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It didn't really survive though, in the end. In January 2006 the company was bought out. Per Wikipedia: "The old Kongō Construction remained only in the real es
by romanhn 2y ago
It didn't really survive though, in the end. In January 2006 the company was bought out. Per Wikipedia: "The old Kongō Construction remained only in the real estate division and changed its name to KJ Construction Co., Ltd. The over-1,400-year-old Kongō family's management structure essentially closed its doors. In July 2006, KJ Construction filed for bankruptcy due to insufficient funds." Nevertheless, very impressive track record!
- gradschoolfail 2y agoHeh, guessing the new management structure led to a bout of volatility in funding? Survived nearly 1500 -> Nearly survived 1500
- lenkite 2y agoI think this is just due to the slow death of organized religion. There was no way for a temple builder to survive in their primary business. Otherwise, they had an extraordinary run. Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies.
- gradschoolfail 2y agoTemple construction happens also to be concern of the world’s 10th oldest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamura_Shaji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies (Of course, since wiki page hasn’t been updated for the first, it might also have quietly passed into the ether)
- thedailymail 2y agoIt looks like it is still a going concern - the company website and phone line both seem to be active. https://nakamurasyaji.co.jp/ https://nakamurasyaji.co.jp/
- aebtebeten 2y agoA recent SMBC* explores "what if religion was freemium?", but the existence of temples and sacrifices suggest that, whatever model deities may have had in mind, their worshippers have always been eager to sign up for a premium plan. * https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/bad-3
- gradschoolfail 2y agoI love SMBC so much that i once suggested a joke idea to Weinersmith. Sad day for me and my ideas lol. In particular, to discover that my heroes Rao and Weinersmith selfidentify as hypernormies T_T [Cue yada yada the batman snowclone “live long enough”, eg you either die a batman or live long enough to become Batman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_(military)] [another source of hypernormie pro weirdos, from my personal anecdata, are psychiatrists, im guessing the sibboleth is the high neuroticism to __ ratio, which comes off as wisdom (after discounting for age).. weird pronormies would then be econs profs? This is prob why both trigger the So[Ha]Ri(veign/vian) Taleb lol] Also should have replied to alephnerd in a more timely fashion
- 082349872349872 2y agoFinally someone who pronounces sibboleth properly! At one point I ran across a US book which noted that children of psychiatrists tend to wind up in treatment themselves, with the exception having been just after WWII (when the army's need for psychiatrists meant they retrained many people who had studied as regular GPs), and concluded that it may be a field many people pursue due to the attraction of self-diagnosis.
- gradschoolfail 2y agoSorry to disappoint if you didnt already guess i picked that up from you. However, its probably not a spelling i would practise elsewhere — too memorable.
- 2y ago
- knallfrosch 2y ago> Wish governments supported such companies as cultural legacies. I feel like the core of the company – led as a family business, earning real money – would be lost if it was suddenly state-supported, with the inevitable meddling to go with it.
- kwhitefoot 2y agoThe support doesn't have to be a financial subsidy; it can be the creation of a regulatory framework that advantages companies of this type. That is surely unexceptional, after all it's done in many countries all the time. It just happens that it is large corporations that are state supported rather than those with multi-century continuity or support for the local community in mind.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThankfully religions have never meddled in affairs of business, state, war, or culture. </s>
- Cthulhu_ 2y agoBut they would; temples aren't destroyed unless there's a religious revolution, if the religion stops they become heritage sites and the work remains. Like modern day churches and cathedrals being repurposed as upmarket housing.
- hinkley 2y agoAren’t a bunch of Japanese temples already heritage sites? The big problem with these temples is not religion it’s deforestation. The spine is made of old growth timber. So some of these temples survived over a thousand years until the central pillars were deemed unsound and needed to be replaced. Problem is that the new pillars are estimated to need replacement again in 400 years. They are made of less sturdy stuff.
- onlypassingthru 2y agoMy impression is that Japan's temples are regularly destroyed. They're giant wooden structures with zero fire suppression and basically tinder boxes just waiting for a spark. Lo and behold, the Great ____ Earthquake/Fire or war occurs every few hundred years and there she goes.
- ensignavenger 2y agoIn fact, many Japanese temples are designed to be torn down and rebuilt on a regular basis.
- tmtvl 2y agoAs they say: fires and fights are the flowers of Edo.
- runjake 2y agoIf you look up the history of the temples mentioned in the article, they were more often destroyed by non-religious conflicts, fires, and earthquakes.
- astrobe_ 2y ago
- ddfs123 2y agoThis doesn't really say anything about religions. Constructions company can build a lot of thing. Temples are just happen to be good business at that time.
