Second World War is certainly the most tumultuous time in Japanese history but it was still an era of relative stability when compared to civil wars, revolutions, and invasions in most parts of the world E.g. the monarchy prevails
- anthonypasq 7y agoYou originally argued about foreign invaders, and now youve switched to civil war. which is it?
- afjl 7y ago1) wrong guy 2) He's right. Japan post-WW2 endured foreign occupation yes, but without significant internal turmoil. Other states that underwent massive change (e.g. Russia: WW1->Civil War->2 Revolutions) had significant internal turmoil. This helps explain why so many "old" businesses survived in Japan.
- oblio 7y agoThis is always a dangerous game played on a slipper slope, but Japan had casualties of about 3-4% in WW2. Including the nukes! Yugoslavia, who basically nobody cared about, had casualties of 7-10% in WW2. Big, relevant nations are highlighted way more than the little guys.
- illwrks 7y agoMy wife's familys business has been up and running for well over 100 years. As it was told to me... Her great great great grandfather had a small bank of sorts, then he or perhaps his children, I forget the reason why, moved into food. Primarily sourcing food for upscale restaurants. Her uncles and mother run the business now, although they are in their late 60s so I doubt it will stay going for another generation. Her two brothers have their own careers, we live in the other side of the world and her cousin lives in the US. It is a strange combination of having smaller families, career aspirations and globalisation which makes it less appealing I guess.
- ptah 7y agolooking at recent threads about disastrous upgrades e.g. mac os catalina, i would say we need some of this culture in software companies
- epicgiga 7y agoIt'd be nice if they'd be a bit more precise with their terms. Company, firm, and business have specific meanings. Given BBC is UK based, a company would mean a separate legal entity to its members (a 'corporation' in US). A firm means a group of people in business together, either a company of more than one member or a general partnership. And a business is the true catch-all. I doubt these businesses going back hundreds of years are incorporated entities. Back in the day those took an act of the state to form. The first KK in the country (Inc. equivalent for those in US, or Ltd. for UK) was only formed in 1873. And I doubt businesses have been general partnerships continuously for hundreds of years -- since these desolve automatically when the membership changes e.g. by a death. Especially to journalists, these details should matter.
- tgflynn 7y agoI find it a bit surprising that a culture with so much Buddhist influence should place so much emphasis on preservation since Buddhism emphasizes the transitory nature of all things.
- Nasrudith 7y agoWhy does it emphasize it in the first place? Human discomfort with it and emphasis is often selected by survival bias essentially. Not to mention the syncretism of Japan it has observed and joked to have local festivals at Shinto Shrines, weddings at Christian Churches, and funerals in Buddhist Temples.
- thereyougo 7y agoI think this article can bring new context for the whole situation: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/13/business/economy-business/economy-seen-hurting-thousands-japans-zombie-firms-legally-dodge-bankruptcy/#.XkaavlMzbfY https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/03/13/business/econom...
- tkyjonathan 7y agoThis is very impressive. The average lifespan of a company on the S&P 500 is 15 years.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoThe USA, not so many: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies_in_th...
- johnklos 7y ago(Slightly, but not completely sarcastic) They've learned plenty from the United States, but they haven't learned that in order to succeed, others must fail. They should be trying harder to make these businesses succeed hard or fail. After all, life isn't about living - it's about how much we can accumulate at the cost of others. They should also learn the Unites Statesian way of "going out of business" for the purpose of selling the old company's assets to a newly create company for pennies on the dollar while defaulting on debt and loans. Heck - many Hollywood companies do this from one film to the next! Gah! These Japanese people are amateurs!
- exhaze 7y agoPS Happy to answers any questions about Tokyo life as an engineer/entrepreneur, just reply to my comment. I get where you're coming from, but you can make the same one-sided joke post about Americans. Having done both... - started YC backed startup while in SF and worked at Uber for 4 years - in Tokyo for the past 2 years I honestly think that the outcomes here in Tokyo are much better than in SF. Yes, incomes are lower, but your QAPP (quality-adjusted purchasing power) is significantly higher, at all income levels - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/08/21/commentary/japan-commentary/japans-quality-bubble-explains-flat-lined-gdp https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2017/08/21/commentary/j...
- umvi 7y agoIs it true Japanese companies pay software engineers peanuts compared to USA? How much Japanese do you need to speak to get by?
- wst_ 7y agoDepends on a company, as everywhere else. Some companies are willing to pay 10M+ annually which is more than enough to live peacefully in not so cheap area.
- asiachick 7y agoIn general, yes. There are exceptions but in general Japanese tech companies pay very poorly. For example, Yahoo Japan (still more popular than Google Japan AFAIK) pays collage grads $36k a year starting salary. I think USA Google Interns get ~3x that. https://about.yahoo.co.jp/hr/job-info/role/0005/#potentialJobAnchor06 https://about.yahoo.co.jp/hr/job-info/role/0005/#potentialJo... I know it's just one data point but it's not far from the average. For Sony, Sharp, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon, NEC, Rakuten, etc it will definitely be in the same ballpark. You can probably get 2x that if you have 10 years experience but if you're over 35 you're considered too old to code by many companies. There are exceptions like maybe Mercari as they are doing well. And western companies, Google, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, pay well. I have no idea if this is why but I'm guessing one reason is they have a captive market. If your only language is Japanese you can't work anywhere else in the world.
- sproketboy 7y agoCompared to what? Is this supposed to be useful?