
The Myth of Japanese Longevity - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-myth-of-japanese-longevity.html
======
tokenadult
Necessary context for this article can be found in an earlier Hacker News
comment

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734>

by another participant on an earlier article from the same blog:

> > It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a
> blog entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of
> 2012. You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they
> included a desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were
> sensationalized and thinly researched [1] produced with a pace that ensures
> discredited theories dont get reviewed.

[1] [http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-
stop-h...](http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2013/02/drug-companies-stop-hiding-
your-data.html%E3%80%80)

> Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen
> anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

<https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog>

That was followed up by another set of comments:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5240084>

> I'm beginning to flag these posts.

I agree.

~~~
aaron695
Good links. Looking at past posts some are a little out there (Read crazy
conspiracy theories)

Shame, it's an interesting idea. Could we be mistaken and the Japanese don't
live longer. I believe similar mistakes are happening in blue zone theory.

But I'm a firm believer that some people can just can make a good argument
about anything.

So if they have been very wrong in the past, or very wrong in part of their
argument then I take it as now they are wrong and just making a good argument
that's fooling my flawed brain.

~~~
Executor
Oh noes, conspiracy-related posts. Closing the tabs to his site right away...
or not.

------
icegreentea
Randomly plugging numbers. Say there are like 250,000 'undead' people. Say
that on average they've been on dead for average of 50 years (crazy! I know!).
This works out to an extra 12.5 million years of life. There are 127 million
Japanese. If we assume average life expectancy of like 70 years, works out to
8.9 billion years of life. If we drop those 12.5 million or so years that
don't exist... we're still at like 8.9 billion years.

~~~
alexpeattie
It's true that the 'undead' wouldn't skew the mean life span much. But given
the way life expectancy is calculated
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy>), it ends up being closer to
median life span - so an overstated number of centenarians (people over 100)
could significantly skew things.

And it's worth noting that while other developed nations are close to Japan in
terms of life expectancy, they're WAY behind in terms of number of
centenarians. Switzerland for example has an average life expectancy of 81.8
years, vs. Japan's 82.7. But Japan supposedly has 3.5x as many centenarians
per capita
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Centenarian_populat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centenarian#Centenarian_populations_by_country)).

~~~
pigou
> it ends up being closer to median life span - so an overstated number of
> centenarians (people over 100) could significantly skew things.

Could you elaborate? Isn't the median always _less_ sensitive to outliers
compared to the mean?

~~~
Dove
Not _always_ , no. They measure different things and fail in different ways.

Take the dataset [7, 8, 9], with a median and mean of 8. Adding a 100 to the
set results in a median of 8.5 and a mean of 31, so the mean moves much
farther. This is probably the effect you're thinking of: the mean can take
extreme values into account "too much".

But I can also make the median move more. Take the dataset [0, 50, 100]. The
median and mean are both 50. If I add [100, 100] to it so it becomes [0, 50,
100, 100, 100], the mean moves to only 70, but the median moves all the way up
to 100! There was a "gap" in the numerical sequence that the median could jump
over, but the mean couldn't.

Here's a different way of moving the median further. Take the dataset [1, 1,
1, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5]. Bathtub-shaped data. As I add fives to the set,
the mean goes 3, 3.17, 3.3. But the median goes 3, 3.5, 4! Medians move past
thin spots in distributions very quickly.

Mean is sensitive to distant outliers; median is sensitive to unevenly
distributed data and numerical gaps.

To come back on topic, while I don't have a reference for the age-at-death
distribution, I _think_ it's bathtub-shaped. Hence, the median might be more
sensitive to extra values at the top than the mean would be.

~~~
pigou
While those are interesting counterexamples, they don't come close to modeling
a realistic "age-at-death" distribution. There isn't any such distribution
whose median would be significantly skewed by a tiny minority of centenarian
outliers. These distributions are basically unimodal with the exception of a
some degree of infant mortality, and the average (median or mean) is not
located at a thin spot in the distribution (quite the opposite) [1].