- FredPret 2y agoBut temples are almost uniquely good for construction companies. - the more ornate, the better - unlike palaces, every town needs at least one, and if you're polytheistic, so much the better - extremely price-insensitive clients who are content to wait generations - you can probably easily bulldoze both structures and local opinions that get in the way of construction because you're building for a cause everyone's supposed to worship
- prepend 2y agoThere aren’t any examples of state run businesses this old, right? It seems like at 1,500 years governments aren’t robust enough to survive. So any business run by a government would not survive the political upheavals.
- archgoon 2y agoThe Church of Sinai has operated Saint Catherine's Monastery for nearly 1500 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Catherine%27s_Monastery
- alephnerd 2y agoSt Catherine's Monastery is not a business
- archgoon 2y agoI mean, if you want to argue it's a Non Profit, not a business, go ahead, but I'm not particularly interested in fitting modern tax code and business rules to an entity that has existed for 1500 years. The organization has existed and has had a need to find funding for it's activities. Since the question was about 'state' run entities, the goal of "making a profit" seemed not particular salient. Honestly, I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state.
- alephnerd 2y ago> I thought the more contentious part of this claim was going to be if the Church of Sinai constituted a state That is not as contentious, because it's basically autocephalous/self governing. It's always been a couple dozen loners in the Sinai peninsula maintaining self sufficiency, which is why I don't find it a good example - as there are plenty of similarly old and continuous organizations, but never truly scaled.
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- nothercastle 2y agoIt got killed by financial engineering in the end. No sanely run company can survive competition from a company structured to take advantage of low interest rates and public/private partnerships
- alephnerd 2y ago> It got killed by financial engineering in the end Real interest rates in Japan were on par with in the US in the mid-2000s [0], and only entered the negative range when the US began dropping interest rates to near 0 during the GFC [0]. The bigger issue in was the hangover of the 1990s Japanese bust which lead to larger players tightening their belts at the expense of smaller players [1] The big players in Japan are also similarly old (usually 300-500 year old guilds converted into corporations/zaibatsus in the 19th century) There is also a succession crisis brewing in plenty of Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese businesses. One person in my network is leaving American Tech PE/VC to concentrate on buying out Korean and a Japanese companies facing issues around succession now - just like American SMEs businesses faced in the 1970s-2000s. Ik people like to shoehorn the Japanese experience to extrapolate American and Western policy, but the Japanese economy is structured very differently from Western economies with an entirely different view on antitrust (ambivalent to opposed), welfare (highly supportive), inflation (keep it as low as possible), and state intervention (highly supportive). The only developed countries that can safely be compared to the Japanese economy are South Korea and Taiwan (maybe Dirigisme-era France and Italy pre-1990s, but they had the benefits of the EC/EU which made stuff significantly different). I recommend reading "The Japanese Economy" by Takatoshi Ito and Takeo Hoshi [2] and "Corporate Financing and Governance in Japan" by Takeo Hoshi and Anil Kashyap [3] [0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=2013&locations=JP-US&start=2001 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FR.INR.RINR?end=2013&lo... [1] - https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/execs-reckoning-small-firms-still-need-help-inaba-says/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2000/01/03/national/execs-... [2] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-economy/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262538244/the-japanese-economy/ [3] - https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-and-governance-in-japan/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262582483/corporate-financing-a...
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- underlipton 2y agoIf I may be flippant, "Killing a 1400-year-old institution," is quite a feather in capitalism's hat.
- jalapenos 2y agoI think it's an exaggeration to say this event was the end of the company. E.g. we don't say GM ended because it went through a bankruptcy. Kongo gumi still continued operating even though it went through a restructuring, so it's fair to say it's still the oldest company in the world. Just it's no longer the oldest family business in the world - that ended when direct Kongo control of it ended, although I hear they still have a ceremonial involvement with the company.
- gradschoolfail 2y agoIts not that much of an exaggeration if you consider that the original Construction purpose is gone. E.g. Ford no longer making cars but still trading shares of Car companies would not be itself considered a continuation of Henry Ford’s original setup.
- jalapenos 2y agoDo you have a source that they're no longer in construction?
- gradschoolfail 2y agoOP was quoting wikipedia which also says that business+chief+employees were transferred to a new company Shin-Kongo (ie “New Kongo”). So it depends on what you mean by “they”, the company with the old name Kongo Gumi is no longer in construction, but otherwise the company with the new name Shin Kongo is, as a subsidiary of another conglomerate. Bloomberg also had an article https://archive.is/rLnnH https://archive.is/rLnnH