The number of people aged 100 or older in Japan has exceeded 70,000 for the first time after marking an increase for the 49th consecutive year in the aging society whose birth rate remains low, government data showed Friday.
Women centenarians vastly outnumber the men, accounting for 88.1 percent of the total 71,238. The figure represents a roughly 23-fold increase from a centenarian population of 3,078 in 1989, according to the data released by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare ahead of Monday’s national holiday in Japan for Respect-for-the-Aged Day.
The number of females who will have reached 100 years of age by Sunday totals 62,775, up 1,321 from last year. The number of such men is 8,463, an increase of 132.
Kane Tanaka, a 116-year-old resident of Fukuoka, is the oldest Japanese. Born in January 1903, she is acknowledged as the world’s oldest living person by Guinness World Records.
Chitetsu Watanabe, a 112-year-old resident of Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture, is the oldest Japanese man.
By prefectures, Tokyo has 6,059 centenarians, followed by Kanagawa at 3,933 and Osaka at 3,648.
Japan’s average life expectancy was 87.32 for women and 81.25 for men in 2018.
Hopefully their quality of life is good as well!
Fine & dandy but what this also means is Japans population will be dropping at an ever INCREASING rate ove the coming decades.
Oh and how many young people are coming into the world here in Japan……………..NOT VERY MANY!
The future is bleak her sadly!
What is the point of being a centenarian and seeing no offspring kids play in front of you…
This is just a bragging point. Let’s not forget, these people grew up in a very different era. It is unlikely Japan will have so many centenarians in another 50 years due to the massive change in culture in the last 50 years. Soak up the sun while you can Japan. It’s going to get cloudy very quickly and very soon.
Most being women is no surprise. To be over 100 you must be of the World War II generation when men suffered enormous casualties.
Japan is going to reach a crisis point in the next two decades where it will have to decide if it will let go of it’s xenophobia or let its society die out. Robotics won’t change the patriarchy, the burden child rearing Japanese society puts entirely on women, and without significant cultural change there is little incentive for women to bear enough babies to make a dent in their declining population. Its a good example of what other industrialized countries can expect in the coming years.
Was only a few years ago when checking their files that there were quite a few people well over 100 collecting pensions, turns out when checked most had moved on to serenity. Also remember 10 years ago a report and another yesterday was raising alarm bells as developing Nations are heading the same way but not in such a quick manor. The first report Japan was being viewed as a test case, the second no.