A crowd of police officers stack up on a
door in a small cramped household in Tokyo.
They finally crack the door and peer inside, a
vicious aura emanating from the back of the room.
They slowly enter, watching for movement when they find him.
Laid under a thin blanket on his bed, wearing
nothing but a pair of long underwear, the mummified
remains of Kato Sogen rests silently as the grave.
On a bedside table next to the corpse
lies a small packet of yellowed pages.
A newspaper dated back to 1978.
A thick veneer of dust settles across every surface,
and motes dance in the air as officers slowly begin to
shift Kato from his resting place for the last 30 years.
Why would a family seal their grandfather away,
alone in a room without food or water for 30 years?
How did he become mummified, and how did
the Japanese government never find out?
This is the story of how a Buddhist mummy uncovered
the disappearance of over 200,000 people, and the
drastic lengths we had to go to to get them back.
When Japanese government officials arrived at the Kato household to
pay aged patriarch Kato Sogen a visit for upcoming “Respect for the
Aged Day” in September 18th, they were surprised when his 53-year old
granddaughter, Tokimi, turned them away, saying “My grandfather is well,
but he’s refused to meet with anyone.” The officials were confused.
As of that day, the elder Kato was the oldest person in Tokyo.
Wouldn’t he and his family want to celebrate this momentous occasion?
Kato Sogen was born in 1899.
At that time, the car had only just been invented, and human
flight was still the fever dream of a handful of naive idealists.
By his 111st birthday in 2010, humans
had been living in space for 10 years.
Time is both incomprehensibly long, and blinkingly short.
Days later, on the 28th of July, Tokimi approached police admitting
that her grandfather had been dead for many years already.
This stumped the police even more, what do you mean he’s dead already?
Sogen lived with his wife, daughter, 81, along with her husband,
and their two children, but one day he, quote, “shut himself in
a first-floor room about 30 years ago in line with his Buddhist
doctrines, refusing to take food or water.” according to Tokimi.
He was apparently trying to become a Sokushinbutsu, the
result of an ancient Buddhist methodology of meditation
so deep, that the practitioner becomes mummified alive.
The rest of the family never bothered to break
into his room to ensure he was still alive.
Tokimi continued telling the police, “When we looked inside the room
in March this year, we saw the skeletal remains of our grandfather”.
When police were finally able to enter the room,
they found Sogen just like Tokimi had described.
He was wearing a pair of long underwear
and laid tucked under a blanket on his bed.
Next to him, on his bedside table, still
unread, was a magazine dated back to 1978.
With this evidence police began investigating the Kato
family for fraud charges on suspicion that they’d been
collecting pension money in Sogen’s name for the past 6 years.
A month later, a criminal complaint was filed against the
patriarch’s daughter, Michiko, and his granddaughter, Tokimi
by the Japan Mutual Aid Association of Public School Teachers.
They claimed that the two illegally took pension money that
would have been payable to Sogen’s as a widower, since his late
wife, a former teacher, died back in 2004 The fraud was valued
at the time up to over 9.5 million Yen, or 100,000 US dollars.
With a further 2.7 million yen, the equivalent
of 31,000 USD was drawn in just the past month.
Then on Friday August 27th, Japanese police
arrested Michiko and Tokimi for fraud.
Months later, the Tokyo District Court sentenced Tokimi
to two and a half years in prison, but the judge presiding
over the case, Hajime Shimada, suspended the jail time for 4
years, saying that “The defendant committed a malicious crime
with the selfish motive of securing revenue for her family.
However, she has paid back the pension
benefits and expressed remorse for the crime.”
While the claim that the Kato patriarch was attempting to become a
Sokushinbutsu was clearly an attempt to throw off the police from
their fraudulent activity, the case drew attention to a little known
Buddhist rite in which monks turn themselves into “living Buddhas”.
But what is a sokushinbutsu?
The word translates to “a Buddha in this very body”, and refers
to a specific Japanese form of self-inflicted mummification.
The practice originated from the Shingon
Buddhists in the mountains of Yamagata prefecture.
To become a Sokushinbutsu, monks emulate the techniques
of a ninth-century monk named Kūkai, posthumously known
as the Kōbō Daishi, who founded the Shingon school in 806.
According to his writings, after achieving Sokushinbutsu, he intended
to return in 5.67 million years to deliver the rest of us to Nirvana.
The story comes from a biography written about 300 years later that
claimed that Kūkai, instead of dying of natural causes, instead
entered a state of deep meditation in his tomb called nyūjō,
basically meditation so deep it may as well be a living death.
