Things My Husband Says

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.

The husband and I are taking advantage of the cheap pitchers of PBR and free wifi at a bar conveniently located to our home (both the old and the future). I do love me a cheap pitcher of PBR. I’ve been tryinig to make something manageable out of our wedding spreadsheet, and he’s designing labels for the wine we made during the shanghai adventure date. (Side note: did you know that the term “Shanghai” largely originated in our fair city? Apparently the Seattle Underground was one of the main places that this practice — conscriptng sailors by trickery or other coersion — was prevalent. Oh, the irony!)

Even after the bullshit she pulled before we used her timeshare at xmas, it looks like we’re going to try to use his mom’s timeshare for our honeymoon. I really hate the timeshare website. I’m not actually that internet-competent, but it still sticks out to me as horribly unfriendly to use. However, it will be worth suffering through this nonsense once we’re sitting in the sun in the middle of December. Seriously, though, this website is bullshit. We will continue to not sit through their sales pitches. But, mmmm, drinking on the beach. I want it!