Tomiko Itooka was still mountaineering when she was over 70 and climbed the 3,067-meter-high Ontake in Japan – in sneakers.
A 116-year-old Japanese woman is named the oldest person in the world by the Guinness Book of Records.
The U.S.-based Gerontology Research Group announced Wednesday that former mountaineer Tomiko Itooka, born on May 23, 1908, would take over the title.
Itooka was the next contender for the record after Spaniard Maria Branyas Morera died on Tuesday at the age of 117 in a nursing home in Catalonia, her family said.
The Gerontology Research Group (GRG) is pleased to announce that Ms. Tomiko Itooka from Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, 🇯🇵 Japan, born on May 23, 1908, age 116, is a candidate for the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS. @GWR Title “Oldest person in the world”. https://t.co/W4xiEvpXc9 pic.twitter.com/z4fdZaJHin
— Gerontology Research Group (GRG) (@GerontologyGrg) 20 August 2024
Itooka, a resident of the western Japanese city of Ashiya in Hyogo Prefecture, was born 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 children was still climbing when she was over 70 and scaled the 3,067-meter-high Ontake in Japan twice. She surprised her guide by climbing the mountain in sneakers instead of hiking boots.
At the age of 100, she walked up the long stone steps of Japan’s Ashiya Shrine without a cane, said the group, which claims to have the “world’s largest database of supercentenarians.”
The previous record holder, Branyas, who had lived through the 1918 flu, two world wars and the Spanish Civil War, contracted COVID-19 in 2020, just weeks after her 113th birthday, but made a full recovery.
The US-born woman 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 recognized Branyas as the world’s oldest person in January 2023, following the death of French nun Lucile Randon at the age of 118.
The oldest documented person was the Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.
