Futility Closet - 073-The Tichborne Claimant

Episode Date: September 14, 2015

In 1854, English aristocrat Roger Tichborne disappeared at sea. Twelve years later, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia, claimed he was the long-lost heir. In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast, we'll tell the sensational story of the Tichborne claimant, which Mark Twain called "the most intricate and fascinating and marvelous real-life romance that has ever been played upon the world's stage." We'll also puzzle over why family businesses are often more successful in Japan than in other countries. Sources for our feature on the Tichborne claimant: Rohan McWilliam, The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation, 2007. Robyn Annear, The Man Who Lost Himself: The Unbelievable Story of the Tichborne Claimant, 2011. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2014 book Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles. There's a fuller explanation (with spoilers!) in Dan Lewis' Now I Know newsletter. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and all contributions are greatly appreciated. You can change or cancel your pledge at any time, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation via the Donate button in the sidebar of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at [e-mail]. Thanks for listening!

Welcome to Futility Closet, a celebration of the quirky and the curious, the thought-provoking and the simply amusing. This is the audio companion to the website that catalogs more than 8,000 curiosities in history, language, mathematics, literature, philosophy, and art. You can find us online at futilitycloset.com. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Episode 73. I'm Greg Ross.

And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1854, English aristocrat Roger Tichborne disappeared at sea. Twelve years later, a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia claimed he was the long-lost heir. In today's show, we'll tell the sensational story of the Tichborne claimant, which captivated the Victorian world for decades. We'll also puzzle over why family businesses are often more successful in Japan than in other countries. The Tichborne Claimant. This is a good one. This was interesting to research because it was a huge sensation in the 19th century in Victorian England, and I was amazed to find how thoroughly it's been forgotten.

It's everywhere if you read anything written back then in the news or in popular culture. Basically, the heir to a title and fortune in Victorian England disappeared at sea and then turned up again mysteriously in Australia and claimed the fortune, but no one's sure to this day whether he was the real guy or an imposter. It wasn't ever quite settled. The man who disappeared was named Roger Tichborne, who was heir to the Tichborne family's title and fortunes. He'd grown up in Paris in a wealthy family and spoke mainly French. He spoke English with a pronounced accent.

He traveled a lot as a young man. He was in South America in 1853 when he learned that his father had succeeded to the baronetcy. So that meant that he would be next in line when his father died. that his father had succeeded to the baronetcy, so that meant that he would be next in line when his father died. Unfortunately, shortly after that, he was in Rio de Janeiro in April 1854, awaiting sea passage to Jamaica on a ship called the Bella, and the Bella was never seen again after it left. Four days later, a capsized shipboat bearing that name was found off the coast of Brazil with some wreckage, so it looked quite bad as if it had been lost in a storm or something, but they never found out for sure what had happened to it. But Roger disappeared with it.

His family, understandably, clung to the hope that he'd been picked up by another ship. And while they were waiting to get more news about anything, any news about what had happened to Roger, the father, Sir James Tichborne, died in June 1862, which meant that Roger, if he were still alive, would be the 11th Baronet and inherit the title and the fortune. So that's the setup. Okay, yeah.

His mother, in particular, was really desperate to believe that he was still alive, and she heard from a sailor at one point that the Bella had gone down, but some of the men had been picked up from the water and taken by the rescuing ship to Australia. So she began placing newspaper advertisements seeking information about him, first in the London Times and then in Australian newspapers. In the advertisements, she would give a description of what Roger looked like and said that a most liberal reward would be given, quote, for any information that may definitely point out his fate. And you can see where this is going. In October 1865, she got word that a bankrupt butcher named Thomas Castro in Wagga Wagga in Australia had mentioned an entitlement to a property in England during his bankruptcy examination. He also spoke vaguely of living through a shipwreck, and he smoked a pipe engraved with the letters

RCT, which were Roger's initials. You're smiling. You should smile. When people challenged him, he reluctantly admitted that he was Roger Tichborne. Reluctantly admitted. Yes. That's an interesting question, because what he's saying then, I mean, the story he's presenting is, yes, I am Roger Tichborne, and I have this title and these riches, but for some reason, I found myself in Australia, and he was just working with cattle down there in sort of a lowly job under the name of Thomas Castro. And no one ever got him to explain that. Like why he was doing that.

