116-year-old Japanese in line to be named world's oldest living person

Tomiko Itooka, a 116-year-old woman from the western Japan city of Ashiya, is in line to be declared the world's oldest living person by Guinness World Records, a nonprofit organization that tracks supercentenarians said Wednesday.

Itooka became a candidate for the title after the previous holder, Maria Branyas Morera, a 117-year-old from Olot in Catalonia, Spain, died Monday, according to the Gerontology Research Group.

File photo shows Tomiko Itooka celebrating her 116th birthday on May 23, 2024, in Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. (Photo courtesy of the Ashiya municipal government)(Kyodo)
Born on May 23, 1908, in Osaka, Itooka is the eldest of three siblings, the Ashiya city government in Hyogo Prefecture said. She married around the age of 20 and gave birth to two daughters and two sons, the group said.

During the war, she took over from her husband to manage a textile factory in South Korea and later, after her husband died in 1979, she lived alone in Nara Prefecture, western Japan, where she became involved in mountain climbing.

She has climbed Mt. Ontake twice, a mountain that straddles Nagano and Gifu prefectures in central Japan with a peak of about 3,000 meters, the nonprofit said.

At age 100, she was able to climb the stone steps of Ashiya Shrine without a cane, but after entering a nursing home in 2019, she began requiring a wheelchair to get around.

Itooka has been Japan's oldest person since December 2023.

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