Japan's oldest man who fought in WWII dies at 112

Mikizo Ueda, who was the oldest living man in Japan, passed away at the age of 112 in the city of Nara last week. The supercentenarian was born in May 1910 and passed away in a nursing home on September 9, 2022.

He was one of those who fought in World War II and survived the Hiroshima atomic bombing, per a report in The Independent. The Japanese health ministry will announce the current oldest living man in the country on September 16.

The oldest recorded person in the world was also a Japanese citizen. Kane Tanaka was certified as the oldest person in the world by the Guinness World Records in 2019. She passed away at the age of 119 at a hospital in Fukuoka city earlier this year.

According to local officials, Tanaka was born on January 2, 1903, and died of old age on April 19. With her demise, 118-year-old French nun Lucile Randon has become the world's oldest person.

Tanaka was born in 1903, a year when Theodore Roosevelt was US president, Edward VII was British king and the Wright Brothers flew their motor-driven plane for the first time.

She even survived cancer, not once but twice. She lived through several historical events, which included two world wars, the 1918 Spanish flu, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Japan was recently ranked as the world's healthiest country. It has an extremely low obesity rate at just 3.6 percent of the population. The low obesity rate and high life expectancy have been attributed to their eating habits.

Japanese are not big meat eaters. They consume less dairy products, sugar, red meat and potatoes and eat more fish and seafood, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

The study added that the country has the world's longest life expectancy due to a significant decrease in mortality from infectious diseases, cerebrovascular disease, and pneumonia after World War II.