Japanese Elders

Where have all Japan's elders gone? Apparently, they are not still all alive as statistics and their children would have you believe. Thousands of centenarians cannot be located, fueling fears that families are hiding deaths of elderly relatives in pension schemes.
More than 230,000 Japanese people listed as 100 years old cannot be located and many may have died decades ago, according to a government survey released Friday.
It seems that more than 77,000 people listed as still alive in local government records would have to be aged at least 120, and 884 would be 150 or older.
The figures have exposed antiquated methods of record keeping and fuelled fears that some families are deliberately hiding the deaths of elderly relatives in order to claim their pensions.
This exposes two problems: one that I have always claimed is the problem with tracing young children. There are no records of them if they do not work. If they leave a school, no one traces where they go to. Authorities wait to hear from the next school and if the family leaves the country there is no traceability. Well, apparently the same problem must exist with the elderly, if they no longer work there are few records of them unless someone takes the time to let authorities know that there has been a change. The other problem that I see among my students is that their parents work very hard and as a result have little time for their children. These children who were ignored as children will in many cases react the same way with their parents and ignore them as they get older. This is what happened in Japan, their parents worked very hard after the war to the determint of their children.
This case of missing elders makes you wonder how many other things are hidden or ignored as people do not post things with authorities, the official record keepers.