Supercentenarian

Lore & Background

The term supercentenarian has been used since the 1970s. Norris McWhirter, editor of The Guinness Book of Records, used the term in association with age claims researcher A. Ross Eckler Jr. in 1976, and the term was further popularised in 1991 by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book Generations. The term semisupercentenarian has been used to describe someone aged 105–109. Originally, the term supercentenarian was used to mean someone well over the age of 100, but 110 years and over became the cutoff point of accepted criteria for d

Reader's Guide

Supercentenarians are significant because they represent the extreme frontier of human longevity, offering insights into the biology of aging and the potential for extending healthy lifespan. Research into their morbidity has found that they remain free of major age-related diseases such as stroke, cardiovascular disease, dementia, cancer, Parkinson's disease, and diabetes until the very end of life, when they die of exhaustion of organ reserve. About 10% of supercentenarians survive until the last three months of life without major age-related diseases, compared to only 4% of semi-supercentenarians and 3% of centenarians. A 2021 genomic study identified genetic characteristics that protect against age-related diseases, particularly variants that improve DNA repair, and found that supercentenarians had an unexpectedly low level of somatic mutations. However, it has been suggested that data of supercentenarians, even if 'verified', tend to be unreliable due to errors from confirmation bias and other factors, causing inflated numbers. In one blue zone example, 82% of the supercentenarian population were discovered to be missing, imaginary, clerical errors, or dead upon verification. This suggests that many figures of supercentenarian population may contain substantial errors that have yet to be reassessed critically.

Did You Know?

• The term supercentenarian has been used since 1832 or earlier.
• The first verified supercentenarian in human history was Dutchman Geert Adriaans Boomgaard (1788–1899).
• A 2024 Ig Nobel Prize was awarded to a study that found 72% of centenarians in one blue zone were misreported as still living so that family members could collect pension benefits.
• The cerebellum of a 112-year-old female supercentenarian was found to be about 15 years younger than expected according to an epigenetic clock.

Record-Breaking Longevity and the Question of His True Birthdate

Jiroemon Kimura held the title of the world's oldest verified living person from the passing of Dina Manfredini in December 2012 until his own death in June 2013 at 116 years and 54 days. He had first claimed the distinction of oldest living man in September 2011 following the death of Peru's Horacio Celi Mendoza, and in December 2012 he surpassed the verified lifespan of Christian Mortensen to become the oldest man in recorded history. He remains the sole verified male to reach 116 and is one of only six men ever documented as the oldest living person on Earth. After the death of 113-year-old James Sisnett in May 2013, Kimura stood as the final known man born in the nineteenth century. His exact birthdate, however, carried a small controversy. A 2017 research team, after interviewing family members and examining official archives, determined that his parents had listed his birth as 19 March rather than the likely true 19 April, so he could enter school a year earlier under Japan's then-current academic calendar. A 1955 consolidation of municipal records had further muddled the date, and his nephew recalled the family celebrating on March 19.

A Half-Century of Service: Post Office, Army, and the Family Farm

From the age of fourteen, Kinjiro Miyake built a career defined by steady public service. He started as a telegraph boy at the Nakahama post office in April 1911, simultaneously tending the family farm. A brief departure in 1913 led him to a posts-and-telegraph training school in Kyoto, where he graduated at the top of a class of seventy in late 1914. His career was interrupted three times by conscription into the Imperial Japanese Army's communications units—first in Tokyo in 1918, then a short stint in 1919, and finally a three-week posting to Hiroshima in 1921. In the summer of 1920 he even traveled to Keijō, now Seoul, then under Japanese rule, to work in the Government-General of Chōsen's Mail and Telecommunications Department and to support a sick younger brother who had emigrated there. After his last military obligation, he became deputy postmaster at the Hira post office in April 1924 and remained there for thirty-eight years, retiring in June 1962 at age sixty-five. In total he spent forty-five years in postal work. After retirement he continued farming alongside his eldest son until he was ninety.

A Name Inherited, a Family Expanded

In December 1920, the twenty-three-year-old Kinjiro Miyake married his neighbor Yae, the adopted daughter of Jiroemon Kimura the Eighth. Because Yae's household lacked a male heir, the couple assumed the Kimura name after her father's death in 1927, making Kinjiro the ninth person in that line to carry the title. Together they raised eight children between 1922 and 1943, though the family endured the loss of a son who died before his second birthday and a youngest child who passed at fifty-four in 1998. Yae herself died in 1979. In his final decades, Kimura's domestic life shifted repeatedly: he moved in with his eldest son in 1978, then after that son's death in 1998 he lived with a grandson, and after the grandson's passing in 2005 he was cared for by the grandson's widow and, until early 2013, his eldest son's widow. By the time of his own death he had fourteen grandchildren, twenty-five great-grandchildren, and thirteen great-great-grandchildren. Remarkably, at age 110 he still had a living brother, Tetsuo, who died the following year at ninety-eight.

Roots in a Kyoto Fishing Village

Kinjiro Miyake entered the world on 19 April 1897 in Kamiukawa, a small fishing community in Kyoto Prefecture, then part of the Empire of Japan. He was the fifth of eight children born to farmer parents Morizo and Fusa Miyake. At the time of his birth, only two of his older siblings—his second sister and second brother—were still alive. The family's modest agricultural livelihood shaped his early years, and his parents clearly valued education as a path to contributing to farm work sooner. He began primary school on 1 April 1903 and proved to be a sharp student, completing two years beyond the compulsory curriculum and finishing with the equivalent of an eighth-grade education in March 1911. Under the imperial-era school system, children born before April were placed one grade ahead of those born in April or later, a rule his parents exploited by recording his birth in March so he could graduate a year earlier and join the family farm. He left school at fourteen and never returned to formal education, spending the rest of his long life in manual and public-service work.