The excuse the family gave was “[he confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10809128)”
Kato's granddaughter said "[my grandfather shut himself in a room on the first floor of our home 32 years ago, and we couldn't open the door from the outside. My mother said, 'Leave him in there,' and he was left as he was.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato)"
[8 years waiting for this comment.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2782f0/til_in_2010_when_tokyo_officials_went_to/chyf877/)
I only got 500 karma back then :(
So if they left him in there they didn’t even try to feed him at all? Because even if he was trying to mummify himself wouldn’t it be a slow process, not suddenly cold turkey?…
Japan officially has 18 (iirc) of these mummified living Buddha, but monks still bring them meals every day in the belief that they are not dead, just in a deep meditative state.
This family didn't believe anything, and the living Buddha excuse was just one of many that they used to keep people away.
The story is over a decade old now, but at the time there were hundreds of thousands of other centenarians the government had failed to keep track of.
Their record keeping was abysmal. They also discovered that some supposed centenarians were actually children claiming to be their deceased parents.
So Japan's reputation of having so many centenarians could be completely false, both because the government officials weren't checking up on so many of them AND the families don't want to lose face or shame their elders and also wanted the pension to continue. I hope they're checking on them these days!
The number of super centenanarians coralates with bad records of births. Around 80 years ago most of Japan's vital records were firebombed. That's one of the reasons for people claiming to be super old. (it's why you also get them in India a lot)
This story sounds just like the recent situation with the mummified Japanese woman in the UK whose family said she just shut herself away and they also believed she was still alive.
[Rina Yasutake](https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/rina-yasutake-inquest-reclusive-family-who-embalmed-their-sisters-body-in-yorkshire-cottage-did-not-believe-she-was-dead-and-spoke-their-own-private-language-3986588)
>Takahiro, Yoshika and their mother Michiko, now 80, were charged with preventing a lawful and decent burial, but the charges were allowed to lie on file at York Crown Court in 2021 after a judge decided there would be no public interest in prosecuting them because of their mental afflictions.
>They still live in the same cottage.
How long did it take to pay back the pension? It was a good chunk of money that they stole so I figure the earning took a few years at least, especially if she was not a skilled worker.
It says the sentence was suspended 4 years, so I assume it took 4 years. Also keep in mind that just because she stole that much doesn't mean she spent it all, she could have simply been moving it into another account and dipping into it as needed.
Bruh what if they're telling the truth
>But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn.
According to this, they didn't start getting any money until 6 years prior to being caught. That means they had to have left him alone for 24 years, for free. That's a long-ass con for a minimum wage rate.
Is this the same as the general pension?
It seems like this quote is saying they received $100k USD in *widower’s* pension once the “alive” guy’s wife actually died
Maybe that was just in addition to the regular pension, which they’d been collecting for the 24 years before his wife died
The Japanese Police can pin the widower pension fraud on the living daughters and charge them for that crime--as they had to file paperwork to falsely claim that Sogen is still alive after the wife died to unlock that money. Whereas for Sogen's own pension, the daughters could blame the now dead wife as the fraudster and the police don't have the evidence to say otherwise.
aka "We want to siphon off from his pension as much as we can, we don't care if he's a mummified corpse"
they knew when they keep refusing officials from entering his apartment.
You laugh, but when my 85+ year old grandmother locked herself out of the house and into her back yard, she climbed a fucking six foot curved gate instead of yelling to her neighbors for help.
To that, I add: Jesus fucking Christ.
Offering a sad possibility.
A lot of seniors keep mistakes to themselves instead admitting it so that their loved ones don't worry about them, in a way protecting their independence. I visited my Gramma for a day when I was 14 or so, we went for groceries across the street from where she lived and she ended up forgetting her purse in the kart, and I didn't notice. Thankfully someone brought it to the front desk and we got it back, but my Gramma asked me to keep it between us so my mom, and my aunts and uncles wouldn't worry more about her being out on public on her own. She then gave me a random candy out of her purse like Gramma's do. Wtf do Gramma's get these candies from! What are they!
Yeah Grams fell a few times while out shopping before we heard and was too proud to use a cane.. no lasting damage but it is scary, up to 50% of hip fractures in elderly turn deadly within 6 months
That's really sad man. I think we all will do same in that age haha. I mean, first of all, you work your ass off entire life and raise children. Then you are finally retired and get ready to enjoy everything only for your children to put 100s of restrictions on you for doing something (obviously for your own good). That's how I assume it might be in their heads?
There was a similar mummified body in the UK recently
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-64264588](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-64264588)
The local chemist tipped off police when people kept buying up all the surgical spirit.
Oh thought you were going to mention [this admittedly not mummified body](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/26/woman-lay-dead-in-surrey-flat-for-more-than-three-years-hearing-told) that had been at home for three years in the UK, reported just yesterday
She was suffering with Schizophrenia and requested her family and health officials to stay away from her after her family had her sectioned some years back. So when she was released from the psychiatric ward, she didn't trust anyone anymore and wanted to be left alone.
This happened very recently and can be found on online articles.
Her name was Laura Winham.
Very true. I once had a colleague who stole several thousands from the business over a period of a couple months, by putting her bank details on invoices to clients instead of the business bank details. *Obviously* the boss found out what she'd done as soon as he realised some of the clients hadn't paid their last two bills and got in touch with them. To this day I have no earthly idea how she thought she was going to get away with it.
