Kiyotaka Hasegawa

My name is Kiyotaka Hasegawa. I am 72 years old, born in Tokyo on August 7, 1953. Today I make my home in Yokohama, Kanagawa.

My working life began, as many of my generation’s did, at a company we simply called Marubeni — one of Japan’s great trading houses. I joined its information systems division after university and spent the first two decades of my career among mainframes and punch cards, watching Japan build the infrastructure of a modern economy.

At forty-nine I moved to SoftBank, then in the racing heart of the telecommunications revolution. Fiber optic. Broadband. Mobile internet. I was there while a country that had invented the walkman learned how to carry the entire internet in its pocket.

And then, at sixty — an age when many of my colleagues were rehearsing their retirement speeches — I did something my younger self would never have predicted. Caring for my own aging parents had shown me, up close, what old age asks of a family — and it opened a door. I entered the world of long-term elderly care.

Today, in the Tokyo and Kanagawa area, I serve as the manager of a day-care service center for the elderly. My daily companions are men and women in their eighties and nineties. For more than ten years, I have watched them at breakfast, at exercise, at the family altar. They have taught me most of what I know about how to grow old, and how to grow old well.

The three careers

Why this site exists

It began with a simple question that would not leave me alone: why are the Japanese the longest-lived people on earth?

Japan is the longest-lived nation on earth. Nearly ninety-five thousand of us have passed our hundredth birthday. Roughly one in every six centenarians alive today is Japanese. These are the plain facts of an extraordinary phenomenon.

For decades, researchers have flown to Japan asking why. They’ve designated Okinawa a Blue Zone. They’ve carried our maternal and child health handbook to developing nations under the WHO. They’ve studied and adapted our long-term care insurance in Seoul, Taipei, and Berlin. In 2013 UNESCO inscribed our traditional cuisine — washoku — on humanity’s list of intangible cultural heritage.

The world, in other words, has long regarded Japan as a teacher. The strange thing is that we in Japan have never quite noticed. We keep importing the latest wellness fads from abroad while the real answer lies quietly at our feet: in the miso soup on the breakfast table, in the morning bow before the family altar, in the neighbor who calls out otagaisama — “we’re all in this together” — across the fence.

This site is my attempt to translate that inheritance — food, Buddhist wisdom, the island worldview, and a public health system that catches everyone — into plain English, so that a world now aging faster than it can build hospitals can take from Japan what it needs.

What you’ll find here

• Everyday habits from Japanese longevity, grounded in peer-reviewed research (Katagiri 2020, VanderWeele 2017, Xie 2013, Livingston 2024, and others).
• Field notes from more than ten years managing a day-care center for people in their eighties and nineties.
• A calm, honest look at how AI and Physical AI will — and will not — help us live longer, healthier lives.
• The essence of my forthcoming book, The Healthspan Revolution: Living Well to 110.

This is not a book about heroic effort. It is a book about daily grace — augmented, in the years ahead, by technology arriving just in time to help the very old. Ordinary practices, refined by a hundred generations, will carry us to healthy lives of one hundred and ten.

Off you go — into today.