On the morning of May 23, 1925, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the small hot spring town of Kinosaki, near the coast of the Sea of Japan.

The timing was catastrophic. It was late morning, and nearly every household in the village was cooking lunch over an open flame. Within minutes, fires leapt from kitchen to kitchen across the dense wooden architecture, consuming everything. By the time the ground stopped shaking and the fires burned out, 283 people were dead and virtually every building in Kinosaki was rubble.

After the earthquake, the surviving ryokan (inn) owners sat down together — competitors, all of them — and held over 100 meetings to decide, collectively, how to rebuild.

What emerged from those meetings was a radical idea. The owners agreed to treat the entire town as a single inn. Each ryokan would function as a “room.” The streets would be the hallways, and the public bathhouses would be shared amenities, belonging to no single business but to the town as a whole. 

They adopted a guiding philosophy and posted it on signs throughout the village: kyozon-kyoei — coexistence and co-prosperity.

They passed laws limiting buildings to three stories, preserving the traditional wooden architecture that gave Kinosaki its character. They fortified the riverbanks with volcanic stone. They rebuilt, together, not to maximize any individual business, but to protect the ecosystem that made all of their businesses possible.

That was 100 years ago. Kinosaki is still thriving, and the philosophy still holds. 

In a world that increasingly rewards the opposite — dominance over cooperation, taking over giving — it may be the most urgent idea of the modern age.

Winning vs. lasting

Japan is a case study of business endurance: It is home to more centuries-old businesses than any other country on earth. 

Over 33,000 Japanese companies have been operating for more than a century, and more than 140 have been running for over 500 years. The Japanese even have a word for them: shinise — old shops, venerable establishments.

There are many theories for why Japan produces so many of these long-lived firms: stable institutions, a culture of craftsmanship, family succession practices that prioritize continuity over individual ambition. All of these matter. But the deeper I look, the more I believe the real answer is philosophical in nature. Japanese business culture, at its best, operates on a fundamentally different assumption than the one most Western companies take for granted.

The assumption is that your survival depends on the health of the system around you, including your competitors. This is the opposite of zero-sum thinking. In most of Western business culture, competition is the organizing metaphor for everything. Markets are battlefields, and competitors are enemies. The goal is to win, and winning means someone else loses. We speak of “disruption” and “killer apps” and “winner-take-all” as though the purpose of building something is to make sure nothing else can stand beside it.

And look at what this mindset has produced. Company lifespans on the S&P 500 have fallen from over 60 years in the mid-20th century to roughly 15 to 20 years today, with employee turnover at historic highs. Trust in institutions is cratering. 

We are getting better at winning and worse at lasting.

Perhaps my favorite counterpoint to zero-sum business thinking is a concept called kyōsei. And while it has ancient roots, its most articulate modern expression came from an unlikely source: a technology executive who had survived the atomic bomb.

A counterpoint to zero-sum thinking

In 1997, Ryuzaburo Kaku, the honorary chairman of Canon, published an essay in the Harvard Business Review called “The Path of Kyosei.” Kaku was born in 1926 and spent much of his childhood in wartime China. At 19, working as a conscripted laborer in Nagasaki, he heard the atomic bomb explode. He reported hiding underground for three days because he understood the effects of radiation. The experience never left him.

Decades later, after rising through the ranks at Canon and transforming it from a small camera company into one of the world’s leading technology manufacturers, Kaku introduced kyōsei as Canon’s guiding philosophy. The word combines two Japanese characters: kyō (together) and sei (life). Kaku defined it simply: “a spirit of cooperation in which individuals and organizations live and work together for the common good.”

Kaku argued that kyōsei was a developmental path to longevity. 

He laid out five stages that any company could follow — though there is nothing in his logic that limits it to companies. These are stages of maturity, and they apply to anyone building something meant to last. 

Each builds on the one before it, like ripples moving outward from a stone dropped in water. You can’t create the outer ring without the inner one, and the inner rings don’t disappear as you expand.

Stage 1: Economic survival. Before you can help anyone, you must first be able to sustain yourself. Secure your footing. Establish a position strong enough that you are not one bad quarter — or one bad month — from collapse. There is nothing wrong with the profit motive, Kaku wrote — “even companies in the later stages of kyōsei must increase profits.” But making money is only the beginning of your obligations, not the end. The same is true for anyone: getting your own house in order is a prerequisite for the following steps.

