Japan's aging business owners are selling their legacies for cheap to young entrepreneurs who are down to hustle

• Japan's aging population and rural exodus are fueling a small-business succession crisis.
• With no heirs, many aging business owners are listing their companies on succession platforms, often at low prices.
• Meet the young entrepreneurs betting on themselves to keep these businesses alive.

Six days a week, Kengo Ohama is up before the sun. He takes 5 minutes to get ready, and is soon out the door for an hourlong motorbike ride to the neighboring town of Mihara in Hiroshima, Japan.

By 6 a.m., he pulls up outside a log-cabin-style building, home to Country Road, the café and roastery that he's been managing with his wife since April.

He cleans the space, makes pastries, roasts coffee beans, and serves guests throughout the day. After the last table has cleared, Ohama stays behind to prepare for tomorrow. By the time he gets home, it is already 11 p.m.

Ohama had always dreamed of opening a café. When he found an established one listed on Relay, a Japanese business-succession platform, it felt like fate.

The café's owners, an older couple looking to retire, no longer had the physical stamina to run the business."Their biggest wish was simply for someone to take good care of the shop and keep it a lively place," Ohama, 31, told Business Insider.

The terms of the takeover were simple: He had to keep the business operating, but was free to redesign the interiors as he saw fit. "That flexibility made the opportunity very attractive," Ohama said.

Ohama now covers 50,000 Japanese yen in monthly rent for the building. The business itself — including the brand, furniture, kitchen equipment, recipes, and supplier information — was transferred to him for zero Japanese yen.

A new generation steps in

Ohama is part of a younger generation taking over Japan's small businesses as their longtime owners age out with no successor in sight.

The country's low birth rate and rapidly aging population have left many business owners without adult children to inherit their companies. Even when they do have kids, those heirs may live elsewhere, have established careers, or simply not want to take on the demands of running a local business.

In 2023, the Japan Finance Corporation found that 57.4% of small and midsize businesses it surveyed expected to close when their current owners stepped away, up from 52.6% in 2019.

That gap has created an opening for platforms such as Relay and BATONZ, which connect owners looking to hand over their businesses with prospective successors.

Relay has listed about 900 businesses to date, including roughly 350 active listings, a representative told Business Insider. Owners looking to pass on their businesses are often in their 60s and 70s, while successors are often in their 30s and 40s.

BATONZ, which also handles more conventional acquisitions by companies looking to expand, has listed more than 42,000 businesses and matched 3,421 buyer-seller pairs as of March 2026, a spokesperson told Business Insider.

Keeping a beloved place open

For some business owners, these platforms can offer a lifeline when an unexpected crisis forces them to confront succession planning sooner than they expected.

Akitaka Mitsui spent years working as an outdoor tour guide before opening Mori to Mizu Backpackers in Nagano, a city in central Japan known for its alpine landscapes, in 2011.

When the pandemic brought travel to a standstill, he temporarily closed the guesthouse. Even after it was safe to reopen, he had to scale back the operation and cut staff.

By 2022, visitor numbers were picking up again, and Mitsui was considering expanding once more. Then he suffered a stroke.

"It was not severe, but I had to be hospitalized," Mitsui, 67, told Business Insider. "The cause of the stroke was never identified, which meant it could happen again. I began to think it would be better to stop running the business."

He turned to BATONZ to find a successor outside his family.

"I never intended to make my children take over the business," he said. "I wanted them to do what they wanted to do with their own lives."

Enter Kota Fujisawa, a Nagano native who moved to Tokyo for university and later worked in consulting.

Fujisawa, 29, had been looking for a way to help revitalize his home region. Along with two childhood friends, he took over the guesthouse in May 2024, though one of them has since left the business. They renamed it Local Knot Backpackers.

He said they paid less than 10 million Japanese yen for the business, which came with its website, booking systems, and staff. The building was not part of the transfer, and he declined to disclose the monthly rent.

It is a drastic change from his stable office job, where he worked on just one part of larger projects. Now, as a small-business owner, Fujisawa has more freedom to shape the entire operation and decide where to take it next.

"My previous work was mainly desk-based, but I now spend much more time on-site and have more opportunities to communicate directly with a wide range of tourists," Fujisawa told Business Insider.

Still, there is a balancing act: Taking over an established business means deciding what to preserve and what to rework.

"If we changed everything, it would become a completely different place," he said.

Getting a foothold in a new industry

Beyond handing over entire businesses, succession platforms can also help aspiring entrepreneurs gain access to the infrastructure they need to get started.

For Takayuki Otawara, a 29-year-old former civil servant in Miyazaki, it opened a path into farming despite his lack of agricultural experience. His interest in cacao farming began during a stressful stretch at work, when he discovered craft chocolate and fell in love with it.

"I had never farmed before," Otawara told Business Insider. "The only thing I had ever grown was a small tomato plant for a primary-school project."

His parents initially opposed his decision to leave a stable government job for farming. His friends, though, were more encouraging. "They mostly thought it sounded interesting," he said.

To get started, Otawara needed a greenhouse and farmland, neither of which his family owned. After struggling to find one through local farmers, he turned to Relay and found a listing from a strawberry-farming family looking to scale back their operations as they got older.

Under a business succession agreement, Otawara bought a greenhouse and irrigation equipment from the original owners for 3 million Japanese yen.

He used the facilities to start his own farm, where he now grows cacao alongside strawberries, bananas, rice, and other crops.

He is at the farm every day, where his work begins at 6 a.m. and often ends around 7 p.m. He is usually in bed by 10 p.m.

The work is more demanding than his former office job, which came with weekends and public holidays off. However, farming has given him a kind of satisfaction he never found as a civil servant.

"The work I put in comes back to me directly as results," Otawara said. "In the government, you have a clearer idea of what your salary and career will look like until retirement. Now, how much I do and how much I earn can change. I find that exciting and rewarding."