On the morning of May 23, 1925, a 6.8-magnitude earthquake struck the small hot spring town of Kinosaki, near the coast of the Sea of Japan. The timing was catastrophic. It was late morning, and nearly every household in the village was cooking lunch over an open flame. Within minutes, fires leapt from kitchen to kitchen across the dense wooden architecture, consuming everything. By the time the ground stopped shaking and the fires burned out, 283 people were dead and virtually every building in Kinosaki was rubble. After the earthquake, the surviving ryokan (inn) owners sat down together — competitors, all of them — and held over 100 meetings to decide, collectively, how to rebuild. What emerged from those meetings was a radical idea. The owners agreed to treat the entire town as a single inn.…