How did you lose them?
For the last several weeks, I’ve been following the story of Japan’s missing centenarians. Yes, plural centenarians, missing.
What the crap?
First there was a story about a Tokyo’s alleged oldest man, who turns out to have died 32 years ago. His family mummified him and kept him in his bed.
And one of Tokyo’s oldest women? No one has seen her since 1986, when her daughter moved.
These discoveries are coming to light as the country prepares for Respect for the Aged Day. Perhaps instead of a single day to honor centenarians, they would be better served by actually verifying their continued existence?
Japan believes it has more than 40,000 centenarians, of whom 200 are now known to be missing, and that’s before all 47 prefectures have reported the results of their attempts to locate them. I’m having a hard time imagining how a society that has a national holiday to celebrate their super-elderly can lose so many of them.
One of them was registered at an address that became a park in 1981! One of them died in 1966! He would’ve been 126, except that he died at 82, which is still a respectable old age, but c’mon. Forty-four years?? You’ve got to be kidding me.
