At 116 years old, Tomiko Itooka is about to be named the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records. The Japanese former mountaineer and climber was born on May 23, 1908 — the same year the Wright Brothers made their first public flights in Europe and the US.
Itooka lives in the western Japanese city of Ashiya, according to US-based Gerontology Research Group — an organisation that purports to hold the world’s “largest supercentenarian database”.
The mother-of-three lost her husband in 1979 and subsequently lived alone in his hometown for a decade. In December 2023, she became Japan’s oldest living person.
As an avid climber, Itooka continued to climb well into her 70s, scaling Japan’s 3,067-metre Mount Ontake twice in sneakers.
When she was 100, she ascended the steps of Japan’s Ashiya Shrine without the aid of a walking stick. In 2019, she entered a nursing home, at the age of 111. Upon her admission, she began to use a wheelchair.
Itooka will assume the title of the world’s oldest person after Spanish woman Maria Branyas passed away in a nursing home in Catalonia on Tuesday, aged 117. In January 2023, Branyas, who was the 12th-oldest verified person in recorded history, claimed her title following the death of French nun Lucile Randon, who reached 118.
Branyas lived through the 1918 flu, two world wars, Spain’s civil war and even contracted COVID-19 in 2020, just weeks after she turned 113. Remarkably, she made a full recovery and lived for another four years.
Currently, the fifty oldest individuals in the world are all women. Among the top ten, four are from Japan. The country is widely known to be home to the world’s longest-living people. In 2022, a report from Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare found more than 90,000 centenarians living in the country. In Australia, recent calculations puts the number of people aged 100 or over at roughly 4,250.
The oldest verified person in recorded history was also a woman — Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days.