[1]
[http://www.longevitas.co.uk/site/informationmatrix/mortality...](http://www.longevitas.co.uk/site/informationmatrix/mortalitytransformation.html)

~~~
Dove
Ah! Thank you! I had the most miserable time trying to google for that exact
graph.

------
dbul
This is unbelievable: it looks like they are faking child births, too! The
rate is up a whopping 15%.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20120203092942/https://www.cia.go...](http://web.archive.org/web/20120203092942/https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-
world-factbook/geos/ja.html)

[https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/...](https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-
factbook/geos/ja.html)

Also, from my experience smoking seems to be rare both in Tokyo and the
countryside, so I'd like the see some statistics about Japanese being "smoking
fiends" before I assertTrue().

~~~
doctorstupid
Rare in Tokyo? Are you kidding? They even have public smoking booths so that
people can smoke in otherwise restricted areas.

~~~
wahnfrieden
He was maybe confused since it's now forbidden to smoke in many large public
areas outside of confined spaces marked off for smoking, like the areas around
train stations. There's less smoking-and-walking in general.

~~~
jim_h
From my understanding and observations when I visited Japan for a couple of
weeks, Japanese people don't eat/drink/smoke while walking. Even for outside
vendors, they will eat it on a nearby bench or stand and eat it before moving
again.

I did see smokers often in the smoking areas. More than I see in NYC.

~~~
Zircom
>Japanese people don't eat/drink/smoke while walking.

What about all those Japanese schoolgirls that run to school with a piece of
toast hanging out of their mouths because they overslept?

------
standeven
This article is sensationalist and false. If one reads the CBS page linked
from the article
([http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/10/world/main6853038....](http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/09/10/world/main6853038.shtml)),
we find the following:

"An official at the Health Ministry's statistics bureau said Friday's survey
does not change Japan's status as a fast-aging nation because life expectancy
calculations are not based on family registration records."

~~~
codexon
If it isn't based on family registration records then what is it based on?

If there's one thing people know about the Japanese, it is how much they like
to save face.

------
D9u
Methinks that the page has been defaced. This is what I saw when I opened the
link: <http://i.imgur.com/WHHxE7n.png> NSFW

Viewing the page source shows the following as the background image:
[http://www.blogblog.com/1kt/watermark/body_background_birds....](http://www.blogblog.com/1kt/watermark/body_background_birds.png)
NSFW

Interestingly, the same page, viewed in xombrero, shows nothing amiss.

Yet in Chromium, the following is what I see when I load the background image
as linked to in the page source: <http://i.imgur.com/kJ5veiA.png> NSFW

I'm not the only one who sees it.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Methinks it's just you. When I visit the page, I see nothing of the kind. No
one else seems to have noticed the butt background either.

~~~
D9u
I have received verification from someone in Great Britain, that they also see
the butt background.

~~~
lambda
Are you on an usecured wifi network or something?

Because I see no such background. I feel like maybe you are being MITMed.

~~~
D9u
My connection is as secure as T-Mobile makes their "4G Mobile Hotspot."

The fact that an acquaintance in England (I'm in Hawaii) also saw the x-rated
background leads me to believe that something else is going on with this page.

------
iyulaev
Weak article. They assert there is a problem with the data, point out at least
one flaw, conclude that the entire data set is wrong and then attempt to draw
conclusions from it. The author seems to be trying to use negative evidence,
i.e. induction, to prove something, like in the following example:

Argument: The average age of a population is 10.

Counter-argument: At least on one of the numbers is greater than it should be.

Conclusion: The average age of a population is 8.

~~~
rm999
The meat of the article is:

> _the fact that there are 234,000 unrecorded deaths in the Japanese
> population means the often-touted life-expectancy figure of 82 years for
> Japan now has to be considered suspect_

Not sure how you can argue against that reasoning unless you can show Japan's
life expectancy calculations have nothing to do with official estimates of how
many people are currently older than 100 (which is possible).

