Japan’s birthrate may be low, but they have really figured out the opposite end of life. As of this month, nearly 100,000 people in the country are officially over 100 years old. This is according to Japan’s Ministry of Health.
That’s more than the entire population of some small countries, except the Japanese, who are probably eating less red meat and doing more morning calisthenics than all the others.
Women lead the charge into triple digits, making up 88 percent of centenarians. The current oldest living person in Japan is a 114-year-old woman from Nara named Shigeko Kagawa. Its oldest living man is 111-year-old Kiyotaka Mizuno, who lives near the ocean, presumably with good seafood.
Japan Now Has Nearly 100,000 People Over 100
Back in 1963, there were only 153 people over 100. By 1998, that number jumped to 10,000. Today, it stands at 99,763 and continues to climb every year, without fail. Japan is aging so rapidly that it had to invent a holiday, Elderly Day, to keep up with the annual congratulations.
This year alone, over 52,000 new centenarians qualified for their ceremonial silver cup reward and a letter from the prime minister.
If you’re trying to live to 100 and beyond, you can try the Mediterranean diet, or maybe go for the somewhat similar Japanese diet, which includes lots of fish, low in saturated fats, and plenty of vegetables.
You can also pair that with a bit of Radio Taiso, a daily three-minute group exercise program broadcast across the country since 1928. It’s a low-impact calisthenics exercise that gets elderly people up and moving.
You don’t have to live in Japan to do it. You can find plenty of Radio Taiso routines on YouTube.
For all the celebrating about the longevity of Japan’s citizens, there is some murkiness in the numbers. Some of those centenarians might not actually be alive at all. A 2010 audit uncovered over 230,000 names listed as 100+ years old who were either dead or missing. Some of it involves pension fraud.
These old people are collecting checks that their families rely on, so when they die, they keep the checks rolling in by keeping the death a secret, sometimes mummifying the corpse and storing it somewhere on their property.
Definitely grim, but that is not generally the case across the country. There is still an overwhelming abundance of 100+-year-old Japanese citizens who can be visually verified as alive, so whether it’s lean fish protein, fermented soybeans, or daily squats, clearly Japan is doing something right.
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