117-Year-Old Kane Tanaka is the ‘World’s Oldest Living Person’

Kane Tanaka has once again extended her record of being the world’s oldest person by celebrating her 117th birthday on Sunday, surrounded by family, friends, and staff at a nursing home in Fukuoka in Southern Japan. 

As a mark of her birthday celebration, Tanaka took a bite from a slice of her big birthday cake and tucking a few strawberries and cream, she said with a smile, “Tasty, I want some more.”

Tanaka, whose actual date of birth is January 2nd, was verified as the oldest person on the planet, aged 116 years 66 days old as of March 9 last year by Guinness World Records. She is still five years away of the record for the oldest person ever but she is in good health.

The record age of Tanaka is symbolic to Japan’s fast-growing ageing population, which is coupled with the country’s falling birthrate is also raising concerns about the labour shortages and prospects for the future economic growth of the country.

According to Japan’s welfare ministry, last year, the number of babies born in Japan fell an estimated 5.9% to fewer than 900,000 for the first time this year since the government has started compiling the data in 1899.

In the year 1903, Tanaka was born in the same year the Wright brothers first gained their powered flight. The supercentenarian was the seventh child of her parents Kumakichi and Kuma Ota. 

She married Hideo Tanaka four days after her 19th birthday in the year 1922. According to the Guinness World Records. The couple had four children and has adopted a fifth child. Now she has five grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

The couple ran a business popularly known as Tanaka Mochiya, which made and traded sticky rice, Zenzai (a kind of Japanese sweets) and Udon noodles. She took a more significant role in the firm, when her husband was called up for the military service in 1937 throughout the Second Sino-Japanese War. Hideo Tanaka and their eldest son Nobuo died in the Second World War, and She carried on managing the family firm until retiring at the age of 63 years.

The 117-year-old wakes up at 6 am every day and in the afternoon after lunch, she often studies maths and calligraphy. One of her cherished past times is the classic board game, Othello. She still beats the staffs in the game at the nursing home.

The oldest person ever to have survived was a French woman named Jeanne Louise Calment, who survived till the age of 122.