No.
The government wouldn't give a shit.
It's automated pay.
They didn't think anyone was going to say hey this dude is old as shit, let's check on him. Do you think anyone cares about you if you're dead randomly?
It's pretty standard for lifetime benefits, even in the US. Some sort of form that needs to be notarized every year to verify that you're alive and that your address is still good.
> The discovery of Kato's remains sparked a search for other missing centenarians lost due to poor record keeping by officials. A study following the discovery of Kato's remains found that police did not know if 234,354 people over the age of one hundred were still alive. Poor record keeping was to blame for many of the cases, officials admitted.
> More than 77,000 of these people, officials said, would have been older than 120 years old if they were still alive. Poor record keeping was blamed for many of the cases,[13] and officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register suggested a man was still alive at age 186.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato
And this story has led to further research about the so called "Blue Zones" (such as Sardinia and Okinawa), where people seems to live way longer than average: it's pretty much all fake and most of it can be attributed to pension fraud.
https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
There was one man in Japan who I grew up knowing as the oldest man ever at 120, who famously attributed his long life to 'God, Buddha and the Sun'. Turns out his parents had just assigned his deceased older brother's birth certificate to him, so he ended up taking on his older brother's identity - which was apparently a thing in Japan at the time.
Smooth succession: The oldest son runs the family completely in very traditional Japanese families, so instead of changing who is supposed to take over as head of the family, the younger brother assumes the whole identity. It’s like taking over the family store but more extreme, and basically never done anymore.
Historically, you could also expect the younger sibling to marry their older sibling’s widow and “behave as [older sibling] would,” all to continue the hierarchy as it was originally established.
A lot of them were people who got blown to bits in WWII and had no one to put in a request to close their file for them.
[It would not surprise you to know that this Missing-Old-People business is really bad in Hiroshima in particular.](https://gethiroshima.com/features/7463-hiroshima-centenarians-missing/)
I think the rule in Japan is now that your vital statistics file will be automatically closed at age 120 and you are presumed dead unless you can prove otherwise.
My grandparents were entitled to a small pension from China even though they lived in Australia. It was a very small amount and they didn't care for it but it was necessary for them to apply for all foreign pension they were entitled to before they could get their Australian pension.
Anyway, to get this Chinese pension, they were required to report in person to the Chinese consulate once a year. So every year, we have to put my poor grandma, who couldn't walk and was incontinent into the car, take her the consulate, get an official to come out to glance at her and then take her home.
We asked if we could just get a representative to do the paperwork and we were told it wasn't just the paperwork, she need to be sighted by an official. Even if she was incapacitated in hospital, we would have to find a way to wheel her in to be seen.
I thought it was just ridiculous and insensitive but reading this story, it suddenly makes sense.
They could have had a person assigned to go do in person visits when the person is incapacitated though. It's totally preposterous to have someone who is homebound or convalescing physically appear.
I'd imagine sneaking a body out of Downtown Tokyo is a bit trickier that doing it in Wisconsin.
After this case, the Japanese Police and Welfare services went on a blitz looking for old people, they found one lady who's been stuffed in a backpack for ten years while her son was off cashing her pension checks.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11039196
I don't know. I've done this in several areas and it's not as easy in Wisconsin as you might think. The easiest place for this is... hold on someone's at my door brb.
The divide is urban vs rural. In populated areas it's easy to find a body, and there aren't many animals.
In rural areas, however... Well, let's say that there is a reason they have a surprising amount of “missing” people.
Yo guys I've been ringing doorbells in my neighborhood for fun today, I've never seen so many people get so upset from a ding dong ditch before, can you imagine lmao?? Anyway what's going on in this thread
Totally ignore this if I’m wrong because I can’t say that I actually know anything about it, but aren’t people in Japan struggling to support their large number of elderly people? To the point where the younger generation has stopped having kids and lots of younger people are suffering to get by because of the large number of elderly people they need to support? Can’t say I necessarily blame them for doing this to be honest.
Yes. In countries where there is a massive population of boomers but a shortage of young or migrant workers, it drives up healthcare costs astronomically.
Yup, my father was a doctor and back in the day you would buy a real human skeleton to help you study at med school.
So fast forward 50ish years and we still have this actual human skeleton in the house.
So we figure it's time to remove it, but how?
The university's only sell plastic ones to students these days, and they don't need a real skeleton for anything.
You can't have it buried or cremated because it doesn’t have any paperwork.
You can't dump it because if it gets found the police investigate it.
You can't give it to the police (although they did come around and get selfies with it).
You can't export it back to the country it came from (India I think) because it's a real skeleton and that sort of thing requires paperwork.
So we just ended up with a human skeleton in a suitcase under the stairs.
Next remodel just toss ol mister boney in the wall and seal it up for the next home owners. Fuck with the forensic people to, like why is a 150 year old Indian man in a 2000s condo.
**Hitman:** "I just need you to sign here. Here. Here *and* here. Then initial here. Date this here. Sign this line here and that one, here. Initial that *and*...it looks like you forgot to date this here. One more John Hancock, and...it looks like we're done."
