Custom of the eldest son inheriting the family business

The custom of the eldest son inheriting the family business is the organizing assumption behind the Taniguchi family’s succession dispute. It first seems to privilege Kyoichi, the elder son, but its effects are more complicated: when he turns away from the family inn, Daisuké is expected to take responsibility for it, only for Kyoichi to return when their parents need him. The brothers’ contrasting accounts reveal a family order in which birth position shapes inheritance, obligation, and lasting resentment.

The Succession Assumption

Daisuké describes his elder brother as a “dawdling master,” not bad at heart but made complacent by the certainty that, as the firstborn, he would inherit the inn. Kyoichi neglected his studies, became a hoodlum in middle school, and later went to a private university in Tokyo and studied in America for two years. After returning to Japan, he went back to the capital and opened a restaurant with friends rather than joining the family business. The succession custom is thus presented not merely as a rule of inheritance but as a cushion: Kyoichi can delay deciding what to do with his life because the inn is presumed to be his.

Daisuké’s path appears more dutiful and less adventurous. He graduates from the economics department of a public university in the countryside, and when his parents finally give up trying to persuade Kyoichi to come home, they turn to their second son. Daisuké begins working at his father’s company and applies himself, hoping to comfort his disappointed parents. His diligence gradually makes them willing to entrust the family legacy to him. The custom does not disappear; rather, Kyoichi’s absence temporarily makes the family’s practical needs outweigh the birth order it had assumed would determine succession.

A Reversal in the Family Arrangement

The arrangement changes when Kyoichi’s restaurant fails and he returns burdened by substantial debt. Their father agrees to pay it off on the condition that Kyoichi take over the inn. Their mother supports the decision, and the parents promise that Kyoichi will eventually be managing director while Daisuké will be vice president. The titles appear to make room for both sons, but they restore the elder brother to the position that the family had once expected him to occupy, even though Daisuké has already begun preparing to carry the business.

Daisuké understands that the titles do not settle who will actually do the work: in practice, he expects that responsibility to fall to him. What frightens him is not simply losing a title or a chance to inherit, but the prospect that the renewed arrangement will damage his relationship with Kyoichi. The old order has therefore produced a double bind. Daisuké is entrusted with the burden of keeping the business going, while Kyoichi is again given the family’s formal recognition as the elder son.

The Brothers’ Conflicting Accounts

Daisuké’s resentment is tied to a question he has struggled with for years: why, simply because Kyoichi is the eldest male, must their parents love him so much? Daisuké says he loves his brother too, but he does not believe that feeling is returned in equal measure. In his account, the succession custom is inseparable from an emotional hierarchy: Kyoichi’s birth order seems to secure affection as well as inheritance, while Daisuké is valued for being dependable.

When Kido later asks about the family conflict surrounding their father’s liver transplant, Kyoichi rejects the story Daisuké had told. He insists that their father never pressured Daisuké to become a donor and that Daisuké volunteered of his own free choice. He likewise contests Daisuké’s account of the succession: according to Kyoichi, he had no interest in an inn in the countryside and returned only after his parents begged him because they believed Daisuké could not manage it. He says that he handed the business over to Daisuké, then accuses his brother of responding with bitterness and jealousy over the importance attached to the eldest son.

The dispute does not establish one uncontested version of what happened. Kyoichi presents himself as having yielded a position he did not want, while Daisuké’s earlier account stresses that the family first expected Kyoichi to inherit and later restored him to the role after his business failed. Their disagreement makes the custom visible as more than a formal principle: it is also a language through which each brother explains who sacrificed, who was favored, and who owes whom. The family’s promise of two titles cannot resolve that conflict, because the brothers disagree about what the succession meant in the first place.

Work, Obligation, and Resentment

The custom’s consequences extend beyond the question of who formally inherits. Daisuké’s diligence is motivated by the wish to cheer up his parents, and his position as the son who can reliably run the company turns him into the practical carrier of the family legacy. Yet being needed does not erase his awareness that the eldest son’s status has shaped the family’s choices. His resentment grows from the gap between work and recognition: the business may depend on him, but the family’s arrangement continues to give Kyoichi the elder brother’s title and place.

That gap also shadows the later dispute over their father’s illness. Kyoichi says Daisuké chose freely to donate part of his liver and then distorted the story into a complaint; Daisuké’s account describes a family that did not explicitly order him to donate, but also did not tell him he was free to refuse. The account connects the unequal distribution of responsibility within the family to the succession pattern without making the two conflicts identical. In both, the question is whether Daisuké’s willingness to take on a burden counts as an unpressured choice, or whether family expectations have already narrowed the choices available to him.

The eldest-son custom therefore operates less as a simple rule than as a family expectation repeatedly adjusted to suit circumstance. Kyoichi can leave, return, and reclaim the leading position; Daisuké can be asked to do the work, then occupy the subordinate title. Their incompatible recollections preserve the imbalance even as each brother claims that the other has misunderstood the past. By placing both accounts alongside one another, the narrative shows how a tradition of inheritance can shape not only the transfer of a business, but also the stories a family tells about duty, favoritism, and the meaning of sacrifice.