A few years ago, a Western travel blogger, reviewing the famed Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, noted with apparent disappointment that the buildings were 'only a few decades old'. This even though the inn, nestled in Japan's Yamanashi prefecture, has operated continuously since the year 705. That's not a typo. It has been welcoming guests for over 1,300 years.
This criticism—like so many cross-cultural misunderstandings—is a window into two very different conceptions of permanence. In much of the Western world, authenticity is confused with fixity. Tradition is imagined in terms of immutability: marble columns, original signage, moments frozen in amber. But in Japan, endurance lives in the act of renewal. The centuries-old businesses known as shinise (老舗)—a term typically translated as 'long-established firm'—are not measured by the age of their buildings but by the continuity of their purpose.
Western observers might call this maintenance. The Japanese understand it as stewardship.
Continuity Through Change
Organisational research has long struggled with the paradox of continuity in the face of environmental change. Philip Selznick (1919–2010) famously argued that the institutional character of an organisation is formed through a fusion of formal structure and informal values. But in practice, many firms mistake slogans for values and monuments for meaning. The result is a kind of corporate taxidermy: recognisable on the outside, but inert on the inside.