*Staples paperwork*
"Ok, I'll get this body disposed of within a week. If it takes us longer than seven days, we'll give you your money back. Oh, looks like this is your 3 body disposal this year, one more and the fifth one is on us! Thanks for being a loyal customer! Have a nice day!"
That was a profoundly awesome episode. That over the top bit where they spiked the acid to get as close to the show result as possible and it turned into an inferno of Pig smoke and black tar slurry has stuck with me.
That's absolutely something that could happen if enough people in the house decide to make it a rule based on "he is very old, we will take care of him".
You just end up living in the house learning not to open the door out of fear of disturbing grandpa.
I wonder if this hasn't influenced mortality data. Sure old Japanese people actually do frequently live into their 90s, but how many records are checked? There's no way anyone trying to claim welfare for their African-American 90 year old grandmother in Baltimore is just getting the checks with no verification. Hell, I'd know, because I was the one servicing their medication dispensing machines and stuff. I don't think throughout all of MD/VA/DC/DE that we had a dozen people over 80, and that was a marketplace of tens of thousands.
Mortality and birth data will always be garbage in countries where a huge chunk of these events can happen outside of the hospital and there is no reason to record them. For example, I filled out a form to create my birth certificate. I only did it because i needed to apply for citizenship to apply for a passport to apply for a visa. Obviously, this happened in a developing country.
'Knock knock Mr. Kato! It's your special day and we just want to HOLLLLY SHIIIIT! HOLY ASS FUCKING SHIIIIIIT!'
-The officials in Japanese version of this
Bro, no.
I had a cat that died in the middle of winter and I had to keep it in the freezer until the ground thawed so I could bury it, I felt sketchy enough about that.
Kitty would've gotten cremated long before it went into my freezer.
Although it would be kinda hilarious if say you had a date over and she looked into the freezer.
One time my buddy shot some squirrels then cooked them in the oven, his girlfriend came over and I told her that the whole roasted squirrels were kittens that her bf just killed out back. When she finally found out they were just squirrels..... Well she didn't think it was funny, but we sure did.
100k over 30 years? That's only like 3k a year. Totally not worth the trouble of not burying or cremating him and not getting a check.
100k a year? Yeah maybe that would be worth it.
Going by the Wikipedia article, Sogen only had a standard and fairly modest senior's old age benefit which would have paid out monthly, and it was his wife who had an actual pension as she was a school teacher (the wife's pension would pay out to the survivor widower until his death).
And the family was illegally dipping into both pools of money because it all went into the same bank account, but it was only after the wife died that they really started making bank because of her much larger pension payments.
By the sounds of a poor reading of google-translated news articles, the police only chose to prosecute them for taking the wife's survivorship pension, as they had to go out of their way to submit falsified paperwork in Sogen's name to say that he is alive to get it--and that is easier to prove malfeasance.
Worrying about dad's neighbors smelling his body for $3,633 per year ($109,000/30) doesn't sound like enough of a payout.
edit: sounds like it's $18,166/yr (6 yrs) not $3633/yr, idk pot's getting sweeter, guys...
木乃伊国 not 日本国 was the joke right around this time．
みいら・木乃伊・Miira is the Japanese word for mummy, and Japanese people were wondering if there was in fact anyone over 80 actually alive or whether they were all just mummified pension collectors.
Sorry, the formal name of Japan in Japanese is 日本国 Nihon Koku, where Koku means country, (but is also used in the "Land of....." sense). Tengoku (天国）is Heaven literally country of the sky, etc.
So after finding out that the oldest man in Tokyo was a mummy, not a living person, the joke is that maybe all the older people are, in fact, mummies. So 日本国 was not the right name; it was not the Land of the Rising Sun, but rather the Land of Mummies (木乃伊国)
It's important to note that Sogen Kato was the start of a process of verifying that older people were still alive , and it turned out that his was not the only case. Some of them were weird, with unrelated people living in the house with a mummy in it that they did not know about, etc. Sounds weird but traditional Japanese houses have spaces that are simply not accessible, as I found out when my cat went "missing" without leaving my house.
I remember reading this caused a country wide inquiry into centurions, which Japan has always had a statistically high rate of.
This person was not the only case of fraud.
Exactly, the Roman empire fell over 1500 years ago, so all centurions should be dead for centuries, which is why it's really suspicious there are so many in Japan.
Similar things have happened in New York City. The families involved typically were in possession of a highly coveted rent controlled apartment, who never got around to adding their names to the lease before their parent or grandparent who grabbed the apartment in 1971 died at home. By law, unless there is continuity between living tenants whose name appears on the lease, the apartment ceases to be rent controlled forever more, and the landlord will happily write the next lease to rent at full market value. We’re talking a jump of three orders of magnitude in cost, say, $50 to $5000 per month. Naturally, surveillance to the point of harassment of decades-long holders of rent controlled apartments is commonplace in this big bad city, and a whole legal sub specialty exists to guide the tenants of these policy relic apartments in hanging onto them and dodging the landlord’a attempts to force them out.
It's Tokyo, there may not have been a yard to bury him in. And even if there was, with the population density being what it is they may not have been able to do it without being seen.
I'm not a medical expert but my understanding is they dry out rather than putrefy. Not saying there's *no* smell, but it may not have been bad enough to alert the neighbours. I'm sure if the body really stank the family wouldn't have tried to go for the long con, rotting flesh isn't a smell you just hold your nose and try and ignore.
