By Martin Fackler
Tokyo: Tomiko Itooka, a Japanese woman born before the start of World War I and the sinking of the Titanic, who was believed to be the oldest person in the world, has died at a nursing home in Ashiya, Japan. She was 116.
In a statement released on Saturday, the mayor of Ashiya said Itooka passed away last Sunday. He did not give a cause, but local news media reports said she died peacefully of complications related to old age.
Tomiko Itooka in May, marking her 116th birthday at her nursing home in Ashiya, Japan.Credit: AP
“I offer my deepest condolences,” said Mayor Ryosuke Takashima. “Ms Itooka gave us great courage and hope throughout her long life. I would like to express my gratitude once again.”
Guinness World Records declared Itooka the oldest living person in September after the death of Maria Branyas Morera of Spain at age 117.
Itooka was born Tomiko Yano on May 23, 1908, in the city of Osaka, one of three children in a family who ran a clothing store. At that time, her country was a rising imperial power that had just defeated tsarist Russia in war and was embarking on expansion into mainland Asia.
In the year of her birth, Japan signed an agreement with American president Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state that averted conflict with the United States in exchange for Washington recognising Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula. During her lifetime, her nation emerged as an Asian colonial empire, fell in fiery defeat in 1945 and rose again as an industrial giant and peaceful democracy.
Growing up in pre-war Japan, she played volleyball in high school before marrying the owner of a textile company, Kenji Itooka, with whom she had two daughters and two sons. During World War II, she stayed in Japan to run the business while her husband went to Korea, then a Japanese colony, to oversee a factory there.
“She single-handedly managed a Japanese office and raised her children during this period,” according to the Gerontology Research Group, which keeps a database of the world’s oldest people.
In 1979, her husband died after 51 years of marriage. Itooka then moved to Ashiya, a city outside Osaka, where she remained an avid hiker into her 80s. At 100, she was said to be still ascending the stone steps of her local Shinto shrine without a cane.
When once asked by local news media for the secret of her longevity, she reportedly credited eating bananas and drinking Calpis, a Japanese dairy drink. Itooka is survived by one daughter, one son and a number of her five grandchildren.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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