Aging Nation ... or Lying Nation ?!

For more than the past 2 decades Japan has held the title for longest life expectancy in the world. 

Average life expectancy in Japan is 82.6 years of age, with females at 86 and males at 79. 
Whereas America's life expectancy is 78.2 years of age, with females at 80.8 and males at 75.6.

Some people say that even my life expectancy is going to increase because I have spent one year living here, eating their food and participating in their traditions.

In addition to Japan's aging population, they also have a falling birth rate.  Japan has one of the lowest birth rates in the world thanks to couples putting off having kids until later in life and often not at all.  If the Japanese births continues at the same rate, they will cease to exist in 800 years!

The longest living person in the world is said to be a woman in Okinawa who is 114 years of age.  Japan's oldest man is considered to be living in Kyoto at the ripe age of 112.  85% of the people over 80 years of age are females. 

But in the past few weeks, Japan has uncovered an embarrassing and very serious pension scandal where many centenarians (people over 100 years old) are unable to be located!  Currently, there are 75 centenarians still missing, and over 840 cases of discovered pension fraud.  It seems that many relatives simply did not report the death of their elders, and then continue to receive and cash their pension checks from the government each month.  Some instances of fraud have been going on for over 32 years!!

Some say the cause is the breakdown of families, since it's not as common for multiple generations to live together anymore, but I say that's a bogus reason.  Many adults in America don't live with their parents or grandparents either, yet we still manage to notify the government once they pass away.

For instance, Tokyo's reported "oldest" man was found as a mummy lying in bed at his 80-year-old daughter's home.  The daughter claimed she had kept him there for over 30 years as a "living Buddha"!  (Can you imagine the stink in that tiny home?!)  A similar story surfaced with Tokyo's "oldest" woman.  When the authorities showed up at her daughter's house to check her whereabouts, they were redirected to her "new" address... a vacant lot!!

Pension fraud is despicable (especially for decades), but not reporting the death of your loved ones is truly disturbing to me.  I thought Japan was this kind, trusting, and respectable nation, yet now I'm beginning to wonder what kind of other creepy scandals are just waiting to be uncovered...

So as Japan scrambles to update their pension records and continue to search for their "missing" elders, you can bet I'm going to question all of the "statistics" the Japanese continue to throw at me which includes words like "the most", "the best", "the highest", and "the safest".