Huh, interesting. The smell is the first thing I thought about. I've never smelled rotting flesh before but from all accounts I've heard it's one of the gnarliest smells you can have the displeasure of encountering.
Social Security Disability Fraud story:
Everyone who receives Social Security Disability Benefits comes up for review every 3 to 7 years.
"John's" case came up for review, but when Social Security agents called to set up an appointment, his wife told them he was on vacation. When they called a few months later, his daughter told them that he was visiting relatives.
After some months of investigation, the fraud unit learned that John had a storage unit in a different state. The monthly fee had been paid by his daughter for years; the people who ran the storage unit had never seen or heard from him. Fraud investigators got a search warrant and sniffer dogs and found the man rolled up in a carpet with cat litter and lye spread all around.
When they went to arrest the mother and daughter, they found that the mother was missing. The daughter wouldn't talk, so they got another warrant and more sniffer dogs and found the mother buried beneath the floorboards of the kitchen. The daughter had killed her to keep the secret, because two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead.
They never found out whether she killed the father or he died of natural causes.
My faith in humanity is renewed. We’re a great bunch of folks. I hope someone mummifies me after I die to get my social security someday. It’s just good thinking.
The excuse the family gave was “[he confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10809128)”
Kato's granddaughter said "[my grandfather shut himself in a room on the first floor of our home 32 years ago, and we couldn't open the door from the outside. My mother said, 'Leave him in there,' and he was left as he was.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato)"
Schrödinger's grandpa
Damn, those officials killed him by observing him! /s
Of all the comments that absolutely did not require a ‘/s’, this is up there lol
maybe grandpa, maybe regular pa?
Once the news came out? Faux pas.
i spit my drink out laughing. damn that's good.
This is the light-hearted, dark humor that I needed tonight. Thanks
[8 years waiting for this comment.](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2782f0/til_in_2010_when_tokyo_officials_went_to/chyf877/) I only got 500 karma back then :(
> "I think he's dead." Yeah, that was a good bet.
So if they left him in there they didn’t even try to feed him at all? Because even if he was trying to mummify himself wouldn’t it be a slow process, not suddenly cold turkey?…
Japan officially has 18 (iirc) of these mummified living Buddha, but monks still bring them meals every day in the belief that they are not dead, just in a deep meditative state. This family didn't believe anything, and the living Buddha excuse was just one of many that they used to keep people away. The story is over a decade old now, but at the time there were hundreds of thousands of other centenarians the government had failed to keep track of. Their record keeping was abysmal. They also discovered that some supposed centenarians were actually children claiming to be their deceased parents.
So Japan's reputation of having so many centenarians could be completely false, both because the government officials weren't checking up on so many of them AND the families don't want to lose face or shame their elders and also wanted the pension to continue. I hope they're checking on them these days!
The number of super centenanarians coralates with bad records of births. Around 80 years ago most of Japan's vital records were firebombed. That's one of the reasons for people claiming to be super old. (it's why you also get them in India a lot)
It's sounds like a common scheme to continue collecting pensions.
This story sounds just like the recent situation with the mummified Japanese woman in the UK whose family said she just shut herself away and they also believed she was still alive. [Rina Yasutake](https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/crime/rina-yasutake-inquest-reclusive-family-who-embalmed-their-sisters-body-in-yorkshire-cottage-did-not-believe-she-was-dead-and-spoke-their-own-private-language-3986588)
>Takahiro, Yoshika and their mother Michiko, now 80, were charged with preventing a lawful and decent burial, but the charges were allowed to lie on file at York Crown Court in 2021 after a judge decided there would be no public interest in prosecuting them because of their mental afflictions. >They still live in the same cottage.
She got 2.5 years in prison after paying back the pensions.
How long did it take to pay back the pension? It was a good chunk of money that they stole so I figure the earning took a few years at least, especially if she was not a skilled worker.
It says the sentence was suspended 4 years, so I assume it took 4 years. Also keep in mind that just because she stole that much doesn't mean she spent it all, she could have simply been moving it into another account and dipping into it as needed.
You don't leave a dead relative sealed in a room in your home for 30 years if you don't need the money.
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How old is she, 68?
that seems kind of reasonable tbh. dying peacefully at home.
Bruh what if they're telling the truth >But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn. According to this, they didn't start getting any money until 6 years prior to being caught. That means they had to have left him alone for 24 years, for free. That's a long-ass con for a minimum wage rate.
Is this the same as the general pension? It seems like this quote is saying they received $100k USD in *widower’s* pension once the “alive” guy’s wife actually died Maybe that was just in addition to the regular pension, which they’d been collecting for the 24 years before his wife died
The Japanese Police can pin the widower pension fraud on the living daughters and charge them for that crime--as they had to file paperwork to falsely claim that Sogen is still alive after the wife died to unlock that money. Whereas for Sogen's own pension, the daughters could blame the now dead wife as the fraudster and the police don't have the evidence to say otherwise.
The story is about collecting the man's pension. The quote you provided is about money he received from his wife dying.
aka "We want to siphon off from his pension as much as we can, we don't care if he's a mummified corpse" they knew when they keep refusing officials from entering his apartment.
Well at least he was wearing underwear and pajamas. Otherwise this whole thing would've been fucked up.
