World's oldest person dies in Japan at 116

Jiroemon Kimura, world’s oldest person dies in Japan at 116

By Lindsay Jolivet | Daily Buzz – 7 hours ago

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When Japan's Jiroemon Kimura was born in 1897, Mitsubishi was still two decades away from manufacturing the country's first passenger car. In Canada, the Klondike Gold Rush drew fortune-seekers to the Yukon in droves.

On Wednesday, after more than 116 years that saw the turn of two centuries, Kimura died in Kyotango, Kyoto of natural causes. He held the record of the oldest man ever to have lived, Guinness World Records said in a statement.

[ Related: World's oldest person dies at 116 in Japan ]
Kimura was a retired postal worker, according to Guinness. The world record body named him the oldest man who ever lived in 2012, adding to his record as the oldest living person.

Craig Glenday, the editor-in-chief of Guinness World Records, published a note about Kimura, saying the elderly man welcomed him into his home this fall when he delivered the world record certificates.

"He was alert and sharp, and even spoke a few words of English he'd learned specially for my visit," the statement says.
Those words were "Thank you very much."
Another Japanese, Misao Okawa, is now the oldest living person at 115-years-old, according to Guinness.
Glenday wrote that only seven other confirmed people have lived to 116 and only four have lived to the age of 117. Those older than Kimura were all women, including the oldest person who ever lived, Jeanne Louise Calment, according to Guinness. Calment died in 1997 at the age of 122.
[ Related: 105-year-old New Zealand man still loves to drive the open road ]
The account of her record says that when she turned 120, someone asked what kind of future she expected.
"A very short one," she replied.
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