Kane Tanaka, the world’s oldest living person, has died at the age of 119. Tanaka, who lives in Fukuoka in southern Japan, had held the record for three years.
Tanaka, who was healthy until his last days, said that the secret to long life is family, sleep, hope and faith.
Tanaka, who got up at 6 am every day, studied math and calligraphy in the afternoons. He was also famous for constantly beating the residents and staff of the nursing home he lived in at the board game Othello.
According to the Guinness Book of Records, Tanaka was born prematurely on January 2, 1903, the seventh child of a family in Fukuoka.
That same year, the Wright Brothers invented the first airplane, and Marie Curie went down in history as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.
Exactly 100 years ago in 1922, at the age of 19, she married Hideo Tanaka and together they took over the family business selling rice, Japanese noodles and sweets.
Tanaka had four children from this marriage, and later adopted the fifth.
His favorite things were chocolate and soda
When Tanaka was officially elected the oldest living person in the world in March 2019, in an interview he gave at the ceremony, he said that his favorite things were chocolate and soda, and he immediately opened a box of chocolates brought for the celebration and ate it.
When asked at the same ceremony when he was happiest in his life, he replied, “Now”.
Tanaka’s carrying the Olympic torch in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which was held last year with a one-year delay, was also on the agenda, but his dream did not come true because his family found this decision risky due to the risk of COVID-19.
Kane Tanaka was also the guest of honor many times at the Respect for the Elderly Day celebrated in September in Japan.
In Japan, which has the oldest people in the world, 28 percent of the population consists of those aged 65 and over.
Tanaka, who lived to be 119 years old, also entered the Guinness Book of Records as the second oldest living person in history, surpassing the American Sarah Knauss earlier this month.
The oldest person in history to have ever lived is French Jeanne Louise Calment, who was 122 years old when she died in 1997.
After Tanaka’s death, Lucile Randon, a 118-year-old French nun, is now the world’s oldest living person.
Randon is also known as the oldest person in the world to have contracted COVID-19 and survived.