This story ended up being
more complicated than I thought. It is generally accepted that
the oldest business in the world, the oldest that’s
still operating, anyway, is the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan. Which is this hot-springs hotel,
about three hours west of Tokyo. For one thousand three hundred years,
people have been coming here for the natural, crystal-clear
hot water baths, and until recently, the owners have
52 generations of the same family. There are other people staying
here tonight, by the way, it’s just we’re not filming them
for obvious privacy reasons. The hotel's not empty. Anyway, I assumed that
I'd be staying in something like a
living museum here, because that's what
I've come to expect from the sort of historical attractions
you'll find in Britain. That's what tends to happen to anything centuries old
where I'm from: a kind of preservation that means
that everything must be held at a certain point in time, funded by tourists who want to
visit the old thing and see history. Which is great if you're
running a museum, but for a hotel business that needs
to survive in the 21st century: well, customers will change
with the times. There’s still tradition here.
It's not a Western-style hotel. You sleep on futons, dinner is served
at a low Japanese-style table. But this place has been updated,
again and again and again, this building is only
a few decades old, the exact location has moved
around this area many times over the years. It’s only been a hotel in the
English sense for a few decades, before that it was just a place
to stay and take the waters. Now, there's very fast wifi and,
of course, a gift shop. They excavated new
hot springs in 2005, which gave them five times
as much hot water, and there are modern pumps and systems
to check water temperature and quality. The water's drinkable, by the way. It's a hot spring after all,
it’s mineral water. So that was going to be the story. This is the world's oldest business,
because it changes with the times. Problem one with that: the modern English-language
concept of "business" doesn't quite map correctly onto Japanese culture from more
than a millennium ago. Obviously. There is a school of flower arrangement
in Kyoto called Ikenobō, that was founded a couple
of centuries before this. But that school
probably counts as an "organisation" in English,
rather than “business”, as best as I can tell from
translations and my local team here. If you do count that school, you kind of have count much older
like the Catholic Church as well! This has always been
a definite business. So problem two: this has only been the oldest business
in the world since 2006, when the former record holder,
a construction company called Kongo Gumi, fell on hard times. But Kongo Gumi didn't close
or go bankrupt... it was bought by a bigger
construction company. It had been a family business
for nearly 1500 years, but now it's just a subsidiary
of a modern company, still operating but arguably just
a name on an organisation chart. Should Kongu Gumi still count?
I don't think so, but... if it doesn't count, that brings me to problem three
with this story, which all the English-speaking sources
I found seem to have missed. There was no practical change
to what was happening here, that seems more like a
restructure than a takeover? The new owner is the
old general manager, so while it’s not in the family,
there is continuity. And I hate to say "I'm not sure", but if there's been one theme
through this channel over the years I've
been making videos, it's that the world
is complicated and it doesn't fit in
neat little categories. If you've got a list like
"oldest businesses" that's a millennium
and a half old... of course it's going to
have a few asterisks on it. As for me... I'm just going to go
and take the waters.
