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More than 100k people in Japan are now aged 100 or older

217 points · 282 comments · karakoram

  1. briandw · · focus · HN ↗
    The secret to extreme long life is bad record keeping.
    1. hn_throwaway_99 · · focus · HN ↗
      Yeah, I agree that the "Blue Zone" theory is mostly explained by bad record keeping. Okinawa is one of the poorest areas of Japan, but was deemed a Blue Zone, despite that wealth is nearly always positively correlated with longevity within similar cultures. Low and behold Okinawa had shitty record keeping and tons of incentives for relatives to commit pension fraud.
      1. dnautics · · focus · HN ↗
        This is dumb. If you go to any Japanese graveyard in Hawaii (where family graves have prefecture of origin) you will find the preponderance of centenarians are from okinawan families. There is no incentive for pension fraud for someone born in the us (or emigrated to the us in their younger years) and died in the us in the 1980s-> early 20XXs
        1. crooked-v · · focus · HN ↗
          Sure, but there would have still been the same poor record keeping around birth dates and the same incentives for people in a poor area 60 years ago to enter the workforce early.
          1. dnautics · · focus · HN ↗
            Bad record keeping in Hawaii in 1900-1910++? Bad record keeping and misregistering a 8 year old as 18 upon immigration to the territory of Hawaii? What are you proposing here?

            I'm looking at a photograph I have with a 1915-2015 and in same frame an immediately adjacent plot for a distinct family which has 1913-2015, both of these deceased almost certainly born in the territory of Hawaii (one site has two 1880s born -- that's probably the immigrants).

            Supposing there were bad records and incentives to fudge that persisted into the territory of Hawaii, why would those incentives only exist for Okinawan immigrants in Japan versus immigrants from any other prefecture, including poor ones like those in the south of Honshu or Kyushu!?

    2. presumptinator · · focus · HN ↗

      [dead]

    3. Jordan-117 · · focus · HN ↗
      <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theonion.com&#x2F;134-year-old-man-attributes-longevity-to-typographical-1819564555&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theonion.com&#x2F;134-year-old-man-attributes-longevity-t...
    4. globular-toast · · focus · HN ↗
      If it&#x27;s all just fraud, why are 88% of them women? Is there any reason fraudsters would overwhelmingly claim for women?
      1. consonaut · · focus · HN ↗
        To be 100 years or older you would have been born in 1926 or before. Meaning you turned 18 in 1944 or before. Maybe something happened in Japan that killed of a large percentage of young adult males around that time?
        1. globular-toast · · focus · HN ↗
          Well, exactly, but this lends credence to the numbers being somewhat accurate. If there were almost as many male centenarians then it could probably be attributed to bad record keeping.
          1. AntiqueFig · · focus · HN ↗
            Also women tends to live longer, thus even if the records were for example 5 years wrong, there would still be more 95 years old women than men.
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