The number of people aged 100 or older in Japan has passed 100,000, according to the health ministry, even as the wider population has continued to shrink.
The country is now home to 107,677 centenarians, up almost 8,000 from last year, the ministry said on Tuesday. It’s the highest national population of centenarians in the world.
The number has risen every year since the ministry began tracking it 56 years ago.
As many as 88 per cent of the centenarians, 94,298 people, are women. Fuyo Kishimoto, a 114-year-old in Kyoto, is the country's oldest woman, and Hikaru Kato, a 112-year-old from Kumamoto, is the oldest man.
"I am very pleased that so many people are remaining active and healthy for so long," health minister Kenichiro Ueno said, adding that this reflected genuine progress in medicine and technology.
He, however, warned of the strain the population trend was putting on Japan’s social security system.
Japan has consistently ranked among the longest-living nations, with average life expectancy reaching 84 in 2024, according to the World Bank, compared with 79 in the US.
When the country started its centenarian survey in 1963, it counted 153 people aged 100 or older. The number passed 1,000 in 1981 and 10,000 in 1998.
The latest figures come ahead of the "Respect for the Aged" public holiday, when the government sends personal letters and traditional sake cups to citizens turning 100.
Studies have previously raised doubts about the reliability of centenarian censuses globally, pointing to data errors, unreliable public records, and missing birth certificates.
A government audit of Japan's family registries in 2010 found over 230,000 people listed as aged 100 or above who could not be accounted for or had died decades earlier, a discrepancy blamed on patchy recordkeeping and, in some cases, suspicions that families had concealed deaths to continue claiming pension.
The increase in centenarians comes even as Japan's overall population continues to fall.
The total population, currently about 123 million, is projected to drop to 87 million by 2070, a 30 per cent decline from the 2008 peak of 128 million, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research.
The fertility rate fell to a record low of 1.14 last year, well below the 2.1 needed for the population to replace itself.
People aged 65 and over currently make up around 30 per cent of the population and their share is expected to approach 40 per cent by 2070.
In 2025, Japan saw populations fall in 45 of its 47 prefectures, with the rate of decline accelerating.
Prime minister Sanae Takichi has described the demographic decline as a "quiet emergency".
State subsidies and programmes intended to encourage people to have more children have thus far failed to lift birth rates.
Experts have noted a mix of causes for the crisis, including falling marriage rates, women’s increased participation in the workforce, and the rising cost of raising children.
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