Nearly 200 of Japan’s oldest citizens ‘missing’

Nearly 200 Japanese centenarians are missing, officials said yesterday, with the total likely to rise amid a nationwide search after the discovery of the 30-year-old corpse of a man registered as aged 111.

In the western city of Kobe alone, the whereabouts of 105 out of 847 centenarians were unknown as of the end of July, a city official said.

“The city launched an investigation on the condition of the 105 people,” the Kobe city official said – in addition to 22 others who have not accessed nursing or medical insurance in recent years.

Those unaccounted-for include people who could be older than the current officially recognised oldest woman in Japan, 113-year-old Chiyono Hasegawa, who lives in the southern Saga prefecture.

They include one supposedly 125-year-old woman.

The sheer number of missing has raised fears that Japan’s current welfare system could be easily exploited by relatives, after officials visiting Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday instead found his mummified 30 year-old remains.

Police are investigating the late Kato’s relatives – who claimed he had retreated to his room to become “a living Buddha” – for fraud because the government had kept paying a pension into the man’s bank account.