Skip to main content

Why Japan Has the Oldest Businesses in the World?: Hōshi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues

Perhaps, when the state of the world once again permits reasonably convenient travel, you plan to visit Japan. If so, you’d do well to consider staying at one of the country’s ryokan, the traditional inns often located at hot springs. No accommodations could appeal more deeply to those in search of “old Japan,” and many ryokan deliver on that adjective in the most literal sense. Take the Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan, whose 1300 years of operation at its hot spring in Yamanashi Prefecture make it the oldest hotel in the world. But it has yet to get the documentary treatment by Fritz Schumann, a German filmmaker with an eye for Japan previously featured here on Open Culture for his video on the “mountain monks” of Yamagata.

Schumann has, however, made a subject of the second-oldest hotel in the world, Komatsu’s H?shi ryokan, founded in the year 718.  That Japan boasts both the word’s oldest and second-oldest hotels should surprise nobody who knows the nature of its businesses. “The country is home to more than 33,000 with at least 100 years of history — over 40 percent of the world’s total, according to a study by the Tokyo-based Research Institute of Centennial Management,” write The New York Times‘ Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno.

“Over 3,100 have been running for at least two centuries. Around 140 have existed for more than 500 years. And at least 19 claim to have been continuously operating since the first millennium.” These shinise, or “old shops,” include brands like Nintendo, founded as a playing-card company, and soy-sauce maker Kikkoman.

Dooley and Uneo highlight Ichiwa, a shop that has sold mochi — those slightly sweet rice-based confections often molded into aesthetically pleasing shapes — for over a millennium. “Like many businesses in Japan,” Ichiwa “takes the long view — albeit longer than most. By putting tradition and stability over profit and growth, Ichiwa has weathered wars, plagues, natural disasters, and the rise and fall of empires. Through it all, its rice flour cakes have remained the same.” At BBC’s Worklife, Bryan Lufkin examines Tsuen Tea, a fixture of suburban Kyoto since the year 1160, back when Kyoto was still Japan’s capital, a history that grants the city pride of place among traditionalists. There, writes Lufkin, “many long-standing businesses also tout a dedication to good customer service as an element that keeps them thriving.”

In Kyoto, or anywhere else in Japan, this is “especially the case with ryokan,” which “treat guests like family.” Like many things Japanese, this aspect of the ryokan experience will both surprise first-time visitors and be just what they expected. Whether in their look and feel, their settings, their standard of service — or rather, in a combination of all those qualities and others besides — ryokan offer something available nowhere else in the world. So do Japan’s other shinise, which also set themselves apart by having amassed the resources (financial, familial, and otherwise) to keep going through hard times. This past year has been another such hard time, and with the ongoing pandemic still causing a great deal of human and economic damage around the world, we might look to H?shi and its long-lived kind for lessons on how do to business in the future.

Related Content:

How Soy Sauce Has Been Made in Japan for Over 220 Years: An Inside View

Mountain Monks: A Vivid Short Documentary on the Monks Who Practice an Ancient, Once-Forbidden Religion in Japan

Discover the Japanese Museum Dedicated to Collecting Rocks That Look Like Human Faces

The Japanese Traditions of Sashiko & Boro: The Centuries-Old Craft That Mends Clothes in a Sustainable, Artistic Way

Wabi-Sabi: A Short Film on the Beauty of Traditional Japan

20 Mesmerizing Videos of Japanese Artisans Creating Traditional Handicrafts

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

Why Japan Has the Oldest Businesses in the World?: H?shi, a 1300-Year-Old Hotel, Offers Clues is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/39Pk97F
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Howard Zinn’s Recommended Reading List for Activists Who Want to Change the World

Image by via Wikimedia Commons Back in college, I spotted A People’s History of the United States   in the bags and on the bookshelves of many a fellow undergraduate. By that time, Howard Zinn’s alternative telling of the American story had been popular reading material for a couple of decades, just as it presumably remains a couple more decades on. Even now, a dozen years after Zinn’s death, his ideas about how to approach U.S. history through non-standard points of view remain widely influential. Just last month, Radical Reads featured the reading list he originally drew up for the  Socialist Worker , pitched at “activists interested in making their own history.” Zinn’s recommendations naturally include the work of other historians, from Gary Nash’s Red, White and Black: The Peoples of Early America (“a pioneering work of ‘multiculturalism’ dealing with racial interactions in the colonial period”) to Vincent Harding’s There Is a River: The Black Struggle for ...
Post a Comment
Read more