Those Bumbling Bureaucrats and Their Missing Centenarians
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Japan has issues, just like any other nation on Earth. The problem is, Japan tends to boast of its accomplishments and then run from the truth when those accomplishments are proved to be less than stellar. Japan's economic prowess has been one of the most overhyped and misunderstood phenomenons of my lifetime. Would you want their economy? If you're Sudan, Botswana or Serbia, absolutely. If you're the United States, no way.
This is yet another example of how Japan's boasting has gotten in the way of reality:
Japan has long boasted of having many of the world’s oldest people — testament, many here say, to a society with a superior diet and a commitment to its elderly that is unrivaled in the West.
That was before the police found the body of a man thought to be one of Japan’s oldest, at 111 years, mummified in his bed, dead for more than three decades. His daughter, now 81, hid his death to continue collecting his monthly pension payments, the police said.
Alarmed, local governments began sending teams to check on other elderly residents. What they found so far has been anything but encouraging.
A woman thought to be Tokyo’s oldest, who would be 113, was last seen in the 1980s. Another woman, who would be the oldest in the world at 125, is also missing, and probably has been for a long time. When city officials tried to visit her at her registered address, they discovered that the site had been turned into a city park, in 1981.
To date, the authorities have been unable to find more than 281 Japanese who had been listed in records as 100 years old or older. Facing a growing public outcry, the country’s health minister, Akira Nagatsuma, said officials would meet with every person listed as 110 or older to verify that they are alive; Tokyo officials made the same promise for the 3,000 or so residents listed as 100 and up.
The national hand-wringing over the revelations has reached such proportions that the rising toll of people missing has merited daily, and mournful, media coverage. “Is this the reality of a longevity nation?” lamented an editorial last week in The Mainichi newspaper, one of Japan’s biggest dailies.
This goes on everywhere; it's not a Japanese problem. But mummified since 1978? What the hell is that about?
























