In Japan almost 80% of all university students attend private institutions. According to some estimates, up to 40% of these institutions are family businesses in the sense that members of a single family have substantive ownership or control over their operation. This paper examines how such universities in Japan have negotiated a period of major demographic decline since the 1990s: their experiments in restructuring and reform, the diverse experiences of those who worked and studied within them and, above all, their unexpected resilience. It argues that this resilience derives from a number of ‘inbuilt’ strengths of family business which are often overlooked in conventional descriptions of higher education.