The Oldest Businesses in the World Share Their Secrets

Until it became a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction Group in 2006, Kongo Gumi was the world’s oldest continuously operating company. Even as a subsidiary, it still does things the really, really old-fashioned way. Its specialty is the restoration of Buddhist temples and other historic buildings. Workers could train for as long as 10 years, during which time they were sometimes set against one another, competing to see which craftsperson demonstrated the most skill working with the timber and clay traditionally used to build temples. “I think that’s where things have slipped through the cracks in a lot of other traditions or professions, because people either weren’t interested or there was actually a devaluing of some of that workmanship,” says , an architecture professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. By keeping these techniques alive, Kongo Gumi has made itself indispensable to the preservation of Japanese architecture.