If you really are Roger Tichborn, and you want, obviously you want the title and the fortune because you're claiming them now, why were you there in the first place? What led you there, and why were you living this life under an assumed name? No one ever got a straight answer from him about that, which doesn't mean that he wasn't telling the truth, but it's just hard to understand. So he started writing, sort of corresponding with his mother and being sort of evasive and equivocal when she asked him direct questions. But he managed to convince her that he was her son.

So in 1866, he moved to Sydney, where he started borrowing money on the strength of Roger's reputation. And he said, basically what the sailor had said was true, that after the Bella had sunk, he'd been picked up by a ship called the Osprey, which is bound for Melbourne. And he'd taken the name Thomas Castor and just wandered for some years before settling in Wagga Wagga as a butcher. He'd married a woman who had a daughter and they together had had a second daughter. So he had a wife and two kids now, but he said he was Roger Tichborne. In Sydney, he happened to meet two former servants of the Tichborne family. One of them claimed to recognize him and then changed his mind immediately when he began

asking for money. But the other one didn't immediately recognize him as he now weighed 189 pounds. He keeps gaining weight through this whole story. And Roger was quite thin. Okay. But then the second servant did claim that he did recognize him, and he stuck to that position until the end of his life. When I see he gained weight, he gained a lot of weight.

In Sydney, he gained another 20 pounds, and then on the voyage from Australia to England, he gained another 40. He arrived in England on Christmas Day, 1866. By 1871, just by the way, he would weigh 28 stone 4 pounds, which is almost 400 pounds. That's a lot of weight. People say two different things about that. One is that he wasn't used to having this much money and so was sort of enjoying it. You can also imagine that maybe he wanted to obscure his appearance a bit.

Yeah. So he would look different, yeah. Because he did lose a lot of this weight in prison later on, which is interesting. Okay. Spoiler alert, prison. Yeah, well, you can see where it's heading. On getting to England, he found that his mother, Lady Tichborne, was actually in Paris at the time, and he did something very foolish. He went to Wapping in East London and inquired after a family there named Orton. And on finding that they'd left the area, he mentioned that he was a friend of a man named Arthur Orton, who he said was now one of the wealthiest men in Australia. That's a strange

thing for Roger Tichborne to do, but it'll make sense later on if he's actually not. He's sort of tipping his hand there as to maybe who he really is. In which case he's not very intelligent. No. Anyway, he went to Paris finally, and after some nervous dithering, he finally met his mother, who accepted him immediately and signed a formal declaration that he was her son over the protestations of Roger's childhood tutor, who immediately declared him an imposter.

It was the first of many people who had known Roger as a child and said, this is not Roger. Okay. But she was convinced. Well, a lot of time has passed, and apparently a lot of weight has been gained, so... Yes, exactly. She settled an income on him of a thousand pounds a year and accompanied him to England to sort of press his cause with the rest of the family who were already skeptical.

My notes here say this gets very interesting. It's a long story, and it unfolded over many years, but what I've put together is there are reasons to believe he was telling the truth, and there are reasons to think he wasn't. And I've just sort of put together a list of each just to make this simple. The reasons to believe that he was were that some of the people who had known Roger well as a child vouched for him. The Tichborn family solicitor and doctor both accepted him. The doctor saying because he could see certain physical characteristics that Roger had. He seemed to be able to recall small details of Roger Tichborne's early life, really small details such as the fly-fishing tackle that he'd used.

He knew the locations of certain pictures in Tichborne Park, the family home. He remembered clothing and the name of a pet dog, and several soldiers that Roger had served with recognized him, which was particularly remarkable because by mid-June 1867, he'd reached 300 pounds. But they still said they recognized him. So small things like that that seem unlikely if this guy is just a butcher from Australia. It would be hard to explain. Unless, like, in his conversations with the servants in Australia, for example, right?

