Couple posters have replied and attempted to answer, but the true reason is the concept of adult adoption.

These companies have survived because any time the family had only girls, one of the women would marry and their husband would be adopted. Thus making the husband the eldest man, and keeping the business in the family.

Japan having family businesses is not the factor, all businesses were good family businesses before the invention of the stock company. Instead what doomed most family businesses in the west was the eventual chance of getting unlucky with inheritance.

The general acceptance of adult adoption to continue a family line, kept those businesses in a single family and justified passing the business whole to the "eldest son".

From what I've read (but note that a Japanese could answer this much better), honor is an extremely important aspect of Japanese culture. As Karen Ma put it on a Quora answer:

> In some odd ways, you can view many of Japan's famous and historical companies such as Mitsubishi and Mitsui as having assumed the role of the lords from feudal Japan, and the employees working for these companies can be seen as the modern day warriors. They devote absolute loyalty to their companies/modern day lords, who in turn vow to take care of these warriors by providing life-time employment, etc.

> However, if these warriors tarnished the image of their companies somehow, e.g., involving in a scandal whereby their companies get blamed, or the reputation is severely damaged, then these corporate warriors would assume responsibility by kneeling down to apologize in public, and/or in some cases, jump off a building in an extreme expression of their deep regrets for failing to defend the honor of the company.

Historically, warriors who protected the feudal lords would also commit suicide when they failed their master. See the Bushido book for more information about Japanese culture in English terms. It's really hard to express the culture in English, I think, because some is lost in translation and some is just hard to put in words.

My understanding is that many of the oldest companies have lasted so long because they were/are family operations. Countries where “son takes over the business” is the norm will have more older businesses.

Japan is one such country and also happens to have been around a long time too.

AFAIK, in the case of the German company Robert Bosch GmbH, the founder was pretty sure his family would not do a good work of keeping the company running (he didn't even trusted himself), so he devised a somewhat complicated mechanism, where the family receives some money, but has little power over the direction of the company. Some other companies followed after that.

My guess it has something to do with Japanese culture constantly discouraging individualism. If you're raised to be a cog in the machine and make sure you children will be cogs in the machine then that machine can run for a very long time.

There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.

Also, for a group to be resilent, there actually needs to be a lot of creativity at in its members as otherwise it will collapse when it meets challenges.

> There is a lot of individual creativity in Japan. How much you care for the interest of group (family/company/nation) is different from how much expressiveness there is at a personal level. The fomer being higher doesn't mean the latter is low.

Could you elaborate on this some more? It was my understanding people were discouraged from even dressing different, for example.

There is a lot of individual creative energy in Japan, both in art and engineering. A great deal of care is taken to ensure the quality of products.

I think this may also come down to record keeping.

And keep in mind that China had the Cultural Revolution which reset the counter to zero.

Lack of colonialism.

Could it be because China had a communist revolution and privately owned companies where banned (for a while)?

Colonialism, probably?

In China there was this thing called revolution, maybe you have heard of it.