There is a company in Osaka called Kongō Gumi that has been in continuous operation since the year 578, which means it was founded before Islam existed, before England was a country, and before the rise of nearly every institution on Earth that still has

There is a company in Osaka called Kongō Gumi that has been in continuous operation since the year 578, which means it was founded before Islam existed, before England was a country, and before the rise of nearly every institution on Earth that still has

Masakazu Kongō, the fortieth-generation head of Kongō Gumi, used to keep a hand-copied scroll listing every leader of the family business going back to a Korean carpenter named Shigemitsu Kongō, who arrived in what is now Osaka in the year 578 at the invitation of Prince Shōtoku to build Shitennō-ji, one of the first Buddhist temples on the Japanese archipelago. The scroll is roughly four meters long. Each name corresponds to a person who ran th…