Yeah. That's what people said. That the servants had some friends of the family supported him enough that he could sort of draw this out of them in conversation and use it. Yeah. So that's the argument. Okay. The cons are, I think, more compelling. His letters to his mother were illiterate.

Roger was quite well educated. But there are misspellings and just grammatical errors, and it just doesn't look like the work of someone who was as educated as well as Roger had been. When they found him in Australia and he admitted that he was Roger Tichborne, one of the first things they asked him to do was to make out a will

because he was now this important man. In the will, he described a Tichborne property in the Isle of Wight that did not exist and he referred to his mother as Hannah Frances,

which was not her name. He didn't speak or understand French. As I said, Roger had been raised in Paris, and he had no French accent, which Roger did. Journalists noticed that he had what appeared to be a Cockney accent, which suggested origins in East London.

He couldn't recognize his own father's handwriting. The family, apart from his mother, were nearly unanimous that he was a fraud. He couldn't recognize certain other family members, and occasionally they'd try to catch him out by presenting an imposter to him and saying, this is like your sister-in-law, and he'd have to, he got angry at them for trying to catch him out, but apparently he couldn't always recognize family members. Roger had left a package with a family servant,

but the claimant couldn't name its contents. And finally, he seemed to remember little about Stonyhurst, which was a Jesuit boarding college that Roger had attended. He could not identify Virgil, he confused Latin with Greek, and he didn't know what chemistry was. His defense at trial later on would be that the shipwreck had been so traumatic. I was going to say, yes, shipwrecks just change you. I mean, yeah, you forget languages. Yeah, so you can weigh that evidence however you want, but that's sort of how it falls out. I mentioned that he had gone shortly after arriving in England to East London,

seeking a man named Arthur Orton. That turned out to be a butcher's son from Wapping who had gone to see his boy and wound up in Australia where he worked at the cattle station until 1857. When investigators went to Australia and started looking into this, they couldn't find Arthur Orton. And when they showed a picture of the claimant, the man who was claiming to be Roger Tichborne, to people who worked there, they said that that was Arthur Orton. So it's beginning to look more and more like this man who's claiming the fortune is actually the son of a butcher from East London who had found himself in Australia, read a newspaper story about this missing man and decided to go for the fortune. But that hasn't been proven yet.

Unfortunately for him, the only member of the family who was really on his side was his mother, and she died in 1868, which deprived him of his main advocate and source of money. He was a chief mourner at her funeral mass, which outraged the family. And from this point on, he was mostly bankrupt and just living off the donations of supporters. There was a civil trial that started in May 1871, where he hoped to confirm his identity and claim the fortune. Basically, his advocate claimed that there were the traumatic experiences of the shipwreck had impaired his memory of his early life, and they called a lot of former officers and men from his, from Rogers, I should say, regiment, as well as servants who claimed to recognize him. On May 30th, the claimant himself testified. He described Arthur

Wharton as someone else other than himself, as a large-boned man with sharp features and a lengthy face slightly marked with smallpox. He evaded questions about their relationship, saying he didn't want to incriminate himself. He said vaguely that they had both traveled through Australia together but involved in some shadowy activity and he didn't want to incriminate himself. He said vaguely that they had both traveled through Australia together but involved in some shadowy activity and he didn't want to speak too much about it, which is convenient. After being questioned on his visit to Waping, the opposing counsel finally just asked him outright,

Are you Arthur Orton? And he answered, I am not. Under oath. Oh, well, okay. Nobody can ever lie under oath. The defense, the family, suggested that he was, as you said, receiving information from sympathetic servants and from family friends, and that's how he knew all these interesting details about the family.

And they announced grandly that they intended to prove that he was actually Arthur Orton and that they'd do so by summoning more than 200 witnesses to expose him as what they called one of the great imposters of history. They didn't even have to get that far, though, because it eventually came out that Roger Tichborne had had distinctive body tattoos that the claimant did not possess. And that's pretty open and shut then. There's nothing you can really say about that.

Being shipwrecked doesn't change your tattoos. Okay. So on March 4th, the jury rejected his suit. And at that point, that means that he's guilty of perjury. Right. Yeah. And that means that a criminal trial now has to immediately begin. And now things start to fall apart. The criminal trial started in April 1873 and was a gigantic sensation.

