[neffy]

Japan is one of the older civilisations with a recorded history, but "thousands of years old" businesses is stretching it more than a little.

Japan (population 125 million) is third in the world in GDP, with China (population over 1 billion) and the US (population 330 million) ahead of it. More remarkably this is from a tectonically unstable, volcanic island chain with limited natural resources, which is in stark contrast to either the US or China. This is probably an underestimate as they have a considerable secondary investment/production effort going on across Asia.

Japan's priorities are the same as everybody else's, they're just rather good at disguising that.

[rntksi]

From the years living in Japan I think the previous poster is right on a cultural level.

I mean if you think about it, 6 of the top 10 oldest companies are Japanese [1]. That says something about the value of continuity and stability in Japan's mindset. I don't see that changing any time soon tbh. (And yes, some of them are a "thousand" year old, though of course not thousand"s")

[1] : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies

[scawf]

Construction company founded 1443 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kong%C5%8D_Gumi