My name is Tom. I was born in China but I am now living in the United States.
I have been following the GRG since about 2006 or so and started tracking Japanese supercentenarians in 2007. My first validated case for the GRG was in 2008. Although I do not speak Japanese, my knowledge of Chinese allows me to understand written Japanese to a limited extent. Since then, I've been monitoring news reports about Japanese supercentenarians, and I've also searched on the web for any information available on them. In recent years, however, there have been several developments which have frustrated me on this front:
-Japan stopped publishing comprehensive lists of their oldest people after 2006, which forces me to track cases individually in the news.
-Major newspapers such as Mainichi (which is/was a major source of news stories/obituaries for Japanese supercentenarians) now require registration to read articles, and they apparently don't allow people who live outside of Japan to register.
-Some newspapers either do not publish their articles online or are not indexed by Google Search and/or Google News, which increases the likelihood of a news report and/or obituary being unnoticed by me.
-During the first several years I reported to the GRG, all people who reported Japanese cases to the GRG were based outside Japan.
Now, I am happy that we finally have people from inside Japan who are actively reporting Japanese supercentenarian cases to the GRG, and who have also been actively investigating past cases to fill in the blanks on names, birth dates, death dates, etc. If some day we can take it a step further and obtain actual documents for each supercentenarian, that would make things even more watertight (remember, the Kamato Hongo case was thrown into doubt once actual documents were obtained and examined by researchers).
