Companies come and go. Startups start and then stop. Spinouts whirl and then falter. In one part of the world, however, it is not hard to find companies the history of which might stretch back more than a century, sometimes two or three centuries, and in many cases much, much longer. That place is Japan. Most Western countries might boast a handful of corporate entities with great longevity stretching back to the pre-Industrial era, but Japan has an astonishing 33,000-plus companies that are at least a century old. Some of them have their foundations built in the 6th Century of the Common Era.