Your example doesn't follow the spirit of their argument at all. They aren't
proposing their own average, and their evidence involves far more than one
data point.

~~~
iyulaev
The headline of the article is proposing an average, though. By saying "the
myth of x" they insist that x is false. In this case, this is equivalent to
asserting that Japanese life expectancy is not above the average in Western
nations. Seems like simply a case of a misleading or exaggerated headline.

~~~
crazcarl
I think your conclusion should be re-stated as

Conclusion: The average age of a population is less than 10.

Which would be true if the counter-argument was found to be correct, would it
not?

------
mitchi
" Sogen Kato, Tokyo's oldest man, as found on his 111th birthday. Kato did not
respond to our requests for an interview. "

hidden joke. I'm glad I caught it.

~~~
D9u
There's something fishy going on with the page.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326345>

------
rikacomet
No this is not entirely true. The Kyoto region of Japan, was a subject of
survey sometime back, I can assure you that I read it myself, and it included
few more regions of the world proven by a UN collaborated study.

That study is mentioned here: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercentenarian>

also, see the verified records <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_people>

A extended list: <http://www.grg.org/Adams/E.HTM>

Publications: <http://www.supercentenarians.org/publications.htm>

------
Someone
_"CIA's web page on Japan's death rate shows Japanese mortality as having
dropped by 10% in one year, in 2012"_

10% sounds like a lot to me, but that 2011 earthquake/tsunami will have caused
a peak in death rate. Likely, there also was a stress related peak outside the
directly affected areas. That peak would be followed by a through, just like
one sees elsewhere after a hot summer or harsh winter
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_displacement>)

Ten percent fewer deaths would be, I guess, about 60,000 'excess' deaths in
the year of the tsunami and 60,000 fewer in the next year. Does anybody know
whether that would be feasible?

~~~
sskates
The number of deaths from the tsunami is listed at about 16k
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_T%C5%8Dhoku_earthquake_and_tsunami)).
I'm surprised it was so high, but in general deaths from natural disasters are
low in number, compared to regular things people die from like disease in old
age.

~~~
Someone
That is the number of direct victims. My point is that there will have been
people (elderly or otherwise physically weaker) who died a few weeks/months
earlier than they would have if that earthquake hadn't struck, for example
because they got a heart attack worrying whether their grandchildren survived.

Such deaths both increase mortality in 2011 and decrease it in some time
later.

------
zwieback
What's interesting to me isn't the fraud but the fact that the fraudsters keep
the dead people around. Why not bury them in secret?

~~~
unsignedint
They are more likely living in somewhere relatively dense in population, and
it is easy for people to take notice something weird going on with noise, and
more often, report of odors afterward. (Unless they go out somewhere in the
middle of the mountain, which happens; not everyone having a car can make this
challenging option.)

Another factor is their mindset, too. While most of Japanese are not
religious, they do follow certain cultural customs from Buddism and Shintoism,
etc.

~~~
monochromatic
> report of odors afterward

... which is one of the big reasons I'd expect them to get rid of the bodies
instead of keeping them around.

~~~
unsignedint
Actually, I've heard a many cases of Japanese news that reveals the existence
of the body in the ground because someone buried the body in their yard or in
the ground under their house, etc. I'd still think it'd be challenging (and
probably very unpleasing) to do the same while they are in possession, but at
least they can have some effort of it contained.

------
gngeal
That's hardly new, the Japanese have known for quite some time that their
records about the elderly are "a little bit" off.

~~~
kyllo
It's new to western media though. There are countless articles floating around
about Japanese longevity, attempting to connect it to diet and exercise,
oblivious of this pension fraud factor:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/30/japan-life-
expec...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/30/japan-life-expectancy-
factors)

[http://abcnews.go.com/Health/key-longevity-chatting-
japans-c...](http://abcnews.go.com/Health/key-longevity-chatting-japans-
centenarians/story?id=7382776)

[http://observer.com/2010/08/revealed-the-secret-of-
japanese-...](http://observer.com/2010/08/revealed-the-secret-of-japanese-
longevity/)

[http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2011/may2011_The-Little-
Known...](http://www.lef.org/magazine/mag2011/may2011_The-Little-Known-
Longevity-Factor-in-the-Japanese-Diet_01.htm)

And there have even been funded studies and papers published in medical
journals about this!: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18924533>

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Just because there's welfare fraud in Japan doesn't mean their life expectancy
can't still be higher than in other countries. Also, let's not pretend there's
no welfare fraud in other countries.