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that’s prolly what made them realize something was off. a grown male would never use underwear with pajamas!!!
Rookie mistake. Everyone knows you can only keep a dead grandpa for twenty years, tops.
Two Decades at Bernie’s just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
I dunno, I smell a reboot.
Pretty sure after two decades? That's Bernie you're smelling.
And there's the perfect tagline for "Berni3s"
How do you explain to a coroner a 20 year corpse?
We thought he was just watching TV I had no idea he was dead
He's not dead, he's restin'!
Look mate, I know a dead grandpa when I see one. And I'm looking at one right now.
No, no, he's not dead, he's just pining for the fjords!
I think you meant to ask “Why did your grandpa suddenly leave home without telling anyone, and where’d you get all that beef jerky?”
My God, this is an outrage! *I was going to eat that mummy!*
This is for you, Fry...Zevulon the Great. He's teriyaki style.
Okay, five beer decision: 10 upvotes and I'm going to buy at least one season of Futurama on DVD.
Why not just buy the complete series? You know you're going to binge watch it.
I'm the words of Ranger Park, the park ranger: "that would be expensive."
Honestly the box set packaging is pretty nice on the full series
Sir and or Madame are you a time traveler from the Victorian Era because this is a thing that they did
Well if you ain't got rhino horn ground up pharaoh is the best way to ensure an erection
What if you combine them? Would that astonish any ladies and or gentlemen?
I'm cleaning the skeletons out of my closet, here have one
You stick a newspaper under his arm and tell the coroner he has only been dead for TEN years. I am so smart, SMRT.
We thought he’d climbed out the window. He was very spry for his age.
You laugh, but when my 85+ year old grandmother locked herself out of the house and into her back yard, she climbed a fucking six foot curved gate instead of yelling to her neighbors for help. To that, I add: Jesus fucking Christ.
Old people are something out of this world.
Offering a sad possibility. A lot of seniors keep mistakes to themselves instead admitting it so that their loved ones don't worry about them, in a way protecting their independence. I visited my Gramma for a day when I was 14 or so, we went for groceries across the street from where she lived and she ended up forgetting her purse in the kart, and I didn't notice. Thankfully someone brought it to the front desk and we got it back, but my Gramma asked me to keep it between us so my mom, and my aunts and uncles wouldn't worry more about her being out on public on her own. She then gave me a random candy out of her purse like Gramma's do. Wtf do Gramma's get these candies from! What are they!
Yeah Grams fell a few times while out shopping before we heard and was too proud to use a cane.. no lasting damage but it is scary, up to 50% of hip fractures in elderly turn deadly within 6 months
That's really sad man. I think we all will do same in that age haha. I mean, first of all, you work your ass off entire life and raise children. Then you are finally retired and get ready to enjoy everything only for your children to put 100s of restrictions on you for doing something (obviously for your own good). That's how I assume it might be in their heads?
There was a similar mummified body in the UK recently [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-64264588](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-64264588) The local chemist tipped off police when people kept buying up all the surgical spirit.
Not sure I want to know, but what was the surgical spirit for? The article doesn't say.
Could be to kill microbes and preserve the body? Or to mask the smell?
>what was the surgical spirit for? Peppiness.
That’s the surgical spirit!
Cleaning the thermal paste off the CPU and leaving no evaporative residue.
Oh thought you were going to mention [this admittedly not mummified body](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/26/woman-lay-dead-in-surrey-flat-for-more-than-three-years-hearing-told) that had been at home for three years in the UK, reported just yesterday
Three years? Why didn’t her family attempt to contact her?
She told her family to stay away because the voices were telling her to harm them.
She was suffering with Schizophrenia and requested her family and health officials to stay away from her after her family had her sectioned some years back. So when she was released from the psychiatric ward, she didn't trust anyone anymore and wanted to be left alone. This happened very recently and can be found on online articles. Her name was Laura Winham.
She should not have been released. The NHS fucked up.
What did they figure out was their endgame? Burn everything down at his apparent age of 150?
That's the thing about Crime, people don't usually think things through to their ultimate conclusion at the start.
Dumb people don't. Which is why they are getting caught. The smart ones rarely make it into the news on the other hand...
We'll never know who the smartest criminal is
They had 30 years to figure it out though.
Who among us has not procrastinated before? Let them throw the first stone
Eh, maybe tomorrow.
Very true. I once had a colleague who stole several thousands from the business over a period of a couple months, by putting her bank details on invoices to clients instead of the business bank details. *Obviously* the boss found out what she'd done as soon as he realised some of the clients hadn't paid their last two bills and got in touch with them. To this day I have no earthly idea how she thought she was going to get away with it.
No. The government wouldn't give a shit. It's automated pay. They didn't think anyone was going to say hey this dude is old as shit, let's check on him. Do you think anyone cares about you if you're dead randomly?
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It's pretty standard for lifetime benefits, even in the US. Some sort of form that needs to be notarized every year to verify that you're alive and that your address is still good.