And actually at the time was the longest case heard in an English court. It lasted until February 1874, 188 court days. And he just, things went worse and worse for him. A handwriting expert testified that his writing resembled Orton's but not Tichborne's, which is pretty compelling. And his story about being rescued started to fall apart. A ship called the Osprey had arrived in Melbourne in July 1854, as he said, but it didn't match his description,

and the names of the captain and crew didn't match the ones that he gave. Also, the Osprey's log and the Melbourne harbormaster's log didn't mention anything about a rescue at sea, which you think they would have. So finally, the court found against the claimant citing his, quote, gross and astonishing ignorance of things that Roger Tichborne ought to have known. And for a court case that lasted 188 days, the verdict came quite quickly, 33 minutes. The jury came back and said he was guilty. They said, you're not Roger Tichborne, you're Arthur Orton. And they sentenced him to two consecutive terms of seven years imprisonment for perjury. He was released after 10 years in October, 1884. He

lost, as I mentioned, 148 pounds in prison. Make of that what you will. He still said that he was Roger Tichborne and he maintained that all throughout uh his term in prison but he showed no interest after getting out of continuing the fight instead he signed a contract at worth music halls and circuses and just sort of presented himself as an interesting curiosity who had once been famous and interest among the public finally waned uh in 1887 in exchange for a fee of a few hundred pounds he actually acknowledged to a journalist that he was, in fact, Arthur Orton, and then immediately retracted that. And he died poor of heart disease in April 1888.

But 5,000 people attended his funeral. He was seen as kind of a champion of the working classes, as kind of a social issue. One reason this was so important is that the public lower classes were sort of outraged when they saw the family close ranks against him and use the resources to keep him out. I'll talk about that in a second because it's kind of a paradox. Yeah, I'm not sure I understand that. So he was popular among many people, even though he was now, in the eyes of the law, guilty of perjury and just found out as an imposter. Interestingly, at the funeral, the Tichborne family allowed a card

bearing the name Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne to be placed on the coffin before its interment, and the name Tichborne was registered in the cemetery's records. As I think a show of good will, they weren't acknowledging that he was actually Roger, but they were willing to give him what he said he wanted. So the assessment today is that it's generally believed that the jury was right, that the claimant actually was Arthur Orton, a butcher's son who had made his way to Australia, and read in a newspaper that this missing heir was being sought by his mother. And maybe thought he vaguely resembled him in some ways.

Yes, which he does. I'll put some art in the show notes. Someone made a composite of Roger and Arthur and sort of in the middle what they, you know, showing how similar they are. And apart from the weight difference, which is significant, they do look vaguely the same. They have the same nose, the same eyebrows.

You could understand why someone might imagine that they were the same person if they insisted that they were. To this day, though, as I say, even though in the eyes of the law, he's Arthur Orton, there are some people who still aren't certain that that's the case. One of the strongest arguments for that position is the sheer audacity of what he would have had to have done. He was in Australia just working as a butcher and read this apparently story advertisement in the newspaper. He had a wife, he had two daughters, and just decided to make his way to England

and make this case with no evidence, no connections to the family, knowing it would be under a spotlight in the media and have to get through the court system in order to claim this fortune, but just did it anyway, I guess thinking he was smart enough to pull it off and knowing that what actually turned out to happen might happen,

that he'd be found guilty of perjury and thrown into prison. Yeah. So it's hard to believe that anyone would be smart or dumb enough to try that. Desperate enough, maybe. With so little hope of success. But apparently that's what the official story is, that that's what happened. A couple unanswered questions. One is, we already talked about,

why was he reticent to admit his identity in Australia? What was he saying had happened? He was heir to this fortune and went to Australia and worked at a cattle station under an assumed name and then turned around again. And never came up with a story for that. You would think, you know, with enough time, you could come up with something.

