Oldest man in history dies at age 116

Oldest man in history dies at age 116

Tokyo: Japan's Jiroemon Kimura, recognised by Guinness World Records as the oldest man in recorded history, has died at the age of 116.

Kimura died of natural causes in the hospital in his hometown of Kyotango, western Japan, at 2.08am on Thursday, the local government said.

Jiroemon Kimura: was the last man alive to have been born in the 19th century.

Jiroemon Kimura: was the last man alive to have been born in the 19th century.Credit:AP

A date for his funeral is yet to be set.

Born on April 19, 1897, when Queen Victoria still reigned over the British Empire, Kimura dodged childhood killers such as tuberculosis and pneumonia that kept life expectancy in Japan to 44 years around the time of his birth. He became the oldest man in recorded history on December 28, 2012, at the age of 115 years and 253 days. The oldest woman in recorded history, France's Jeanne Calment, died in 1997 at the age of 122.


"He has an amazingly strong will to live," Kimura's nephew Tamotsu Miyake, 80, said in an interview in December. "He is strongly confident that he lives right and well."

Kimura was also the world's oldest living person. That title now goes to Misao Okawa of Japan, who was born on March 5, 1898, according to a list of the world's oldest people compiled by the Los Angeles-based Gerontology Research Group at UCLA. The previous record-holder for male longevity, Christian Mortensen of California, died in 1998 at the age of 115 years and 252 days.



Born in the 30th year of Japan's Meiji era, Kimura was only the third man in history to reach 115 years of age, according to Guinness. He was one of just four male supercentenarians, or people 110 years or older, known to be alive as of December, Guinness said at the time.


Only two years earlier, Japan's success in the First Sino-Japanese War had established the nation as the dominant power in East Asia. Kimura was 6 years old when Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic first flight in a powered aircraft in North Carolina.



As his wife's family didn't have a male heir, he changed his name to Jiroemon Kimura, making him the ninth person in the family to bear the name. After retiring, he enjoyed reading newspapers and watching sumo wrestling on television. He sometimes helped his son farm until he was about 90 years old, his grandson's widow, Eiko Kimura, said in an interview in December.


His wife, Yae, died in 1978 at the age of 74. Four of Kimura's five siblings lived to be more than 90 years old, and his youngest brother, Tetsuo, died at 100, Miyake said.

Kimura lived with Eiko in a two-story wooden house he built in the 1960s. He never suffered from serious diseases, was still able to communicate and spent most of his time in bed, Eiko said in December.




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