At 116, Japanese woman set to be named world’s oldest person

A Japanese woman aged 116 is set to be named the world’s oldest person by Guinness World Records.

The United States-based Gerontology Research Group announced on Wednesday that former mountaineer Tomiko Itooka, born on May 23, 1908, would assume the title.

Itooka was next in line to hold the record after Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera died on Tuesday, aged 117, in a nursing home in Catalonia, according to her family.

A resident of the western Japanese city of Ashiya in Hyogo prefecture, Itooka was born in the same year the Wright Brothers made their first public flights in Europe and America. That year, the first long-distance radio message was sent from the Eiffel Tower.

The mother-of-three still went climbing into her 70s and twice scaled Japan’s 3,067-metre (10,062-ft) Mount Ontake, surprising her guide by climbing the mountain in sneakers instead of hiking boots.

At the age of 100, she walked up the lengthy stone steps of Japan’s Ashiya Shrine without using a cane, said the group, which claims to have the world’s “largest supercentenarian database”.

Previous record holder Branyas, who lived through the 1918 flu, two world wars and Spain’s civil war, contracted COVID-19 in 2020, just weeks after ringing in her 113th birthday – but made a full recovery.

Born in the United States, she had previously posted on an X account run by her family that the “time is near”.

“Don’t cry, I don’t like tears. And above all, don’t suffer for me. Wherever I go, I will be happy,” she said.

Guinness World Records officially acknowledged Branyas’s status as the world’s oldest person in January 2023 following the death of French nun Lucile Randon aged 118.

The oldest verified person to have ever lived was Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.