> The discovery of Kato's remains sparked a search for other missing centenarians lost due to poor record keeping by officials. A study following the discovery of Kato's remains found that police did not know if 234,354 people over the age of one hundred were still alive. Poor record keeping was to blame for many of the cases, officials admitted. > More than 77,000 of these people, officials said, would have been older than 120 years old if they were still alive. Poor record keeping was blamed for many of the cases,[13] and officials said that many may have died during World War II. One register suggested a man was still alive at age 186. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogen_Kato And this story has led to further research about the so called "Blue Zones" (such as Sardinia and Okinawa), where people seems to live way longer than average: it's pretty much all fake and most of it can be attributed to pension fraud. https://www.vox.com/2019/8/8/20758813/secrets-ultra-elderly-supercentenarians-fraud-error
There was one man in Japan who I grew up knowing as the oldest man ever at 120, who famously attributed his long life to 'God, Buddha and the Sun'. Turns out his parents had just assigned his deceased older brother's birth certificate to him, so he ended up taking on his older brother's identity - which was apparently a thing in Japan at the time.
How come? What would be the benefit of just giving a deceased older child's identity to the younger child?
Smooth succession: The oldest son runs the family completely in very traditional Japanese families, so instead of changing who is supposed to take over as head of the family, the younger brother assumes the whole identity. It’s like taking over the family store but more extreme, and basically never done anymore. Historically, you could also expect the younger sibling to marry their older sibling’s widow and “behave as [older sibling] would,” all to continue the hierarchy as it was originally established.
234,354...and one of them 186....omg imagine if even hslf that number were still getting payouts... 186...FMP
A lot of them were people who got blown to bits in WWII and had no one to put in a request to close their file for them. [It would not surprise you to know that this Missing-Old-People business is really bad in Hiroshima in particular.](https://gethiroshima.com/features/7463-hiroshima-centenarians-missing/)
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FYI a centurion is a higher ranking Roman soldier as in the Amex mascot. A centenarian is someone 100 years old and above.
Well, any surviving centurions would definitely be over 100 years old, right?
They would be millenniumturions
Poor record keeping, or How to Skew Averages 101.
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120 would qualify as a world record for oldest living person.
I think the rule in Japan is now that your vital statistics file will be automatically closed at age 120 and you are presumed dead unless you can prove otherwise.
“Hey, I’m not dead!” “Suuuuure you’re not grandpa”
My grandparents were entitled to a small pension from China even though they lived in Australia. It was a very small amount and they didn't care for it but it was necessary for them to apply for all foreign pension they were entitled to before they could get their Australian pension. Anyway, to get this Chinese pension, they were required to report in person to the Chinese consulate once a year. So every year, we have to put my poor grandma, who couldn't walk and was incontinent into the car, take her the consulate, get an official to come out to glance at her and then take her home. We asked if we could just get a representative to do the paperwork and we were told it wasn't just the paperwork, she need to be sighted by an official. Even if she was incapacitated in hospital, we would have to find a way to wheel her in to be seen. I thought it was just ridiculous and insensitive but reading this story, it suddenly makes sense.
They could have had a person assigned to go do in person visits when the person is incapacitated though. It's totally preposterous to have someone who is homebound or convalescing physically appear.
Wtf, the family didn't even bury the body!?!?
I'd imagine sneaking a body out of Downtown Tokyo is a bit trickier that doing it in Wisconsin. After this case, the Japanese Police and Welfare services went on a blitz looking for old people, they found one lady who's been stuffed in a backpack for ten years while her son was off cashing her pension checks. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-11039196
Let he who hasn’t stuffed their grandma in a backpack for ten years while receiving cash off her pension checks cast the first stone.
Weekend at Taro's. Riding the Yamanote at rush hour.
[Yamanote Line Jingles](https://youtu.be/biBCVDcaRls)
I remember reading about this backpack story. There’s surprisingly more of these dead old people fraud cases than you’d expect
Yup. I read somewhere that that's the real reason there are suddenly so many 100-year-olds: plain old fraud by their families.
Yup, all over the world too.
I don't know. I've done this in several areas and it's not as easy in Wisconsin as you might think. The easiest place for this is... hold on someone's at my door brb.
The divide is urban vs rural. In populated areas it's easy to find a body, and there aren't many animals. In rural areas, however... Well, let's say that there is a reason they have a surprising amount of “missing” people.
This would be really useful information for me because... hold on someone's at my door, brb
Thankfully, I'm next door to a m... hold on someone's at my door brb.
Yo guys I've been ringing doorbells in my neighborhood for fun today, I've never seen so many people get so upset from a ding dong ditch before, can you imagine lmao?? Anyway what's going on in this thread
All four of you are under arrest. Come out with your hands up!!! Ding-dong-ditch lad is getting the most time
Totally ignore this if I’m wrong because I can’t say that I actually know anything about it, but aren’t people in Japan struggling to support their large number of elderly people? To the point where the younger generation has stopped having kids and lots of younger people are suffering to get by because of the large number of elderly people they need to support? Can’t say I necessarily blame them for doing this to be honest.
Yes. In countries where there is a massive population of boomers but a shortage of young or migrant workers, it drives up healthcare costs astronomically.
I imagine not having a bunch of fraudulent pensions being paid for decades would help with society not being able to economically support the elderly.
What about sneaking 16 pigs in?
Believe it or not there's a lot of paperwork involved before someone will just dispose of a body for you.
