The Long-Lived Companies

Companies past a hundred years old are counted in the tens of thousands in Japan, and depending on the survey somewhere around four in ten of the world's total sit here. The reasons usually given are that the country was rarely invaded and its institutions ran on unbroken, that adopting an heir into the family made it possible to hand a business to a capable successor rather than only to a son, and that a great many are small, family-run and unlisted, and so were not pushed to grow. Note that «four in ten» moves with the definition and the survey: the count changes depending on whether unincorporated businesses are included and what counts as founding. What this map wants to put here is not the ranking but the question underneath it. If capital changes hands, has it continued? If the family line breaks and the craft and the name go on, has it continued? The band next to this one (see Craft as Capital) holds a company where exactly that happened.