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Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsFix Now →Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →Japan’s century-old companies are going bankrupt at a record pace—but the latest figure is partial-year, not a final 2026 total. Teikoku Databank counted 112 legal bankruptcies among firms at least 100 years old from January through August 2026, a pace that could exceed the previous annual high. At the same time, Japan had 46,708 firms in this century-old cohort at the end of 2025. The failures are real; they do not mean the country’s long-established businesses are vanishing as a group.
What “record pace” means in 2026
Teikoku Databank (TDB) counted 112 bankruptcies among companies with at least 100 years of history between January 1 and August 31, 2026. The measure covers legal insolvencies with liabilities of at least ¥10 million. TDB said the count was running at a pace above 160 for the year and could surpass the 146 century-old-company bankruptcies recorded in 2024. That is a projection based on the partial-year pace, not a full-year result. TDB’s January–August 2026 report
For context, TDB counted 142 such bankruptcies in 2025. The 2026 count had already reached 112 by the end of August, but comparisons should keep the time periods in view: one is an eight-month total, the other a full-year figure. TDB’s 2025 long-established-company analysis
Bankruptcy is not the same as closing
“Disappearing” can describe different outcomes. A legal bankruptcy is not interchangeable with a business suspension, closure, or dissolution. In a separate series that explicitly excludes legal bankruptcies, TDB counted 67,949 voluntary suspensions, closures, and dissolutions across Japanese businesses in 2025, down 1.6% from 69,019 in 2024. It was still the second-highest annual count in the preceding decade. These are all-company figures, not a count limited to century-old firms. TDB’s 2025 suspensions, closures, and dissolutions report
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TDB cautions that a recorded voluntary exit does not rule out a later resumption. A case may also be counted as a bankruptcy if it subsequently enters legal proceedings. Because the measures have different definitions and may overlap over time, adding the 2025 voluntary-exit count to the bankruptcy count would not produce a clean total of businesses that permanently disappeared.
Japan still has tens of thousands of century-old firms
TDB’s database-based inventory identified 46,708 firms with at least 100 years since founding or establishment as of December 2025. They represented 3.11% of the firms in its count. TDB expected roughly 2,000 more firms to reach the 100-year mark during 2026, so the long-established-company population can grow even while older firms fail. TDB’s 2025 inventory
This is an estimate based on TDB’s COSMOS2 business database, which covered about 1.5 million firms as of December 2025, supplemented by independently collected records for firms with confirmed operating activity. It is not a complete official census. Nine in ten firms in the inventory were founded or established in the Meiji or Taishō periods, and about 3,600 dated to the Edo period or earlier.
Why are long-established businesses failing?
Succession and rising prices
In its 2026 century-old-company bankruptcy report, TDB identified succession difficulty and higher prices as key factors. These pressures can make it harder to keep a business viable through a change in leadership or a rise in operating expenses, but the report does not establish one cause for every failure.
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Costs, labor shortages, and ageing owners
Broader business-exit data point to costs such as energy and labor, as well as ageing managers, succession problems, and labor shortages. The average manager’s age at voluntary exit was 71.5 in TDB’s 2025 all-company series. The OECD’s 2026 Japan survey also cites rapid owner ageing and weak succession transitions as relevant context. Those figures describe wider business trends, not a measured causal breakdown for century-old firms alone. TDB’s 2025 exit report · OECD Economic Surveys: Japan 2026
The national bankruptcy backdrop is also worsening: TDB recorded 10,261 business bankruptcies across Japan in 2025, up 3.6% from 2024 and the first time annual filings exceeded 10,000 since 2013. Across all firms, TDB separately classified 427 bankruptcies as labor-shortage cases and 949 as high-price cases, both records; it recorded 503 cases in which finding successors was difficult, down for a second consecutive year. These national categories should not be treated as counts for the century-old subgroup. TDB’s 2025 business-failures summary
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Failure can come from more than age or tradition
The 2026 report’s cases illustrate different vulnerabilities. Kano-gumi, a waterworks contractor founded in 1925, failed with about ¥3.6 billion in liabilities after undisclosed debt linked to real-estate investment contributed to a cash-flow crisis. Onobe Seikanjo, a paper-packaging maker founded in 1901, went bankrupt after receivables and inventory had been inflated for more than a decade. These cases show why longevity alone cannot protect a company from financing problems or governance failures. TDB’s January–August 2026 report
Among the 112 century-old-company bankruptcies in January–August 2026, manufacturing accounted for 34 cases, wholesale for 24, and retail for 22. Fifty-six cases—half the total—had liabilities below ¥100 million; four had liabilities of at least ¥1 billion. TDB reported compliance failures such as off-book debt or inflated receivables and inventory in three cases. These counts describe the bankruptcies in that eight-month period, not every long-established firm or every company that closed.
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How to read the longer history
TDB’s 2018 analysis counted 461 century-old-company bankruptcies, suspensions, and dissolutions in fiscal 2017, then a record for that combined series. It included multiple kinds of exits, so it cannot be compared directly with the 112 legal bankruptcies recorded from January through August 2026. The older analysis noted lodging, liquor retail, office leasing, and clothing retail among the leading detailed sectors. TDB’s 2018 analysis
The broader signal is that established age does not make a business immune to economic pressure, succession challenges, or internal failures. But the headline figures measure different populations and outcomes: a partial-year bankruptcy count, an all-company voluntary-exit series, and the stock of firms that have reached 100 years. Read separately, they show rising pressure without proving that Japan’s century-old-company cohort is shrinking.
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