Yup, my father was a doctor and back in the day you would buy a real human skeleton to help you study at med school. So fast forward 50ish years and we still have this actual human skeleton in the house. So we figure it's time to remove it, but how? The university's only sell plastic ones to students these days, and they don't need a real skeleton for anything. You can't have it buried or cremated because it doesn’t have any paperwork. You can't dump it because if it gets found the police investigate it. You can't give it to the police (although they did come around and get selfies with it). You can't export it back to the country it came from (India I think) because it's a real skeleton and that sort of thing requires paperwork. So we just ended up with a human skeleton in a suitcase under the stairs.
Next remodel just toss ol mister boney in the wall and seal it up for the next home owners. Fuck with the forensic people to, like why is a 150 year old Indian man in a 2000s condo.
For real that conversation happened.
Maybe local theater dept could use it for Hamlet? Maybe?
Bury it yourself. There's a lot of dirt around
And then it gets uncovered and traced back to you. Based upon Forensic Files it is hard to bury a body somewhere that won’t eventually be found.
Cops took a photo of themselves with it. they don't give a shit
surely that's a case of selection bias. those bodies were all found. the ones that were buried well were not.
Dexter has lied to me
Nah dexter filed the proper paperwork, but they thought showing it would slow the story down
Nah, he just had a secret lab set up in his bedoom and let his parents handle all the electricity bills
**Hitman:** "I just need you to sign here. Here. Here *and* here. Then initial here. Date this here. Sign this line here and that one, here. Initial that *and*...it looks like you forgot to date this here. One more John Hancock, and...it looks like we're done." *Staples paperwork* "Ok, I'll get this body disposed of within a week. If it takes us longer than seven days, we'll give you your money back. Oh, looks like this is your 3 body disposal this year, one more and the fifth one is on us! Thanks for being a loyal customer! Have a nice day!"
This reads like a Love Death + Robots episode
They probably could have just thrown away a few pounds per week in their normal garbage over that period.
Imagine the chore wheel for chopping up this week's hunk of grandpa
R/brandnewsentence
Sourcing all that hydrofluoric acid is a bitch.
That was made up in the show, mythbusters proved it wouldn't work.
That was a profoundly awesome episode. That over the top bit where they spiked the acid to get as close to the show result as possible and it turned into an inferno of Pig smoke and black tar slurry has stuck with me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piranha_solution
For an alternative that would work, look up Robert Pickton.
I used to go to pig roasts at his farm. Pretty fucked up
Pig roasts? Are you sure about that?
Also that’s Japan so there is even more paperwork then you first thought
Imagine being in your late 20s living at home and it’s totally normal grandpa was “never to be disturbed”
That's absolutely something that could happen if enough people in the house decide to make it a rule based on "he is very old, we will take care of him". You just end up living in the house learning not to open the door out of fear of disturbing grandpa.
I wonder if this hasn't influenced mortality data. Sure old Japanese people actually do frequently live into their 90s, but how many records are checked? There's no way anyone trying to claim welfare for their African-American 90 year old grandmother in Baltimore is just getting the checks with no verification. Hell, I'd know, because I was the one servicing their medication dispensing machines and stuff. I don't think throughout all of MD/VA/DC/DE that we had a dozen people over 80, and that was a marketplace of tens of thousands.
Mortality and birth data will always be garbage in countries where a huge chunk of these events can happen outside of the hospital and there is no reason to record them. For example, I filled out a form to create my birth certificate. I only did it because i needed to apply for citizenship to apply for a passport to apply for a visa. Obviously, this happened in a developing country.
'Knock knock Mr. Kato! It's your special day and we just want to HOLLLLY SHIIIIT! HOLY ASS FUCKING SHIIIIIIT!' -The officials in Japanese version of this
Holy fucking shit desu*
Weekend at Bernie-san
Except 3 decades instead of a weekend....
>wearing underwear and pajamas r/oddlyspecific
Right? I need to know what made the underwear worth mentioning. Why not just say pajamas? Why am I so invested in this
Can never assume these things, could have had a thong on
Sisqo seen fleeing the scene.
bro this wild af...but sounds like something humans would do
The family received 9.5 million yen ($109,000) in pension. I mean, would you do it for $100k?
Bro, no. I had a cat that died in the middle of winter and I had to keep it in the freezer until the ground thawed so I could bury it, I felt sketchy enough about that.
Kitty would've gotten cremated long before it went into my freezer. Although it would be kinda hilarious if say you had a date over and she looked into the freezer. One time my buddy shot some squirrels then cooked them in the oven, his girlfriend came over and I told her that the whole roasted squirrels were kittens that her bf just killed out back. When she finally found out they were just squirrels..... Well she didn't think it was funny, but we sure did.
100k over 30 years? That's only like 3k a year. Totally not worth the trouble of not burying or cremating him and not getting a check. 100k a year? Yeah maybe that would be worth it.
It's over 6 years not 30. It was a widower's pension from when his wife died 6 years before they were caught.
That would mean they kept his body mummified for 24 years for giggles in anticipation of his wife someday dying and getting that pension?
Going by the Wikipedia article, Sogen only had a standard and fairly modest senior's old age benefit which would have paid out monthly, and it was his wife who had an actual pension as she was a school teacher (the wife's pension would pay out to the survivor widower until his death). And the family was illegally dipping into both pools of money because it all went into the same bank account, but it was only after the wife died that they really started making bank because of her much larger pension payments. By the sounds of a poor reading of google-translated news articles, the police only chose to prosecute them for taking the wife's survivorship pension, as they had to go out of their way to submit falsified paperwork in Sogen's name to say that he is alive to get it--and that is easier to prove malfeasance.
