Nimbo

In 578 a carpenter named Kongō Shigemitsu came from Baekje to build a temple in Osaka. Shitennō-ji. When it was finished, his family stayed.

They stayed 1,400 years. Through the Edo period they were the temple's carpenters. Oda Nobunaga burned it in 1576; it burned again in 1614; it was rebuilt seven times, and each time by the Kongō.

A three-metre scroll from the 1600s traces forty generations of them, one name after another. When a generation had no son, a son-in-law took the Kongō name and carried it. The name was the job.

In 1868 the temple lost its estate and the stipend stopped. Nobody was paying for the upkeep anymore. They kept building.

What finally ended the family's run wasn't fire or war. It was debt. In 2006 the company was bought by a bigger builder. The name didn't die. It just stopped being a family's.

Fourteen centuries, and the part that held was never the money.