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102-year-old spearchucker featured in London Times

Reporting from Japan on the longevity of folks there, a British writer has a nice story that opens with this: “Like most outstanding athletes, Takashi Shimokawara has an unvaryingly strict regimen of training and exercise. It begins before breakfast with stretches and bends. A brief jog is followed by press-ups, squat thrusts and horizontal leg raises. . . . It is this discipline that has won him two world records in the past year, in shot put and javelin, and he hopes to add another for discus next year. There is one fact, however, that elevates these achievements from the impressive to the extraordinary: Mr Shimokawara is 102 years old.” Takashi beat the late John Whittemore’s M100 record of 5.98 (19-7), set at the Club West masters meet in Santa Barbara, Calif., back in October 2000.

Here’s The Times story, in case the link dies:

Centenarian athletes and aged porn stars: the tip of Japan’s demographic iceberg
Richard Lloyd Parry in Kamaishi, Japan
Like most outstanding athletes, Takashi Shimokawara has an unvaryingly strict regimen of training and exercise. It begins before breakfast with stretches and bends. A brief jog is followed by press-ups, squat thrusts and horizontal leg raises.
Rain or sun, Mr Shimokawara sticks to his routine, at the municipal stadium or around his home town of Kamaishi, northeastern Japan. It is this discipline that has won him two world records in the past year, in shot put and javelin, and he hopes to add another for discus next year.
There is one fact, however, that elevates these achievements from the impressive to the extraordinary: Mr Shimokawara is 102 years old.
Born eight years before the First World War, he has outlived all of his contemporaries and two of his six children. One of his eight great-grandchildren is more than a century younger than him. And yet, only four years ago, he took up athletics.
He competes, literally, in a class of his own: M-100, for athletes in their 11th decade of life. His record throw of 12.75 metres, at the Japan Masters Athletics championship in June, shattered the world centenarian javelin record formerly held by an American.
As Japanese live longer and the number of centenarians rises to new levels, a new elite class is emerging: the Super Elderlies, or Genkinarians (from the word genki, meaning healthy and lively). In the arts, medicine, scholarship and, most strikingly of all, in sport, a small number of extremely old Japanese are not only keeping their heads above water, but surging forward.
The head of one of Tokyo’s leading hospitals, St Luke’s, is the 97-year-old Shigeaki Hinohara. The world’s oldest television newsreader is a 105-year-old lady named Shino Mori, who hosts a local show in Japan’s remote southern Amakusa Islands along with two sprightly younger colleagues of 92 and 84.
Kazuo Ono, 101, the co-founder of the avant-garde butoh dance school, still performs from time to time in a wheelchair.
In a different artistic genre, there is Shigeo Tokuda, 73, the male star of 350 pornographic films, including Maniac Training of Lolitas and Forbidden Elderly Care. The porn business’s oldest talent, Yoshiaki Yasuda, 90, had to retire a few years ago after a career-wrecking back injury.
All of these people, in their different ways, are exceptional – but in 21st-century Japan, reaching the age of 100 is no longer the miracle that it used to be.
In 1950 there were 97 Japanese centenarians. This year there were 36,726; 30,000 of them women. In the financial year ending next March, a total of 20,000 Japanese will have received a congratulatory letter from the Prime Minister (the Japanese equivalent of a telegram from the Queen).
Longevity in Japan is notably more pronounced in the countryside and in small towns such as Kamaishi, where the pace of life is less stressful than in the metropolis. The traditional Japanese diet – rich in fish and lightly cooked vegetables and low in fat – has much to do with it. Mr Shimokawara, however, still enjoys a glass of saké with meals, and until the age of 80 he smoked a packet of cigarettes a day.
“The most important thing of all is to stay supple and flexible,” he says. “The moment you will be most stiff is when you die – you never get stiffer than that. So you’ve got to sleep well, eat well and keep moving.”
The problem is that, as more Japanese live longer and claim pensions, the young are having fewer children, which means fewer workers to pay the taxes that fund the old-age pension. In the long term, the books simply cannot be balanced.
However inspiring their individual examples may be, the Genkinarians represent the tip of a demographic iceberg that threatens to pierce the Japanese economic ship below the waterline.
“It is amazing that Japanese live so long – and it is also frightening,” says Mr Shimokawara. “Japan is the first. There’s no other country where this is happening so quickly. And no one knows what kind of country it will turn out to be.”

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