One Japanese person in every 1,450 is now aged over 100 – and women account for 88.4% of centenarians.
Okinawa, a Japanese archipelago, is one of the world’s five Blue Zones, where there are high concentrations of centenarians.
A member of the Okinawa Centenarian Study research team, Dr. Bradley Willcox, explains some of the secrets to living a long and healthy life.
On the sub-tropical Japanese islands of Okinawa, they have a saying: Live far enough away from your family so you’re not running into them every day, but close enough to take them a warm bowl of soup – on foot.
Many of us during the past 18 months would have benefited from living within walking distance of our family. We’ve had to make do with Zoom calls instead – and the loss of social connection has affected our well-being and mental health.
Socializing is one of the reasons many Okinawans live healthily to 100 and older. So says University of Hawaii geriatrician and Director of the Kuakini Center for Translational Research on Aging, Dr. Bradley Willcox, who with his anthropologist twin brother, Craig, of Okinawa International University, has been studying centenarians on the islands for more than 20 years.
It’s one of the world’s five Blue Zones, where there are high concentrations of centenarians.
“You can’t walk down the street without running into one,” says Dr. Willcox, who co-authored The New York Times bestseller, The Okinawa Way in 2001, to explain his team’s findings.
New centenarian record
Japan’s centenarian population has just hit a record high of 86,510, according to its health ministry, an increase of 6,060 from 2020 – and up from just 153 when records began in 1963.
It means that one Japanese person in every 1,450 is now aged over 100 – and women account for 88.4% of centenarians, including Kane Tanaka, the world’s oldest person at 118 years.
In Okinawa, there were almost double the number of centenarians per 100,000 people in 2015, as there were in Japan as a whole.
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