Tokyo's 'oldest man' had been dead for 30 years (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo's 'oldest man' had been dead for 30 years (2010)

bbc.com

31 pointsredbell19 comments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato

The aftermath of Sogen Kato's discovery reminds me of another story I read about on HN years ago that covered the (quite uniquely Japan, as I understand it) cottage industry that has sprung up around cleaning up from Kodokushi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi). That is, special cleaners who deal with the remains of Japenese salarymen who chose 50 years at Mitsubishi or Kyocera or whatever, instead of any descendents or social network that might notice their passing before their remains rot away in an apartment, unnoticed for months/years.

As someone who chose for personal and ethical reasons not to reproduce, and also struggles to maintain lasting relationships, I sure am glad I'm not Japanese at least! :)

> ... reminds me of another story I read about on HN ...

This one, IIRC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16233336

> As someone who chose for personal and ethical reasons not to reproduce, and also struggles to maintain lasting relationships, I sure am glad I'm not Japanese at least! :)

I don't follow the logic - wouldn't it be better to live somewhere where this is a known problem that there are processes for dealing with, than somewhere where you'll be a unique case?

One result of that incident and the others described in the Wikipedia article is that insurance companies in Japan have become more diligent about checking that pension recipients are still alive. I am sixty-six and have lived in Japan for forty years, and I now receive regular annuity payments on some insurance policies I bought twenty or thirty years ago. Ever since around 2011, once or twice a year the insurance companies mail me postcards that I have to sign and return in order to prove that I am still alive so that I can keep receiving the payments.

For the past few years, I have also been receiving a similar annuity from an American insurance company based on a job I had in the U.S. in the early 1980s. That company doesn’t seem to have any procedures in place to confirm that I am still alive. If I drop dead tomorrow, that U.S. annuity might continue to be paid to my bank account for many years.

>Ever since around 2011, once or twice a year the insurance companies mail me postcards that I have to sign and return in order to prove that I am still alive so that I can keep receiving the payments.

Isn't a signature just a stamp in Japan? How would that verify that you are still alive?

Stamps are still widely used, but these particular postcards ask for a handwritten signature. I suspect that the choice was made to require signatures rather than stamps not because forged signatures are easier to catch but because family members would be more hesitant to forge a signature than to use a dead person’s stamp. Using someone else’s stamp is not unusual and can be innocuous: often office workers, for example, will stamp documents on behalf of their bosses using their bosses’ personal stamps. Forging a handwritten signature is more likely to feel like a crime to many Japanese.

I forgot to mention that one of the Japanese insurance companies also requires short face-to-face interviews every few years. I have done it once so far. They wanted to do it in person, but it was during a COVID spike and they let me do it by videoconferencing instead.

Yup, "police did not know if 234,354 people over the age of 100 were still alive" (with implications probably still filing pension paperwork and benefits).

"officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register claimed a man was still alive at age 186."

Yes they do - the social security death index. It will not be paid for years - once your ssn shows up on the list for the USA pension. Payments are stopped. It is very accurate so at most perhaps a month or two of payments would occur. If there is overpay they will send the bill to your estate.

This is bizarre, so they just didn't open the door to his room for over thirty years? How did they deal with the smell of a decomposing corpse?

From Wikipedia

> “Prosecutors alleged that Michiko Kato, 81, daughter, and Tokimi Kato, 53, his granddaughter, fraudulently received about ¥9,500,000 ($117,939; £72,030) of pension money.[4][7] In addition, after Kato's wife died in 2004 at the age of 101, ¥9,450,000 ($117,318; £71,651) from a survivor's mutual pension was deposited into Kato's bank account between October 2004 and June 2010. Approximately ¥6,050,000 ($75,108; £45,872) was withdrawn before his body was discovered. Kato was likely paid a senior welfare benefit from the time he turned 70, which the family may also have used to their advantage.”

This explains why.

Humans are quite effective at finding and optimizing/exploiting pretty much any incentive.

Oh yes, my other favorite quote:

> Jeff Kingston, the director of Asian studies at the Japan Campus of Temple University, said, "It is a humanising phenomenon—the Japanese are traditionally seen as sober, law-abiding people—when they are in fact scamsters like the rest of us. [The story of the missing centenarians] holds up a mirror to society and reflects realities that many in Japan do not want to accept."

The most cases of surpising longevity come from areas where birth and death tracking was/is a bit lacking.

Are you saying Japan is lacking accurate birth/death tracking?

As evidenced by the case mentioned in the article.

Okinawa specifically is one of the poorer areas of Japan especially for the elderly and had all of its vital records destroyed in WW2. It's also allegedly a "blue zone" where people live especially long.

Today probably not, but was Japan lacking accurate birth tracking 80-120 years ago? It doesn't seem that unlikely at least

Yes, the country is someone notorious for having a disproportionate number of AWOL supercentenarians

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