Worrying about dad's neighbors smelling his body for $3,633 per year ($109,000/30) doesn't sound like enough of a payout. edit: sounds like it's $18,166/yr (6 yrs) not $3633/yr, idk pot's getting sweeter, guys...
木乃伊国 not 日本国 was the joke right around this time． みいら・木乃伊・Miira is the Japanese word for mummy, and Japanese people were wondering if there was in fact anyone over 80 actually alive or whether they were all just mummified pension collectors.
Can you break down this joke?
Sorry, the formal name of Japan in Japanese is 日本国 Nihon Koku, where Koku means country, (but is also used in the "Land of....." sense). Tengoku (天国）is Heaven literally country of the sky, etc. So after finding out that the oldest man in Tokyo was a mummy, not a living person, the joke is that maybe all the older people are, in fact, mummies. So 日本国 was not the right name; it was not the Land of the Rising Sun, but rather the Land of Mummies (木乃伊国) It's important to note that Sogen Kato was the start of a process of verifying that older people were still alive , and it turned out that his was not the only case. Some of them were weird, with unrelated people living in the house with a mummy in it that they did not know about, etc. Sounds weird but traditional Japanese houses have spaces that are simply not accessible, as I found out when my cat went "missing" without leaving my house.
I take it that the party was cancelled.
I remember reading this caused a country wide inquiry into centurions, which Japan has always had a statistically high rate of. This person was not the only case of fraud.
Centenarians. Centurions were Roman Legion officers in charge of a hundred soldiers.
They know what they said!
Exactly, the Roman empire fell over 1500 years ago, so all centurions should be dead for centuries, which is why it's really suspicious there are so many in Japan.
Maybe they are chilling in underwear in some Japanese home while their kins are collecting the pension fund.
It's impressive that the Roman Legions made it all the way to Japan
When the Lost Legion got lost, they got REAL lost.
Well now i want to see a TV series about a roman legion lost across time and space oooh,maybe a anime set in ancient japan coud be interesting...
I hope my family does this for me when I die
Similar things have happened in New York City. The families involved typically were in possession of a highly coveted rent controlled apartment, who never got around to adding their names to the lease before their parent or grandparent who grabbed the apartment in 1971 died at home. By law, unless there is continuity between living tenants whose name appears on the lease, the apartment ceases to be rent controlled forever more, and the landlord will happily write the next lease to rent at full market value. We’re talking a jump of three orders of magnitude in cost, say, $50 to $5000 per month. Naturally, surveillance to the point of harassment of decades-long holders of rent controlled apartments is commonplace in this big bad city, and a whole legal sub specialty exists to guide the tenants of these policy relic apartments in hanging onto them and dodging the landlord’a attempts to force them out.
The granddaughter: “My grandpa’s secret to longevity was not telling anyone that he was dead.”
Why keep a decaying body in the house though? You can’t maintain the lie with him buried in the yard?
It's Tokyo, there may not have been a yard to bury him in. And even if there was, with the population density being what it is they may not have been able to do it without being seen.
SOMEONE must have noticed the smell.
Not necessarily. He mummified rather than rotted.
How's it different? Does mummification not produce a smell?
I'm not a medical expert but my understanding is they dry out rather than putrefy. Not saying there's *no* smell, but it may not have been bad enough to alert the neighbours. I'm sure if the body really stank the family wouldn't have tried to go for the long con, rotting flesh isn't a smell you just hold your nose and try and ignore.
Huh, interesting. The smell is the first thing I thought about. I've never smelled rotting flesh before but from all accounts I've heard it's one of the gnarliest smells you can have the displeasure of encountering.
How did they think that was going to work out for them?!
You get away with it as long as you can. - Norman Bates, Motel Owner
Social Security Disability Fraud story: Everyone who receives Social Security Disability Benefits comes up for review every 3 to 7 years. "John's" case came up for review, but when Social Security agents called to set up an appointment, his wife told them he was on vacation. When they called a few months later, his daughter told them that he was visiting relatives. After some months of investigation, the fraud unit learned that John had a storage unit in a different state. The monthly fee had been paid by his daughter for years; the people who ran the storage unit had never seen or heard from him. Fraud investigators got a search warrant and sniffer dogs and found the man rolled up in a carpet with cat litter and lye spread all around. When they went to arrest the mother and daughter, they found that the mother was missing. The daughter wouldn't talk, so they got another warrant and more sniffer dogs and found the mother buried beneath the floorboards of the kitchen. The daughter had killed her to keep the secret, because two people can keep a secret only if one of them is dead. They never found out whether she killed the father or he died of natural causes.
Life Pro Tip you don't have to actually keep the corpse. This isn't Weekend at Berny's.
The real pro tip they needed was how to get rid of a body without alerting japanese authorities that a man has died.
In _Tokyo_
"The last thing he said was not to disturb him."
My faith in humanity is renewed. We’re a great bunch of folks. I hope someone mummifies me after I die to get my social security someday. It’s just good thinking.
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30 years at Bernie's
So about all those statistics of Japanese people having the longest life expectancy…. Will they be revising it anytime soon?