Stage 2: Cooperating with labor. Once the foundation is solid, the next step is internal: build genuine cooperation with the people closest to you — the ones doing the work alongside you. Kaku believed both sides must see each other as vital to the enterprise — “in the same boat, sharing the same fate.” At Canon, this meant eliminating the distinction between salaried and hourly workers as early as 1943, introducing a five-day workweek before any other major Japanese company, and committing never to fire a domestic employee. In 60 years, Canon Tokyo had never had a strike. The principle scales down, too. Any household, any partnership, any small team runs on the same fuel: the belief that no one’s contribution is worth less than anyone else’s.

Stage 3: Cooperating outside the company. This is where kyōsei starts to get interesting. At this stage, a company extends its cooperative spirit to customers, suppliers, and — crucially — competitors. “Competitors are invited into partnership agreements and joint ventures, which result in higher profits for both parties,” Kaku wrote. Canon’s partnership with Hewlett-Packard is the prime example: the two companies were fierce rivals in printers, yet Canon supplied the laser-printer engines that powered HP’s products. Both companies benefited. The key insight is that a rising tide lifts all ships — but only if someone is willing to raise the water level. This is the stage most people never reach, because it requires something unnatural: treating the person who wants what you want not as a threat, but as a partner in sustaining the thing you both depend on.

Stage 4: Global activism. When a company operates internationally, its decisions ripple outward. Kaku argued that fourth-stage companies should use their global presence to address structural imbalances: building factories in countries with trade deficits, training local workers, and investing in environmental technology. Call it enlightened self-interest. A company that helps stabilize the ecosystem in which it operates is building the conditions for its own long-term survival. You do not have to run a multinational to practice this. Anyone with influence — in an industry, a school district, a neighborhood — can choose to direct it toward the health of the system rather than the advantage of their position within it.

Stage 5: Government as partner. This is the rarest stage. Fifth-stage companies use their influence to advocate for systemic reform — pushing governments toward better trade policy, environmental regulation, and educational investment. Kaku was blunt about why so few companies reach this level: most executives are too consumed by short-term pressures to think about the system they operate inside. The same is true for most people. It is difficult to advocate for a better game when you are still scrambling to win the current one.

If some of this sounds familiar — companies cooperating, pooling influence, advocating for policy — it should. Trade associations have claimed this mantle for decades. But most trade groups pool resources to protect insiders: they lobby against rules that would help customers and block standards that would open the door to newcomers. The tell is that they always need an enemy: a regulator, an activist, a competitor. They’re organized around keeping things the way they are.

Kyōsei needs no enemy. The ryokan owners of Kinosaki weren’t banding together against anyone. They were rebuilding what they all shared. Trade groups protect the players by trying to freeze the game. Kyōsei makes the game healthier and trusts the players to adapt.

What strikes me most about Kaku’s framework is how deeply counterintuitive it remains, nearly thirty years after he published it.

We live in a moment that could not be more hospitable to zero-sum thinking. Tariffs are rising and trust between nations is eroding. The instinct to hoard — to protect, to compete, to win at all costs — is everywhere. And yet the evidence from the longest-surviving companies and communities in the world keeps pointing in the opposite direction.

The ryokan owners of Kinosaki, sitting in the ashes of their destroyed town, understood something that most modern executives have not yet learned: your competitor’s survival is not a threat to yours. It is a condition of yours. If the town dies, every inn dies with it. If the industry collapses, no individual company’s superiority matters. If the ecosystem fails, there is no market left to win.

Kaku understood this, too. “Global companies have no future if the earth has no future,” he wrote. 

***

The centuries-old companies I have studied — in Japan, in France, in Italy, across five continents — all arrived at this conclusion independently. They compete fiercely, and they hold themselves to the highest standards. But they embed their competition inside a larger framework of mutual care: for their workers, for their communities, for the ecosystems — natural and commercial — that sustain them. They understood that endurance is not a solo act.

Kyōsei is not a strategy for the timid. Helping your rivals requires strength. Kaku himself noted that Canon could only practice kyōsei with competitors because it had the patents and technology to bargain from a position of strength. You do not cooperate from weakness. You cooperate from confidence: the confidence that making the system healthier will, over time, make you harder to beat.

Which means the place to start is not Stage 3 or Stage 4. It is Stage 1. Get your own house in order. Build something sturdy enough that generosity becomes a choice rather than a sacrifice. Then move through the concentric circles one stage at a time. Treat the people closest to you as partners. Extend that spirit outward to the people you compete with. Look at the systems you operate inside and ask what you can do to strengthen them.

A century ago, a group of rival innkeepers in a small Japanese town chose to rebuild together rather than compete over the ruins. They are still there.

Kyozon-kyoei. Coexistence and co-prosperity.

It was the right idea then. It may be the most important idea now.