Tomiko Itooka held the title of oldest person on the planet for four months last year. The 116-year-old woman from Japan passed away in the final days of 2024.
Her death was confirmed by the mayor of the city of Ashyia, where Itooka lived in an aged care home.
“Ms. Itooka gave us courage and hope through her long life,” Ryosuke Takashima, the mayor of Ashiya said. “We thank her for it.”
The statement went on to describe the supercentenarian’s love of bananas and Calpis, a yogurt drink popular in Japan and Asia.
Itooka died on December 29 at a nursing home where she had been a resident since 2019. At the time she entered the nursing home, she was 111. Upon her admission, she began to use a wheelchair.
The 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. Four months before her birth, the Ford Model T automobile was launched in the US.
Itooka was recognised as the oldest person in the world after the death of Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera at age 117 in August 2024. In December the year prior, Itooka became Japan’s oldest living person.
During her lifetime, she had four children and five grandchildren. She married her husband at 20 and during WWII, helped with the operations of his textile factory. In 1979, at the age of 71, she lost her husband and subsequently lived alone in his hometown for a decade. 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.
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.
In Japan, women typically live longer than men, but the country has been facing a demographic crisis as its increasing elderly population is leading to rising welfare issues and a reduced civilian labor force to pay for it.
Calculations made in September last year recorded more than 95,000 people who were 100 or older in Japan—88 per cent of whom were women. Of the country’s 123.1 million people, almost a third are 65 or older.
After Itooka’s death, the world’s oldest person is now 116-year-old Inah Canabarro Lucas, a Brazilian nun who was born on June 8, 1908, according to data from the LongeviQuest and the U.S. Gerontology Research Group—an organisation that claims to hold the world’s “largest supercentenarian database”.