How the Oldest Company in the World, Japan’s Temple-Builder Kongō Gumi, Has Survived Nearly 1,500 Years

If you vis­it Osa­ka, you’ll be urged to see two old build­ings in par­tic­u­lar: Osa­ka Cas­tle and Shiten­nō-ji (above), Japan’s first Bud­dhist tem­ple. In behold­ing both, you’ll behold the work of con­struc­tion firm Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the old­est con­tin­u­ous­ly run com­pa­ny in the world. It was with the build­ing of Shiten­nō-ji, com­mis­sioned by Prince Shō­toku Taishi in the year 578, that brought it into exis­tence in the first place. Back then, “Japan was pre­dom­i­nant­ly Shin­to and had no miyadaiku (car­pen­ters trained in the art of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples),” writes Irene Her­rera at Works that Work, “so the prince hired three skilled men from Baek­je, a Bud­dhist state in what is now Korea,” among them a cer­tain Kongō Shiget­su.

There­after, Kongō Gumi con­tin­ued to oper­ate inde­pen­dent­ly for more than 1,400 years, run by 40 gen­er­a­tions of Kongō Shiget­su’s descen­dants. By the time Toy­oto­mi Hideyoshi had the com­pa­ny build Osa­ka Cas­tle in 1583, it had been estab­lished for near­ly a mil­len­ni­um. In the cen­turies since, “the cas­tle has been destroyed repeat­ed­ly by fire and light­ning,” Her­rera writes. “Kongō Gumi pros­pered because of these major recon­struc­tions, which pro­vid­ed them with plen­ty of work.” Through­out most of its long his­to­ry, an even stead­ier busi­ness came from their spe­cial­ty of build­ing Bud­dhist tem­ples, at least until seri­ous chal­lenges to that busi­ness mod­el arose in the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.

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