It’s rather grotesque. And who would have thought this practice would be popular in Japan, of all places?:

Fraud is rampant everywhere, it seems:

In 2010, welfare officials in Tokyo tried to visit Sogen Kato, a local man living in the city’s Adachi district, to congratulate him on his 111th birthday. Their records identified him as the oldest man in the city, but his family kept turning them away, saying he didn’t want visitors or had taken a trip somewhere five hours away.

When police finally entered the house, they found Kato’s mummified remains lying in bed, dressed in pajamas and covered with a blanket. He’d been dead for at least 30 years, although his family claimed he’d shut himself away to become a living Buddha.

His pension kept paying, and someone withdrew 2.7 million yen, about $31,000 at the time, after officials started asking questions. …

“This prompted the Japanese Ministry of Justice to check in on other centenarians: not just in Tokyo but across all Japan,” writes scientist Saul Justin Newman in his new book, “Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science” …

Across Japan, the audit identified 234,354 people still on family registers whose whereabouts couldn’t be confirmed. All would have been at least 100 if alive. Newman describes them as dead or missing and puts their share at more than 82% of the recorded centenarian population.

His findings have been disputed, however, and some researchers say there were only 600 such “missing” centenarians. That’s 600 too many, I’d say.

The whole thing reminds me of a bit of the Faulkner story “A Rose for Emily.”