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Japan’s century-old businesses are facing a record-setting pace of bankruptcies, but the headline needs a date and a definition: Teikoku Databank counted 112 legal bankruptcies among firms at least 100 years old from January through August 2026. That was not a full-year result. The same report said the pace could exceed the previous annual record of 146, set in 2024. The pressures it identified include succession difficulties and higher prices, alongside failures involving cash-flow and accounting problems.
What does “record pace” mean?
The latest figure covers the first eight months of 2026, not the entire year. Teikoku Databank (TDB) counted 112 bankruptcies among companies with at least 100 years of history, defining bankruptcy here as a legal insolvency with liabilities of at least ¥10 million. TDB said that pace pointed to more than 160 cases for the year and could surpass the annual record of 146, recorded in 2024. The eventual full-year total may differ.
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The scale is notable against a large surviving cohort: TDB counted 46,708 firms with at least 100 years since founding or establishment as of December 2025, equivalent to 3.11% of the companies in its measure. It expected roughly 2,000 more firms to reach the century mark during 2026. These numbers describe different things: bankruptcies are a flow of failures during a period; 46,708 is a snapshot of firms that had reached the milestone. The cohort can grow even as more members fail.
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Outbyte PC Repair FREEClear out junk files and repair common Windows errorsFree Scan →Outbyte Driver Updater FREEScan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteDriver Scan →TDB’s count is a database-based estimate, not a complete official census. For its 2025 inventory, it used its COSMOS2 business database, which held about 1.5 million firms as of December 2025, along with independently collected records for firms with confirmed operating activity. Nine in ten firms in the long-established cohort dated to the Meiji or Taishō periods, and about 3,600 dated to the Edo period or earlier. Manufacturing was the largest broad sector, followed by retail and wholesale. (TDB’s 2025 long-established-company analysis; TDB’s January–August 2026 bankruptcy report)
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Bankruptcy is not the same as closing
“Disappearing” can refer to more than legal bankruptcy. TDB separately counted 67,949 voluntary business suspensions, closures and dissolutions in 2025, down 1.6% from 69,019 in 2024 but still the second-highest annual total in the preceding decade. That series explicitly excludes legal bankruptcies and covers businesses generally, not only century-old firms. It cannot be added to the 112 century-old bankruptcies in January–August 2026 to produce a clean total: the populations and periods differ, and the measures are distinct.
TDB also cautions that a business recorded as voluntarily suspended, closed or dissolved may resume activity; if it later enters legal proceedings, it can be counted as a bankruptcy. The OECD’s 2026 Japan survey rounds TDB’s 2025 voluntary-exit figure to about 68,000. (TDB’s 2025 suspensions, closures and dissolutions report; OECD Economic Surveys: Japan 2026)
Why are old Japanese companies failing?
Succession can be difficult
TDB identifies succession difficulty as a key factor in the 112 century-old-company bankruptcies recorded from January through August 2026. An old firm may have survived for generations yet still lack a viable handover to new owners or managers. In the broader 2025 voluntary-exit data, the average age of managers at exit was 71.5 years. That figure describes all businesses in the series, not century-old firms alone; the OECD likewise points to ageing owners and weak succession transitions as a productivity and business-continuity concern.
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Higher prices and labor pressures squeeze operations
TDB also names higher prices as a factor in the century-old-company failures. Its broader voluntary-exit report describes rising energy and labor costs, labor shortages and ageing managers as pressures on businesses. Separately, TDB classified 427 bankruptcies across all firms in 2025 as labor-shortage bankruptcies—a record—and 949 as high-price bankruptcies, also a record. It recorded 503 cases where finding successors was difficult, down for a second consecutive year. Those nationwide classifications provide context; they are not a breakdown of causes for the century-old subgroup. (TDB’s 2025 business-failures summary)
Age is no shield against financing or governance failures
The 2026 cases also show how a long history cannot compensate for a cash-flow crisis or serious accounting problems. Kano-gumi, a waterworks contractor founded in 1925, failed with about ¥3.6 billion in liabilities after undisclosed debt associated with 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. TDB reported that three of the 112 cases involved compliance failures such as off-book debt or inflated receivables or inventory. These examples point to distinct failure mechanisms, not a single explanation for every old company’s collapse.
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For national context, TDB counted 10,261 business bankruptcies across all companies in 2025, a 3.6% increase from 2024 and the first time the total exceeded 10,000 since 2013. This is not a century-old-company figure. Within the 112 century-old bankruptcies recorded from January through August 2026, manufacturing accounted for 34 cases, wholesale for 24 and retail for 22. Fifty-six cases (half) had liabilities below ¥100 million; four had liabilities of at least ¥1 billion. Those figures describe the cases in TDB’s report, not failure rates by industry or company size.
A historical figure often cited for long-established firms requires similar care: TDB counted 461 century-old-company bankruptcies, suspensions and dissolutions combined in fiscal 2017, then a record for that combined series. Because it includes several types of exit, it cannot be compared directly with the 2026 figure, which counts legal bankruptcies only. TDB’s 2018 analysis noted lodging, liquor retail, office leasing and clothing retail among leading detailed sectors at that time; it is historical context, not evidence of the present sector ranking. (TDB’s 2018 analysis of long-established-company exits)
The clearest conclusion is limited but important: legal bankruptcies among Japan’s century-old firms were occurring at a record-setting pace through August 2026, and TDB identified succession and price pressures alongside individual financing and governance failures. That does not mean all old businesses are closing, nor that bankruptcy is the only way a business ends. The surviving century-old cohort remained large at the end of 2025, and the number of firms reaching 100 years can rise at the same time that established firms fail.
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