Tokyo loses track of its centenarians

August 4, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

TOKYO

Japanese authorities admitted Tuesday they’d lost track of a 113-year-old woman listed as Tokyo’s oldest, days after police searched the home of the city’s official oldest man — only to find his long-dead, mummified body.

Officials launched a search this week for Fusa Furuya, born in July 1897 and listed as Tokyo’s oldest citizen, after it emerged her whereabouts are unknown.

Several other celebrated centenarians also are unaccounted for due to poor record-keeping and follow-up in a country that prides itself in its number of long-lived citizens but also frets about an unraveling of traditional family ties.

Officials updating their records ahead of a holiday next month honoring the elderly found that Furuya does not live at the address where she is registered, said Hiroshi Sugimoto, an official in Tokyo’s Suginami ward.

Furuya’s 79-year-old daughter, whose name was not disclosed, told officials she thought her mother was with her younger brother, with whom she has lost touch. But that address just outside Tokyo turned out to be a vacant lot.

The disappearance follows last week’s grisly discovery — also by officials updating the most-elderly list — that the man listed as Tokyo’s oldest male, who would have been 111 years old, had actually been dead for some 30 years and his decayed body was still in his home.