An archive of long-form series on Japanese business, history, and culture.
Series Vol. 18 | Demise and edamise Part 3
How the Ohmi Shonin turned homecoming into promotion. Vol. 18 examines the zaisho-nobori system, the career ladder inside demise and edamise, and the arbitrage across regions that the branch network made possible.
Series Vol. 17 | Demise and edamise Part 2
Part two on demise and edamise: the ranks within a merchant house, why the Ohmi Shonin staffed them only with men from Ohmi, and the roots of Takashimaya.
Series Vol. 16 | demise and edamise Part 1
The Ohmi Shonin covered Japan with demise and edamise, branch shops that clustered in the east. The author explains why, drawing on the Battle of Sekigahara and the shogunate's daimyo hierarchy.
Series Vol. 15 | The Trading Associations the Ohmi Shonin Formed
The Ohmi Shonin didn't peddle alone. Vol. 15 looks at the peddling associations — from the Ryohama-gumi to the Hino Daitoban Nakama — that powered their trade networks.
Series Vol. 14 | How the Ohmi Shonin Travelled: By Sea
The landlocked Ohmi Shonin chartered ships from Tsuruga to trade with Hokkaido. The author traces their Edo-period sea routes, and a hotpot born along the way.
Series Vol. 13 | Ohmi Shonin on the Move — Overland Routes
Not every Ohmi Shonin shouldered a carrying pole. Vol. 13 looks at how these merchants actually travelled overland in the Edo period—from hikyaku shipping to a surprising fact about horses that most Japanese get wrong.
Series Vol. 12 | How Much Profit Were the Ohmi Shonin Really Making?
The Ohmi Shonin were not merely virtuous merchants — they were profitable ones. This installment examines the evidence: from the survival of Ohmi Shonin-founded companies such as Itochu, Marubeni, Nishikawa, Takashimaya, Nippon Life, and Wacoal, to the remarkable personal fortune of Genzaemon Nakai, who grew his assets from 2 ryo at age nineteen to 115,000 ryo by his late eighties. Drawing on a 2021 academic paper by Shiga University's Yukari Matsuda, the piece also shows that the Nakai family maintained a bookkeeping system closely resembling double-entry accounting — more than seventy years before Western double-entry bookkeeping reached Japan in 1873.
Series Vol. 11 | Seken-Yoshi
What does seken — "the world" — actually mean? The word has Buddhist roots that most Japanese speakers have forgotten. Vol. 11 asks what those roots mean for us today, and for the economy we need to build.
The Jodo Ethic and the Spirit of the Ohmi Shonin Vol. 10 | Kai-te Yoshi
The Ohmi Shonin conducted business across nearly all of Japan by the 18th and 19th centuries — and beyond its borders as early as the 17th. This volume traces where they went, who resented them for it, and why their legacy endures regardless.
The Jodo Ethic and the Spirit of the Ohmi Shonin Vol. 9 | Uri-te Yoshi Ⅱ
The Ohmi Shonin lived by a simple maxim: shimatsu shite kibaru — use everything to the last, and work without rest. Vol. 9 explores what that ethic looked like in practice, from a box lid made of recycled business papers at the Ohmi Shonin Kyodokan, to an eighteenth-century merchant's blunt advice on how to build wealth. The spirit, it turns out, is not so distant from the habits of Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.