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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

Japan has a very service oriented business culture and from what I can tell a lot of the loyalty is based on knowing the owner and their family. Is it possible so many Japanese are unwilling to take over a business because they predict that the longtime customers will feel alienated and underwhelmed by the relationship with the new owner? In other words, do potential buyers purposefully avoid taking over business because they know they cannot live up to expectations in the same way a family member can?

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They've actually got a trick for this.

> "In Japan, 98% of adoptions are actually adult men, aged between 20-30 years old — not children."

> "In Japan, there is a several-hundred-year-old tradition in which businesses adopt their executives so companies or institutions are "family-run" groups. In other words, bosses adopt their employees."

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/japanese-adoption-r...

> Nowadays, legal adoption of this kind is paired up with an arranged marriage — known as "omiai" — of a daughter, meaning the adopted son becomes son and son-in-law at the same time because he changes his name to the wife's family name ("mukoyoshi").

So, daughter marries son-in-law, who is "adopted" into the family and carries on the family name.

Take these things with a grain of salt. I would guess the journalist purposely hid the absolute numbers to make the article more interesting.

The incentives for clicks are just too great.

The absolute number is around 80,000 per year, which is considerable, albeit not huge compared to a population of over 100M. (For comparison, the US has about 140,000 with a 3x larger population.)

The bit that is misleading is that adopting or even fostering children not related to you is vanishingly rare in Japan, nearly all orphans end up in orphanages instead.

I think it used to be much more common in feodal Japan, not just for business owners but also in noble or samurai families to continue the "house".

This is accurate; no one outside the family would have been able to use the client base.

The usual approach is to effectively “apprentice” under the old owner as they increasingly hand over responsibility and retire.

No matter what you’ll lose clients, but lose a lot less than if Alice disappears one day and Bob magically appears the next with little handover.

Dunno if that could work in Japan.

I don't know if it's still a thing, but in Japan some business owners with no heir used to adopt adults for them to take over the business. It's like you said, starting as an apprentice, and if the owner trust him enough he'll adopt him, the apprentice litterally taking the family name of the business owner.

So it's still the same family!

Roman emperors often worked the same way.

It's a thing:

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/japanese-adoption-r...

It's a thing everywhere, and doesn't require adoption (or making one of your child's spouses your successor.)

I know a printer right now where the owner has been working towards retiring and selling the business to his now-manager eventual-successor for a few years. The owner has reduced his work responsibilities to sales only at this point, and the goal has been to make his networks comfortable with his successor as he slips away (to live closer to his grandchildren, I bet.)

That doesn't sound likely in this case: the whole premise of the article is that his business is the only provider of a necessary service.

This is a bit like a lot of consumer websites. The value is in the loyal community of users.

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