There is something almost unbearably sad about the story of Sogen Kato, the Japanese man who was supposed to be the oldest person in Tokyo. In 2010, welfare officials wanted to visit him to celebrate his 111th birthday, but his family kept making excuses: he didn’t want visitors, he was away on a trip, he wasn’t feeling well. When the police finally entered the house, they found his mummified remains in bed, still dressed in pajamas and tucked under a blanket. He had been dead for at least thirty years. His family claimed he had shut himself away to become a living Buddha, but the more likely explanation was simpler and uglier: his pension was still being paid, and someone had kept collecting it. Around 2.7 million yen, about $31,000 at the time, was withdrawn after officials began asking questions. The story is both grotesque and deeply human, a strange mix of denial, greed, and loyalty to a lie that somehow held for decades. It also became a kind of origin story for a much bigger reckoning with how wrong official records can be, and how easily we build entire systems of knowledge on top of numbers that were never true.
That reckoning is at the heart of Saul Justin Newman’s new book, Morbid: Debunking Modern Longevity Science, which traces what happened after Kato’s case prompted Japan’s Ministry of Justice to check on its centenarians. The audit looked at people still listed on family registers across the country, and what it found was staggering. More than 234,000 people whose ages would have made them at least one hundred could not be found anywhere. Newman describes the overwhelming majority of them as dead or missing, and he puts their share at more than 82 percent of Japan’s recorded centenarian population. He writes that if 82 percent of the stars seen by the Hubble Space Telescope turned out to be dust on the lens, astronomy would have been thrown into a scandal. In aging science, barely anyone shrugged. Some researchers later argued that Newman misread the data and that the real number of missing people was much smaller, around six hundred. But Newman sees the problem as far broader than Japan. In Greece, he reports, at least 72 percent of centenarians disappeared from the official count after the 2011 census, amid investigations into pension fraud. Like Kato, he writes, the Greek centenarians were only alive on pension day. And some families went to bizarre lengths to keep that fiction going. In Italy, police checking on Irma Borgoglio, reportedly 103, found her propped up in her kitchen, frozen solid. Her son said she had just died, but the chest freezer where he had been keeping her suggested a much longer interval. These stories feel almost like dark comedy, but they are also a reminder that age data is not neutral. It can be manipulated, mistaken, or simply invented, and whole fields of science have been built on it.
Even when people are alive, they sometimes disagree with their own records. In 2016, Adele Dunlap, a former teacher living in a nursing home in Pittstown, New Jersey, was named America’s oldest person. When asked what it felt like to be 113, she reportedly answered, “I’m 104.” The newspaper that shared her story accepted the finding of the Gerontology Research Group that she was indeed 113, and the exchange became another example for Newman of how researchers handle testimony that contradicts someone’s paperwork. Instead of asking whether the record might be wrong, the official number won. This may seem like a small thing, but Newman argues that unreliable age records have real consequences for the advice sold to everyone else. Take the so-called Blue Zones, those places around the world where people supposedly live unusually long, happy lives. Cookbooks, travel guides, and lifestyle programs promise that if we eat like the Okinawans, drink wine like the Sardinians, or walk like the Costa Ricans, we too can add decades to our lives. But what if the ages that made those places famous are as shaky as Kato’s? Newman suggests we may be copying someone’s lifestyle without knowing whether it actually helped them live longer. We might be imitating habits that have nothing to do with longevity, while missing the real lessons entirely.
The contradictions in the Blue Zones story are especially sharp when you look at Okinawa, the Japanese island celebrated as a place where people routinely reach one hundred. Citing Japanese government data, Newman reports that Okinawans rank first in Japan for consumption of Kentucky Fried Chicken. The oldest Okinawans also have the worst body mass index in the country. Blue Zones guides often recommend belonging to a religious community, but Okinawans are about 93 percent atheist by the statistics Newman cites. Their vegetable intake falls short of the advice too, and he drily notes that these are not recent trends, adding that they really should eat more greens. Yet Okinawa is still promoted as a model of healthy aging. Even more confusing is Singapore, which became a Blue Zones designee despite having almost nothing in common with the usual guidance. According to its own health minister, Singaporeans have the opposite attributes of the other five Blue Zones, with stressful lives and diets heavy in sugar and salt. If Singaporeans live long lives while doing things differently, then why should the habits promoted in Blue Zones books get the credit? Newman’s point is not that Okinawan food is bad or that community is useless, but that the stories we tell about longevity are often built on shaky foundations. We want so badly to believe that there is a secret, a recipe, a set of rules, that we are willing to overlook the fact that the data itself may be broken.
The same problem appears in the world of anti-aging medicine, where expensive treatments are sold long before anyone has proven they work. Newman reminds us of resveratrol, a compound found in red wine that was once hailed as a miracle. Harvard researcher David Sinclair called it “as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find,” and in 2008, GlaxoSmithKline paid about $720 million for Sirtris, the company he helped found. The promise was that this molecule could mimic the effects of caloric restriction and unlock a longer, healthier life. But within a few years, the evidence had not caught up with the enthusiasm. One researcher admitted that the actual use for humans still needed to be discovered. By 2013, GSK had closed Sirtris’s Cambridge operation and folded its research into its own labs. The story is not necessarily a sign that the science was fraudulent, but it shows how much money and hope can flow into an idea before we know whether it works. Newman also writes about his own experience in this world. At Oxford, where he was a research fellow, he says colleagues shut him out and urged him to stop criticizing the age records used in longevity research. The discomfort he caused was not about any particular drug or diet, but about method: if the basic measurements are wrong, then everything built on them is suspect. Eventually, he moved to a medical research position at University College London, but the resistance he met says a lot about how hard it is to question a field that promises eternal life.
For all his skepticism about bad data and overhyped fixes, Newman remains fascinated by experiments that genuinely change lifespan. He recounts a 1961 study in which removing the gonads of kokanee salmon prevented the usual death that follows reproduction, allowing some of the fish to live more than twice as long. It is a strange, almost poetic result: by taking away the thing that made life possible, the scientists made it last longer. Newman writes that we can make kokanee double their normal limits of survival with scissors and stitches. But there is no equivalent prescription for humans, and the story has its own darkly ridiculous ending: a gang of raccoons broke into the lab and ate many of the test subjects. That image, part tragedy and part farce, captures the tone of Newman’s broader argument. The science of longevity is full of grand claims and fragile records, but it is also full of uncertainty, mess, and unexpected interruptions. We are not immortal, and the data we use to study aging is not much more reliable than the memories of a grieving family trying to hold onto a pension. If there is a lesson in Morbid, it may be that we need more humility about what we know, a deeper respect for the complexity of human lives, and perhaps a healthier suspicion of every guidebook promising a road to one hundred.
