Could this be the most common method for living past 100?
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.”
Karla (Patrick Stewart) has gone to the other side.
I’ve been watching true crime shows recently. One of them featured an elderly pair of black sisters living in Colorado Springs. The case begins with the discovery of one of the sisters wrapped up and mummified on a couch for a number of years. Yes, the living sister was collecting and cashing the two SocSec checks the whole time.
They had to make sure that there was no evidence that the dead lady had been murdered. They found none. Both sisters were kind of self-styled civil rights champions in their past, and when that ceased to be a paying occupation when they got old, they were desperate for cash.
I’ve seen reports that the stated ages of many living centenarians and “supercentenarians” are also incorrect — but not necessarily because of deliberate fraud. If they’re even close to the ages they’re said to be, they may have been born in a time and place where birth records were poorly kept or disappeared over time.
Norman Bates would like a word.