107,677.
That is how many people in Japan were 100 or older as of September 1, 2026, according to figures Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare released ahead of Respect for the Aged Day, a national holiday on the third Monday of September. The count rose by 7,914 from last year and crossed 100,000 for the first time since records began in 1963. It has now climbed 56 years in a row. In 1963 there were 153 centenarians in the whole country. Sixty-three years later, there are 700 times as many (MHLW press release on centenarian commendations, September 2026).
Women account for 94,298 of them, men for 13,379. That’s 87.6% women. The oldest living woman is 114, in Kyoto; the oldest man is 112, in Kumamoto.
Those numbers make the news every September. What I want to sit with this year is the question behind them. Did the people who reached 100 get there by never getting sick?
Three kinds of centenarians
One study tackled that question head-on. Evert and colleagues at the New England Centenarian Study collected health histories from 424 people aged 97 to 119, recording whether and when they had been diagnosed with ten major age-related diseases, including hypertension, heart disease, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and osteoporosis (Evert J et al. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2003;58(3):M232-M237).
The centenarians sorted into three profiles. “Survivors” had been diagnosed with at least one of these diseases before age 80 and lived to 100 anyway. “Delayers” held off any diagnosis until 80 or later. “Escapers” reached 100 with no diagnosis of a major age-related disease at all.
Here is the part that surprised me. The disease-free Escapers were only 32% of the men and 15% of the women. Survivors, the ones who had been living with a diagnosis since their 70s or earlier, made up 24% of the men and 43% of the women. More than four in ten female centenarians had a chronic condition on the books before they turned 80.
Narrow the list to the three biggest killers, though, and the picture shifts. For heart disease, cancer, and stroke, 87% of the men and 83% of the women had either delayed onset past 80 or avoided the disease entirely.
You don’t need a clean bill of health to reach 100. You need to push the lethal diseases late. That’s what centenarians actually look like.
Closer to 110, the sick years shrink
The same group later followed even older people prospectively: 884 centenarians aged 100 to 104, 430 aged 105 to 109, and 104 supercentenarians aged 110 and up, tracked for an average of three years (Andersen SL et al. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2012;67(4):395-405).
The older the age group, the later the onset of cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, and stroke, and the smaller the share of life spent with disease. Among supercentenarians, health span came close to matching life span. The authors call this “compression of morbidity.” It’s a prospective cohort, so the usual caveat applies: people who are unusually robust to begin with are the ones most likely to reach 110, and that selection effect can’t be fully separated from the finding.
Still, this is why the “110” in this site’s name isn’t just a catchy number. Living long and being sick for a long time are not the same thing.
What Japan’s centenarian studies found: inflammation
Japan runs some of the largest centenarian studies in the world. Arai and colleagues at Keio University pooled three cohorts into a sample of 1,554 people: 684 centenarians and semi-supercentenarians, 167 pairs of centenarians’ children and their spouses, and 536 community-dwelling adults aged 85 to 99 (Arai Y et al. EBioMedicine. 2015;2(10):1549-1558).
Centenarians and their children did have long telomeres. But telomere length did not predict who stayed healthy or survived past 100. Low blood markers of inflammation did. Centenarians’ children also scored lower on inflammation than age-matched controls, and the authors describe inflammation as a modifiable driver of aging that keeps operating right up to extreme old age.
Whether it makes sense for you to have inflammatory markers tested depends on your health situation. Talk to your doctor before ordering anything.
How much is genes
Whenever centenarians’ children turn out to share a trait, someone says it’s all genetics. It’s worth separating the pieces.
Christensen and colleagues, reviewing the evidence in The Lancet, put the share of variation in lifespan explained by genes at roughly 25% (Christensen K et al. The Lancet. 2009;374:1196-1208). The other three-quarters is something else. The 700-fold increase in Japanese centenarians over 63 years can’t be a genetic story either; the Japanese gene pool has barely changed in that time.
What changed was nutrition, sanitation, medicine, and how people work and live.
A 3.6-fold gap between prefectures
One more number in this year’s release caught my eye. Per 100,000 residents, Shimane Prefecture has the most centenarians at 186.65, and Saitama the fewest at 51.27. That’s a 3.6-fold spread. Kochi, Tottori, Kagoshima, and Nagano round out the top five; Aichi, Osaka, Tokyo, and Chiba sit near the bottom.
It’s tempting to read that as “rural life makes you live longer.” I’d be careful. In prefectures where younger people have moved to the cities, the denominator shrinks and the centenarian rate rises on its own. Saitama and Chiba, on the other hand, filled up with newcomers after the war, so the generation now reaching 100 is thin there. As a measure of who ages well, this statistic is weak. That’s my opinion, not a finding.
The real news this holiday
Passing 100,000 means that reaching 100 is no longer an exotic event. At the same time, Japan’s long-term care insurance program (a public system that covers home care, day care, and nursing homes for people 65 and over) certified 7.08 million people as needing support or care in fiscal 2023, or 19.4% of everyone 65 and older (MHLW, Long-Term Care Insurance Annual Report FY2023, published August 2025). A society with more centenarians is also a society with more people who need care.
That’s exactly why Evert’s numbers are encouraging. More than eight in ten centenarians kept heart disease, cancer, and stroke at bay until at least 80. You don’t have to get to zero. You have to push the dangerous ones later. And that part moves with daily steps, sleep, and the people you spend time with.
I have no idea whether I’ll end up one of the 107,677. But learning that most of them were not “never sick a day in their lives” changed how I set the goal. Rather than shrinking from illness, I’d rather keep up the habits that delay the lethal ones, without drama. That seems like enough.
Monday’s post goes back to those habits.
The centenarian research above, and the rest of the evidence behind this site, is collected in my book Walking to 110: Japan’s Wisdom for a Long and Healthy Life. Kindle edition here.
References
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan). Press release on centenarian commendations, September 2026. Population aged 100 and over: 107,677 as of September 1, 2026 (Basic Resident Register).
- Evert J, Lawler E, Bogan H, Perls T. Morbidity profiles of centenarians: survivors, delayers, and escapers. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2003;58(3):M232-M237.
- Andersen SL, Sebastiani P, Dworkis DA, Feldman L, Perls TT. Health span approximates life span among many supercentenarians: compression of morbidity at the approximate limit of life span. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2012;67(4):395-405.
- Arai Y, Martin-Ruiz CM, Takayama M, et al. Inflammation, but not telomere length, predicts successful ageing at extreme old age: a longitudinal study of semi-supercentenarians. EBioMedicine. 2015;2(10):1549-1558.
- Christensen K, Doblhammer G, Rau R, Vaupel JW. Ageing populations: the challenges ahead. The Lancet. 2009;374:1196-1208.
- Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (Japan). Long-Term Care Insurance Annual Report, FY2023 (published August 28, 2025).