Evidently they don’t update their records in Japan often enough.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100910/ap_on_re_as/as_japan_missing_centenarians
They fear that most of the missing centenarians may be dead. Fill in your joke here.
I don’t care how good your health care is, or how much healthy food they eat, it’s a safe bet that those 884 people over 150 are , in fact, dead.
Seems l read somewhere about a trend in a particular kind of fraud crime in Japan: people’s elderly relative quietly passes away, and the family members don’t notify anyone so that the pension payments keep rolling in.
Might be the case for at least some of these.
When the first guy, the 111-year-old in Tokyo, was discovered they did a few follow-up stories on the next few who were discovered. One whose son had hidden her body in a suitcase, but another, Tokyo’s oldest woman, seems to be genuinely missing. Her daughter had moved into her flat, but the woman hadn’t been home at the time, so the daughter thought the mom may have gone to stay with her brother. So she kept paying her mom’s health insurance.
In Canada we just put the elderly on ice flows to die. It’s too much work to try and cover it up.
We don’t feed 'em to bears??? Shit, I’ve been doing it wrong!
I can’t believe you haven’t seen all the “don’t feed the bears” signs.
I thought those were supposed to be ironic.
Proof positive…
Alien abduction run amuck!
later, Tom.
Freakonomics mentioned how seven million children apparently disappeared in 1987. That was the year that the IRS ruled that a social security number must be included for all claimed dependants. And millions of children who had been claimed up to 1987 vanished that year.
^ Someone on this board mentioned that the numbers went back up the next year, though, as if the problem was that a lot of kids just didn’t have a social security number.
That’s true, but many stayed off. The issue was actualy with Mexican Dependents. There’s a special section of IRS code that allows you to claim your family in Mexico (and Canada, but they are not an issue with this). BUT they do NOT qualify you for Earned Income Credit or Head of Household. Many were claimed as living in the USA, and millions of EITC $ was paid out that way.
You can get a ITIN for them, but not a SSN.
Thus, they went bye-bye.
Since Japan has one of the highest life expectancies, I wonder if this skews the results from records somewhat.
Recent studies on diet & aging suggested that a high fish oil diet slows aging & deters heart disease.
But Japanese demographic data is obviously worthless. Skewed, towards the high end.
So, where does this leave the medical science studies?
Recent studies on diet and aging have been amended: a high fish oil diet makes people invisible!
A word about the missing oldsters… that statistic is based on an audit of “family registers”, which are maintained by local governments in Japan. Updating the register is voluntary on the part of individuals, and usually only done when some particular legal need arises.
Statistics on Japanese longevity are put out by the national government, and don’t rely on data from the family registers.
… and if the death is never registered, the pension checks keep coming. This audit has turned up a number of examples already, apparently.
In Norway I hear they just toss them all into the fjords.
Well, as I’ve said before: If you can’t find a place to hide a body in Norway, you’re not really trying.
This is why you don’t order the soylent-maki when in Japan.