Yeah, and related to that, there was sort of a contradiction at the heart of this. As I said, he was sort of championed by the lower classes who saw him as weak against the strong, as one of them against the wealthy. But George Bernard Shaw said, look, if he's one of the oppressed, that means he's a butcher from whopping. he doesn't have any legitimate claim exactly so and if he's not if he really does have a legitimate claim for the title then he's not one of the poor so it makes no sense to me yeah and that's that's just

sort of a puzzle that i think comes out of the british class struggle uh and maybe it doesn't ultimately make any sense um it's just interesting that at the time, people didn't tend to see it that way. The working class just saw him as somebody trying to move up and being oppressed by above. Yeah, because apparently, I mean, at least to read about it, there were legitimate reasons to feel that the justice system at the time was sort of tilted toward the interests of the rich. Uh-huh. And so there were legitimate grievances, and this sort of really touched on that.

Uh-huh. So that explains some of it. An interesting little twist here. In 1876, while the claimant was in prison, so the story, what comes out of the trials is that he's not Roger Tichborne. His name is Arthur Orton. He's a lowly butcher's son, and he's just a liar, and they put him in jail for perjury. An inmate of a Sydney lunatic asylum in 1876 named william cresswell claimed that he was arthur orton oh no which would make the best

ending to a novel you've ever heard there was some circumstantial evidence supporting that he actually had some connection with orton but that and some of the claimant supporters were lobbying to have him brought to england but it kind of fell apart and went nowhere so that's just it doesn't mean anything but it's kind of interesting twist uh. As I say, to this day, no one knows for absolutely certain who this man was. It's interesting to do the research because they refer to him as the claimant with a capital C. And that's how this man is referred to because no one's still to this day quite sure who he was. As as i say he admitted momentarily that he was arthur orton but then recanted that immediately and he might have done it for money

it sounded like he he admitted it for money but yeah uh the arrest warrant that was uh made for him before the first trial reads uh referred to him as thomas castro alias arthur orton alias roger charles dotty titchborn so's three identities, even in the arrest warrant. And as I say, the family allowed him to be buried under the name that he'd been seeking so hard all those years. But to this day, no one really knows who he was. Our podcast is supported primarily by our amazing patrons, whose donations make it possible for us to keep making the show.

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I used to think it helped. No. Well, sometimes you have your eyes closed and sometimes you don't. Well, we'll see if it helps this time. Okay. This week's puzzle is from Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles by Paul Sloan and Des McHale. Family-run firms that are passed down from generation to generation generally perform less well than firms where the CEO is chosen by the board. However, this is not the case in Japan, where family firms do better than in most other countries. Why? Is this true?

firms do better than in most other countries. Why? Is this true? This is true. Really? Okay. Does this mean... I'm immediately stuck. All right. Family firms mean a firm that's governed, that's run by members of the same family. Yes. That's true in both cases, say in the United States and in Japan. So it's not something to do with just different definitions of that term. No, it's family-run firms meaning the same thing

in both cases, that the firm stays within the family. Okay, and you say in Japan those, say it again, meaning they have like better...

Family firms do better than in most other countries. Meaning they have more financial success, they're just, they thrive better as companies? Yes.

All right. This is very interesting. Is it ultimately to do with the Japanese culture? Maybe you can't answer that. That's a little broad. Well, it's not like to do with like the laws. Right. It's not to do with the laws so if you took a family-run maybe you can't answer this either a family-run business from the united states and just transplanted it intact into japan would we expect it to do better no okay so it

would still be the case like they start off saying family-run firms that are passed down from generation to generation generally perform less well than firms where the CEO is chosen by the board. That would still be the case if you put an American firm in Japan. Okay. So is it, I mean, Japanese families in themselves aren't different from, say, American families, right? Are they? That's what I'm going to phrase that as a question. Is it something to do with the difference of the families themselves, the people in the families or their... I'm going to phrase that as a question. Is it something to do with the difference of the families themselves, the people in the families or their... I'm going to say yes. Okay.

That helps, actually, because if we got into that, you know, it could get really complicated. Yeah, if you start asking about business laws or something, I don't know. Japanese families. Does it have to do with... God, I can't even imagine. Passed down from generation to generation. So you have one person who's, say, running the company.

