In 2010, on Respect for the Aged Day, Japanese officials sought out a Tokyo man named Sogen Kato to congratulate him on living to a hundred and eleven. Instead, they found a mummified corpse in his bedroom. Kato had been dead for three decades, and his family had fraudulently collected more than a hundred thousand dollars in pension money. A government investigation later revealed that hundreds of thousands of “living” residents of Japan had in fact gone missing or died, including eighty per cent of Japanese centenarians.
~ Dhruv Khullar via The New Yorker

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