They would make for bizarre missing persons posters: “Unknown number of Japanese citizens. Distinguishing features, gray hair and facial lines. Aged at least 100. Last seen several decades ago.”
Japan on Tuesday launched a nationwide campaign to establish the whereabouts of its oldest residents after embarrassed officials in Tokyo discovered that a 113-year-old woman thought to have been the capital’s oldest citizen had been missing for more than 20 years.
The revelation that Fusa Furuya’s relatives have no idea where she is and that the house where she was supposed to have lived no longer exists has sparked feverish media coverage. It comes days after the corpse of Tokyo’s supposed oldest man was found mummified more than 30 years after his unreported death.
Officials in the capital’s Suginami ward attempted to visit Furuya, who was born in 1897, at an apartment in the city on Monday, but were told by her 79-year-old daughter that she had never lived there.
The daughter gave them the address of a house in Chiba, outside Tokyo, where Furuya was apparently living with the daughter’s estranged younger brother. Officials arrived at the address to find that the building had been demolished to make way for a motorway. Furuya and her daughter were registered as having moved to Tokyo in 1986, but the exact date of the older woman’s disappearance remains a mystery. Police are attempting to contact her son to establish her whereabouts.
The failure of the city’s welfare office to maintain contact with its two oldest residents is an embarrassment for a country that prides itself on looking after its huge population of senior citizens.
The phenomenon of disappearing seniors hit the headlines late last month when police discovered that Sogen Kato, then thought to be Tokyo’s oldest man at 111, had died 32 years earlier.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not