It is generally accepted that the oldest business in the world,

the oldest that's still operating, anyway,

is the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan.

Which is this hot-springs hotel, about three hours west of Tokyo.

For one thousand three hundred years,

people have been coming here for the natural, crystal-clear hot water baths,

and until recently, the owners have 52 generations of the same family.

This hot spring was discovered, and opened to the public, in 705 AD.

A man named Mahito Fujiwara was hunting in the mountains,

and he found a natural spring with hot water.

And he thought, why not make this into hot-spring baths?

That's when and how our history started.

There are other people staying here tonight, by the way,

it's just we're not filming them for obvious privacy reasons.

The hotel's not empty.

Anyway, I assumed that I'd be staying in something like a living museum here,

because that's what I've come to expect from the sort of historical attractions you'll find in Britain.

That's what tends to happen to anything centuries old where I'm from:

a kind of preservation

that means that everything must be held at a certain point in time,

funded by tourists who want to visit the old thing and see history.

Which is great if you're running a museum,

but for a hotel business that needs to survive in the 21st century:

well, customers will change with the times.

There are four original hot-water springs, located in small caves.

That's the original location of Keiunkan.

It was simple wooden buildings, which were built and rebuilt over a long period of time.

People here kept renovating and rebuilding the baths, while operating them.

I can't imagine what the buildings looked like hundreds of years ago.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, people took a healing bath and cooked for themselves.

People simply took a bath in the hot spring itself.

There was no proper bathtub, but it was surrounded by natural rocks.

The earliest proper buildings were constructed in the late 19th century.

In 1997, all the buildings were converted into a half-board, tourist ryokan business.

There's still tradition here. It's not a Western-style hotel.

You sleep on futons, dinner is served at a low Japanese-style table.

But this place has been updated, again and again and again,

this building is only a few decades old,

the exact location has moved around this area many times over the years.

It's only been a hotel in the English sense for a few decades.

Before, that it was just a place to stay and take the waters.

Now, there's very fast wifi and, of course, a gift shop.

They excavated new hot springs in 2005,

which gave them five times as much hot water,

and there are modern pumps and systems to check water temperature and quality.

The water's drinkable, by the way.

It's a hot spring after all, it's mineral water.

From historical documents, we know that Tokugawa Ieyasu and Takeda Shingen stayed here, centuries ago.

The current Emperor of Japan has stayed here too,

in 1987, back when he was the Crown Prince.

He had a hundred people accompanying him.

The previous owner didn't want to publicise that visit, though!

Hot springs can have a problem with "over-tourism",

and he didn't want visitors who just followed trends.

So that was going to be the story.

This is the world's oldest business because it changes with the times.

Problem one with that:

the modern English-language concept of "business"

doesn't quite map correctly onto Japanese culture from more than a millennium ago, obviously.

There is a school of flower arrangement in Kyoto called Ikenobō,

that was founded a couple of centuries before this.

But that school probably counts as an "organisation" in English, rather than "business",

as best as I can tell from translations and my local team here.

If you do count that school,

you kind of have count much older like the Catholic Church as well!

This has always been a definite business.

So problem two:

this has only been the oldest business in the world since 2006,

when the former record holder, a construction company called Kongo Gumi, fell on hard times.

But Kongo Gumi didn't close or go bankrupt,

it was bought by a bigger construction company.

It had been a family business for nearly 1500 years,

but now it's just a subsidiary of a modern company,

still operating, but arguably just a name on an organisation chart.

Should Kongu Gumi still count? I don't think so, but...

if it doesn't count,

that brings me to problem three with this story,

which all the English-speaking sources I found seem to have missed.

When I took over running the business,

my predecessor was more than 80 years old.

But none of his relatives were interested in running a ryokan business in the mountains.

There was no-one to take over.

I'd worked closely with the former president, since I was 25 years old.

And I've not said this to many people,

but I was scolded and shouted at almost every day!

I never thought I might become company president.

One day about almost five years ago, he calls me and says,

"Kawano, you should be the next president."

I said, "What?! Me?"

He said, "I don't want to pass on this ryokan, which has survived for 1,300 years,

to someone I don't know."

But I'm not related to him, so I can't legally inherit a family company like this.

So I founded Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Limited, and as presidentof that company,

took over the shares of the original company.

There was no practical change to what was happening here,

that seems more like a restructure than a takeover?

The new owner is the old general manager,

so while it's not in the family, there is continuity.

And I hate to say "I'm not sure",

but if there's been one theme through this channel over the years I've been making videos,

it's that the world is complicated

and it doesn't fit in neat little categories.

If you've got a list like "oldest businesses" that's a millennium and a half old...

of course it's going to have a few asterisks on it.

As for me...

I'm just going to go and take the waters.

When I became president of the business, as the first outsider,

my predecessor said to me:

"Be the master of the ryokan, only."

"This is your job; do not be distracted."

It's not quite a family motto, but the word have been passed down through generations.

We have come this far because we've focused on just one thing,

only the ryokan business.

I believe that's one of the main reasons why it's continued for 1,300 years.