Yes. And he leaves it to his son, say, or daughter. And that person runs it, and it just goes down from one generation to the next. Correct. And that same setup works in both countries. I'm comparing it to the U.S., just to compare it somewhere. Yeah, well, let's, right, just for simplification, let's compare the U.S. to Japan. But you're saying that in Japan it's more more successful not just in the u.s but then in other

countries as well right all right and you're saying that has something to do with the families themselves i'm just going with that i'm going to ask stupid questions the size of the families no the the longevity or um history of the families i don't know what that means or history of the families? I don't know what that means, the history of the families. Well, that wouldn't even really matter, would it? But something to do with the families themselves. Does this have to do with information ultimately? No.

Would you say the Japanese companies are... I don't know how to ask that. So the Japanese companies are run differently as a result of whatever this factor is. It'd have to be if the company itself does better. I guess so, yes. I'm not even sure quite what I'm asking there. I guess so, but I wouldn't be able to answer a lot of questions in that area. Okay, so let's take a Japanese company, a company x okay today japanese company x that's

operating in japan okay it's run by one person ultimately let's say yeah one one guy's the head of it and he's japanese he didn't have any family. He didn't have any offspring. Okay. Would we still expect him to be running the company better than his counterpart in the United States? Not necessarily. For this factor, whatever it is. Not necessarily.

Okay, good. So, let's say he has a daughter. Okay. And eventually he retires and he just hands it off to her. And she starts running it. Okay. And eventually he retires and he just hands it off to her. And she starts running it. Okay. Can I say that? That doesn't usually happen.

Ah. Does that happen in the United States? It might, I suppose. Yes. Is it significant that it doesn't happen in Japan? Possibly. Okay. Does something else happen I mean he's going to retire

right and then someone's got to run the company right so it's handed off to someone yes some one person yes and this is just sort of a typical way

I'm guessing that it happens yes what we're talking about yes are we still in the Japanese company here yes okay and you're saying if it's not his, oh, is it his son then?

Is it the fact that I chose a woman? Right. In Japan, it's generally still companies need to be at least nominally headed by a man. Oh. Is that a factor in the answer? No, that's not like the main part of the answer. No, but that helps. Okay.

It's a little bit of a factor, but not. But you would say in the United States that's not necessarily the main part of the answer. No, but that helps. Okay. It's a little bit of a factor, but not. But you would say in the United States, that's not necessarily the case. Right, right. Although it's probably still more common in the U.S. for men to run companies, but I think it's probably a little more acceptable for women. All right. Okay. So that's getting somewhere.

So in Japan, let's, okay. So he, he retires, he hands it off then to his son, let's say. Okay. And his son starts running it. Yes. say. Okay. And his son starts running it. Yes. Is there a difference in the amount of training or information that the son gets? No. From the last generation? No. That's not it. That's not it at all. That's like not in the right area at all. Okay. So his son inherits the company. Yes. And starts running it. Yes. Does he run it according to the same general principles that his father did unknown okay but not important right not not important um and then just to keep going he'll

retire someday and pass it off i guess to his son yes uh does it have to do with The length of these... I don't want to call them dynasties. No. You're going to get to a point where someone doesn't have any sons. Correct. Is that part of it? That's one part of it. That's possibly part of it.

Okay, so let's say this guy either has no children or has only daughters. Okay. Do I need to know what happens in that case? That would help. Okay. You're saying that he doesn't hand it off to his daughter? Is that the case? That's usually the case in Japan, yes, is my understanding.

Do you know who he does hand it off to? Not a specific name of a person, but yes, yes. Okay, so I need to figure that out? Yeah. It's not a member of the family or is it? It is a member of the family. His wife? No.

Not his daughter. Not his daughter. He doesn't have any sons. Does it skip a generation? No. Does it go up? No. Brothers?

No. What am I missing? Okay, is it someone in his own generation, would you say? No. It would be a younger generation. Younger generation, but not his own children. Correct, not his own children. Somewhat correct. Well, I'm getting into semantics here, but...

All right, so someone's children. Yes. His wife's children? No. Well, his wife's children are his children. His siblings' children? No. Well, his wife's children are his children. His siblings' children? No. What?