~~~
Spooky23
Tax fraud too. I rented a house in 2002 from a man who died in 1988.

------
unsignedint
While this article makes it somewhat sensationalistic linking it to welfare
fraud, perhaps, the majority of "unregistered deaths" are the ones dying
alone.

There are so many cases in Japan that people die alone, and people not
noticing it until their neighbors reports unusual odors, which may or may not
happen. (although census should supposed to be catching that...)

------
parsnips
Our medicare/medicaid scam artists have a thing or two to learn.

------
zosima
From the linked article in the OP:

"An official at the Health Ministry's statistics bureau said Friday's survey
does not change Japan's status as a fast-aging nation because life expectancy
calculations are not based on family registration records."

Move on, nothing to see here.

20/~100 of the verified oldest people were japanese according to

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_peo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_verified_oldest_people)

That's a handsome statistic right there.

------
jeffdavis
Interesting. Sounds almost like a conspiracy though, it would be nice to see
some confirmation. If it's true, then a lot of government numbers will need to
be updated, and it could have impact on health studies.

~~~
netrus
It's known for some years:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html?_r...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/asia/15japan.html?_r=0).

------
Tsagadai
It is bunk that Japan is known for good bookkeeping. Some large Japanese
financials are still using paper-based risk assessment and transactions. Some
are losing millions of dollars each month to human error.

------
stcredzero
Is there some sort of campaign against the Japanese healthcare system now?

------
Anil-Shrestha
Wow!! Shocked!!!

------
brownbat
Maybe, maybe not.

The top cause of death in Japan is Amyloidosis:

<http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ja-japan/mor-mortality>

Amyloidosis, in case you're wondering, is a protein disorder most commonly
found in super-centarians (people 110 years old or older):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amyloidosis>

So not only are the welfare fraudsters great at hacking the social support
system without getting caught, they're also really knowledgeable about arcane
disease patterns in super-centarians, just to give their lie that extra ring
of truth once they decide to finally leave the dole. And... somehow... they're
conning medical professionals into reporting this as a cause of death for
mummified elders.

While a large number on the face of it, I'm not even convinced 230,000 missing
elderly is statistically significant given the size of the population. [1]

I usually give articles a stronger benefit of the doubt, but this is from the
site that's arguing that lung cancer isn't really related to smoking, and
questionable claims about the causes of autism.[2]

Now I'm wondering, is the blog's title an easter egg? Is the whole point to
just take some crazy proposition and see how many people will buy it? Is this
entire blog just trolling the internet?

[1] EDIT: Someone ran the numbers, thanks icegreentea
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5326622>

[2] Hacker News discussions raised interesting counterpoints, questioning
large gaps reasoning in previous pieces:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196579>

Perhaps the best comment: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5196734>

"It appears you've made some sort of resolution to publish and promote a blog
entry per day in 2013. 40 entries in 41 days this year vs. 46 in all of 2012.
You should reconsider - whatever your reasons were, I doubt they included a
desire to develop a reputation for presenting topics that were sensationalized
and thinly researched produced with a pace that ensures discredited theories
dont get reviewed."

~~~
monochromatic
Umm, look more closely at your link. Amyloidosis is only "top" because the
list is alphabetical.

~~~
brownbat
So... what I said about it being "top" was technically correct, no?

Jk, good catch, monochromatic.

I'd like to say I wouldn't be making such sloppy errors if assertTrue() hasn't
been engaged in this series of nutty claims recently, but that's probably
giving myself too much credit.

Thanks for keeping me honest.

