Seiichi Ishii, 103, a bike repairman, works on a bike at his shop in Tokyo, Japan. The country has about 100,000 people who have lived for a century or more — the most in the world, and more per capita than in any other country. Photo / Chang W. Lee, The New York Times
Japan has about 100,000 people who have lived for a century or more — the most in the world, and more per capita than in any other country.
The frailty that comes with age is creating challenges for Japan, where a record-low birthrate means ever more retirees and fewer working-age people to support them.
For some people, reaching 100 is just another milestone in a full life.
We met five remarkable centenarians who credited their longevity to eating well, Japan’s affordable health care, exercise and family support. For these five, there is also something else: their work.
The bicycle repairman
As a 12-year-old, Seiichi Ishii was walking home from school one day when he came across a “help wanted” sign in the window of a bicycle repair shop in the Shitamachi district of Tokyo.
He had always admired the long navy jumpsuits that bike repairmen wore, and he wanted to step into one himself.
More than 90 years after that start, Ishii is still fixing bikes at his own shop.
Although the legs of the jumpsuit are too long for his shrinking body, he goes to bed every night excited about the customers who might show up the next day.
“If I die here, in my workshop, I will be happy,” he said. “I am a working man, and that doesn’t change with age!”
Ishii, 103, loves removing bolts and tyres and puzzling out how to piece everything back together, though his hands have grown shaky and his vision is blurrier than in his younger days.
Ishii remembers living through the war, when nothing was guaranteed. His income from the repairs supplements a monthly pension of 50,000 yen, or about US$330.
“You never know what will happen,” he said, making miso soup for one in the cluttered kitchen behind his shop.
Working on bikes brings him even more joy than singing karaoke, which he does every Sunday at his favourite snack bar.
He rides a tricycle to get there. On special karaoke outings, he wears his old jumpsuit with the hems rolled up.
The ramen chef
Five or six days a week, Fuku Amakawa works the lunch shift at her family’s ramen restaurant alongside her son and daughter, using long chopsticks to swirl egg noodles in pork broth and sprinkling chopped spring onions into bowls filled with hot soup.
“I can’t believe I’ve managed to work this long without getting bored,” she said while disinfecting serving trays.
Amakawa, 102, said she has always been a bit stubborn.
She put off her arranged marriage as long as she could. After she made the leap, she opened the restaurant with her husband. Its 60th anniversary was this year.
“It is really beautiful that I can still work. Physically and emotionally, it changes the quality of my life,” she said, sitting below an autographed photograph of Takuya Kimura, a singer and actor who visited the restaurant last year.
Amakawa’s skin glistens, which she attributes to all the steam in the kitchen.
One of her biggest fears is losing the ability to walk, and she said the work helps her stay fit.
Last year, she felt pain in her chest and panicked, afraid she was having heart problems. A doctor told her not to worry: It was just muscle pain, from lifting heavy pans.
The farmer
Bright yellow rapeseed flowers, Masafumi Matsuo’s favourite, filled the fields behind his home when he was young.
He loved the mild bitterness of the vegetable, which turns sweet when cooked and which he farmed and sold.
His son, who now runs the family farm, decided to replace the flowers with rice, a less laborious crop to maintain.
Matsuo, 101, also grows eggplants, cucumbers and beans across different seasons.
“I work to stay healthy,” he said on a July morning, dragging a plastic stool out into the field, where he sipped water during breaks from watering his rice seedlings.
Matsuo was born, grew up and raised three children in his town, which is nestled in the mountains of Oita, a coastal prefecture on the southwestern island of Kyushu.
His wife died four years ago, which devastated him.
Every morning, he climbs the stairs, clutching the railing, to the second floor, where he has made a Buddhist shrine to his wife and brings her freshly cooked rice.
Matsuo, who survived oesophageal cancer and, at 99, a bout of Covid, spends his weekends playing with his year-old great-grandson, Toki.
After farming each day, he goes inside to rest at his kotatsu, a heated table that’s covered with heavy blankets.
He slides down into their warmth as grasshoppers bounce around on the windowsill behind him.
The beauty consultant
Tomoko Horino always knew there was more in store for her than staying home.
Inspired by a salesperson she had met, she wanted to sell makeup. But she was a young mother-of-three, and cultural norms meant it would not be considered proper for her to work.
At 39, she ran into an old friend whose husband was recruiting salespeople for the same makeup brand she’d fallen in love with years before.
With her children older, she took the job.
Horino loved seeing her customers’ faces light up as they tried a new lipstick colour or foundation that she’d suggested.
“When I first tried on makeup, I felt so pretty,” she said. “I wanted to make others feel the same way.”
Her husband, who worked in an office, wasn’t happy to have a wife who also worked, but the family was in a dire financial situation.
All he asked was that she knock on doors where she wouldn’t be recognised.
She complied, travelling at least an hour from home to sell her products. Soon she was making more than he was.
Now widowed and living alone at 102, she makes her sales over the phone, with only occasional home visits.
Keeping busy helps her fend off loneliness.
She spends the rest of her time knitting, feeding tuna-flavoured kibble to the neighbourhood cat and waiting for neighbours to drop by for a cup of oolong tea.
Although she has outlived most of her clients, she’s never considered quitting her job.
“I love making people feel beautiful,” Horino said.
When she sees a customer’s self-confidence rise, “that is the most important and joyful part of this”.
The storyteller
When Tomeyo Ono plopped onto a cushion to begin her performance, there was total silence.
Then, from somewhere deep in her petite body, she started to recite the folktale of a bull and a baby bear, with perfect enunciation.
As she spoke, she gestured wildly with her hands, the audience hanging on every word. At the end, the room filled with applause.
With a repertoire of 50 stories, Ono is a teller of minwa, or folktales, a career she took up for fun after turning 70.
“I’ve never had a proper job before; can I do this?” she said she thought at the time.
“I was raised in the suburbs, and girls didn’t know that we could have dreams back then.”
Now 101, she is the oldest, and loudest, member of a storytelling collective.
After the 2011 tsunami washed away her home in Fukushima, she vowed to incorporate the experiences of its survivors into her work.
“I’m living to tell my stories,” Ono said, tears rolling down her cheeks. She said she was terrified by the idea of folktales, or memories of the tsunami, being lost.
Every day, she writes in her journal and eats natto — a sticky dish made from fermented soybeans — folded between two pieces of fluffy white bread.
Occasionally, she dozes off while reading the newspaper as her daughter-in-law tidies up around her. “I get special treatment because I’m the oldest,” she chuckled.
Lately, Ono said, she “no longer dreams of the living”, seeing only friends and family from the past.
She is determined to keep telling stories until she joins them, she said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Hikari Hida
Photographs by: Chang W. Lee
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