Noren-wake

A master house gives a long-serving employee the shop name, a share of the customers and the capital to start, and sets him up independently. Only those who had risen to head clerk — ten years from entry, sometimes twenty — were permitted to hang the same noren. The independent shop was called a bekke, and the coming and going with the main house continued afterwards. Look only at the mechanism and it resembles franchising closely, but what was handed over differs. Where franchising is bound by contract and royalties, noren-wake was bound by obligation and trust. (No scholarly comparison of the two could be found, so this is written as a structural contrast.) Incidentally, the Japanese word for goodwill in an acquisition — noren-dai, the price of the curtain — comes from this same cloth. When and by whom «goodwill» was translated that way, though, has not yet been traced.