I'm closing my eyes again. So someone in the generation below him. Yes. Yes. Let's say there's a businessman who's got a family-run business in Japan, and he has no sons to pass it to. Right. But it still stays in the family. So it's not his siblings' children?

It's not. It's not his wife's family? It's not. And what happens is what allows these Japanese firms to do better. All right. So I'm getting somewhere. Yeah, I mean, so it's what happens allows it to do better than, like, say, in the U.S. Am I looking for the right thing?

In other words, if I said it's his ninth cousin, you'd say, yes, that's it. Or is it just like it's somehow given to the most qualified person available, and that's why they do better? It's closer to what you said in the in the second one but it's still considered family run but it's a it's the most qualified person and it's related to him you know by blood you'd say this person is a no no this person would you say this person though is a member of his family eventually so there's a marriage that takes place Of his family.

Eventually. So there's a marriage that takes place? Possibly, but it's broader than that. So it passes to someone, all right, so let's say this. Let's say I'm running a Japanese, let's say I'm Japanese and I'm running a Japanese company. Right. And I get to retirement age. And let's say you either have no sons or your sons are not very good at business.

You have another option in Japan. Is, okay, so answer this. If I hand off the business to person X, whoever it is, was that person qualified at the instant I decided to retire, or does some arrangement have to be carried through before he's... You're going to hand it off to somebody qualified. So it's not going to arrange marriage or something just to make someone... Oh, I see. I misunderstood. I thought you meant where they qualified business-wise.

No, no, no. No, I mean, does he have to be brought into the family for him? He has to be brought into the family. He does? Yes. By marriage? Possibly, but it's more than that. He marries into my family?

Possibly, but that's only a small part of it. Okay, so it's not... Like, if I have only daughters, I could have to find someone to marry a daughter because he's male and then I give it to him. But say you have no daughters, even. I could still do this if I had no children. You had no children at all.

You could still do this. All right. How else can you bring somebody into the family and consider them part of the family, although you didn't start off having any sons? Adoption? Yes. In Japan, they adopt male children to run the family business and they become a member of the family. So they choose someone qualified. So if you have no sons or your sons are not very good at business instead of in the U.S., where you actually have to still pass it down to your less qualified son,

you adopt an adult male to become your heir. And he's now considered, he changes his last name, and he's now considered a member of your family. So actually, I read this puzzle a while ago and wondered how true it was, because this sounded very implausible to me. But Dan Lewis covered the subject in his email newsletter called Now I Know. And according to the newsletter, of the 81,000 people adopted in Japan in 2011, 90% of those were males in their 20s or 30s. I mean, it's that common.

Wow. Dan Lewis says that many businesses in Japan are hundreds of years old, and many of them have been in the same family for that long, just for centuries. And the culture in Japan still usually requires a male head of the company, but sometimes there isn't anyone suitable for the role. So starting centuries ago, business owners just started adopting adult males as sons. Now today, many times the adopted son will marry the owner's daughter and then become both son and son-in-law. So that's why I was saying the thing about marriage. That's not necessary, but they prefer that even more. But that's a fairly recent twist. And apparently there are now in Japan consultants who specialize in

helping you find a man who will make both a good husband for your daughter and a good heir for your business. Like it's a whole special industry. So instead of leaving it to chance that your child will make a good replacement, you get to choose your successor. And that's why they're more successful. And that's why they're more successful. Yeah. So thanks to Dan Lewis for researching this topic for me. I probably wouldn't have used the puzzle if I hadn't seen his research on it. And if anybody out there has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. send in for us to use, you can send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. That's another episode for us. If you're looking for more Futility Closet, you can check out our books on Amazon or visit the website at futilitycloset.com where you can sample over 8,000

fascinating tidbits. At the website, you can see the show notes for the podcast and listen to previous episodes. Just click podcast in the sidebar. If you would like to help support Futility Closet, please consider becoming a patron to help keep us going. You can find more information at patreon.com slash futilitycloset. You can also help us out by telling your friends about us or by clicking the donate button on the sidebar of the website. If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can reach us by email at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and produced by Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week. Thank you.