Symbol from New York Public Library, by the use of Wikimedia Commons
For those who visit Osaka, you’ll be recommended to peer two previous constructings in particular: Osaka Castle and Shitennō-ji (above), Japan’s first Buddhist temple. In beholding each, you’ll behold the paintings of construction company Kongō Gumi (金剛組), the previousest continuously run compathe big apple on the planet. It was once with the constructing of Shitennō-ji, commissioned by way of Prince Shōtoku Taishi within the yr 578, that introduced it into existence within the first position. Again then, “Japan was once predominantly Shinto and had no miyadaiku (automotivepenters skilled within the artwork of constructing Buddhist temples),” writes Irene Herrera at Works that Paintings, “so the prince employed 3 professional males from Baekje, a Buddhist state in what’s now Korea,” amongst them a certain Kongō Shigetsu.
Thereafter, Kongō Gumi continued to operate independently for greater than 1,400 years, run by way of 40 generations of Kongō Shigetsu’s descendants. By the point Toyotomi Hideyoshi had the compathe big apple construct Osaka Castle in 1583, it have been established for close toly a millennium. Within the centuries since, “the castle has been destroyed repeatedly by way of hearth and light-weightning,” Herrera writes. “Kongō Gumi professionalspered as a result of those primary reconstructions, which professionalvided them with plenty of labor.” Viaout maximum of its lengthy history, a good steadier business got here from their specialty of constructing Buddhist temples, no less than till serious challenges to that business model arose within the twentieth century.
“International Conflict II introduced significant adjustments to Japan, and the call for for temple construction waned,” says the tourism compathe big apple Toki. “Sensing the shifting tides of the time, the compathe big apple made a strategic decision to pivot its expertise against a brand new endeavor: the crafting of coffins.” Governmalestal consistent withmission was once organized by way of the widow of Kongō Haruichi, Kongō Gumi’s thirty seventh chief, who’d taken his personal existence out of financial melancholy inflicted by way of the Shōwa Depression of the 9teen-twenties. Right here time on the head of the compathe big apple illustrates its long-held willingness to grant leadersend tasks no longer simply to first sons, however to family members very best swimsuited to do the task; for that reason, the history of the Kongō extended family comes to many sons-in-law deliberately sought out for that purpose.
The combined forces of the decline of Buddhism and the popping of Japan’s real-estate bubble within the nineties eventually pressured Kongō Gumi to develop into a subsidiary of Takamatsu Construction Staff in January 2006. “The curhire Kongō Gumi paintingspower has just one member of the Kongō family,” the Nikkei Asia fileed in 2020, “a daughter of the fortieth head of the family” who “now serves because the forty first head.” However its miyadaiku — distinctively organized into 8 independent kumi, or teams — continue to do the paintings they all the time have, with ever-more-refined versions of the traditional equipment and techniques they’ve been the use of for close toly a millennium and a part. Kongō Gumi continues to obtain international attention for primarytaining its top level of craftsguysend, however viewers of American TV drama in recent times will even appreciate that its having solved the problem of succession.
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Based totally in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and vastcasts on towns, language, and culture. His tasks come with the Substack newsletter Books on Towns and the e-book The Statemuch less Town: a Stroll via Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