The climate of Japan isn’t suited for the natural formation of mummies.
The country has no peat bogs, arid deserts, or mountain
peaks permanently ensconced in ice to dehydrate and
preserve carcasses of both human and animal nature.
So hardline Japanese Buddhists intent on
mummification had to make do in their own way.
The practice of self mummification isn’t only seen in
Japan, however, Japanese monks are believed to be the
only ones to trigger their own deaths via starvation.
That said, researchers think we’ve found another self-mummified
monk in the Himalayas, and it even still has teeth!
You may even be familiar with a recent discovery
in the Dutch town of Amersfoort in 2014.
A thousands of years old statue of the Buddha that had long been known
to house a mummified monk on loan from China to the Drents Museum
in the Netherlands was taken to a hospital to fully scan its inside.
When they finally peered past the gold-plated outer layer
of the statue using a CT scanner, they weren’t surprised to
find the fully preserved mummified corpse— thought to be of
Buddhist master Liu Quan, who was a member of the Chinese
Meditation School circa 1100 AD sitting in the lotus position.
What they were surprised to find was that the monk’s organs
had been removed and replaced with strips of paper featuring
spells and mantras suggesting he was mummified after death.
About 17 monks between 1081 and 1903 managed
to successfully mummify themselves in life.
The first recorded attempt was by a man named Shōjin,
who buried himself alive in hopes that he would
return like Kūkai to help deliver souls to Nirvana.
Unfortunately, when Shojin’s acolytes came back to
recover his body, they found that he had not succeeded.
His body had begun to decay.
It wouldn’t be another two hundred years until
someone could successfully mummify themselves
and, in their philosophy, finally cheat death.
The actual process was arduous.
It took a minimum of 3 years to complete, and required a diet
called mokujikigyō, directly translated as “tree-eating training”.
Monks would limit themselves to only nuts, roots, and buds from plants.
Basically anything you can forage on a mountain.
Some say that they might have also eaten
berries, bark from trees, and even pine needles.
After a cycle of 1000 days on the diet, monks were said to be ready for
nyūjō, but the majority did 2 or even 3 cycles before they were ready.
That’s over 8 years eating nothing but roots.
I’ll probably stick to metamucil.
After the final preparations were complete, the practitioner
would stop eating, and only drink a small amount of salt water,
while meditating and chanting mantras until their final breath.
When that breath was near, the monk would get his disciples
to put him into a bamboo box, lower him into a pit
three metres deep, pack charcoal around the lid, punch
a bamboo air hole, and then seal in their master alive.
After that, the monk would continue to meditate inside of the
tomb, ringing a bell now and then to show that he was still alive.
When the bell stopped ringing, the same disciples would
return, uncover his body to see if he’d died, and if
he had, they would rebury him for another 1000 days.
After that, he would be uncovered once
more to see if he’d begun to decompose.
If he hadn’t, he was now a sokushinbutsu,
and his body would become a shrine.
If he’d decomposed, they’d exorcise him
and rebury him with little celebration.
Their diet had all kinds of spiritual importance, but in
terms of mummification, it was brutal both for the body,
and also the bacteria and parasites that live on the body.
See, decomposition is driven by bacteria, so anything that makes the
body less hospitable to them increases the chances of mummification.
It’s also been suggested that monks would drink
tea from the Toxicodendron verniculum tree bark.
Also known as the Japanese lacquer tree, the plant
contains a toxic compound similar to poison ivy.
The consumption of this tea would have a double
purpose—one, it would kill them a little quicker, and
two, it continued to ravage the microbiota that cause
decomposition, ideally improving the chances of mummification.
It should be mentioned that the practice of becoming Sokushinbutsu
has been illegal in Japan since the Meiji restoration, around 1879.
The country wanted to modernise itself and emulate foreign
systems of government, and a culture of monks starving
themselves before climbing into their own graves, wasn’t
conducive to the new emperor’s plans for the country.
The Kato family claimed that Sogen had locked himself away to
become a Sokushinbutsu, but whether or not that is true, the
case shone a light on a little known inefficiency the Japanese
government was unaware of, or never had the political will to reform.
Following the story, the Japanese government
conducted a survey that found that as many as 230,000
centenarians, people aged 100 and above, were missing.
But how do you “lose” that many people?
The majority of the “lost” people were likely to have
either died of national disasters, or abroad, during war.
When Kato Sogen was found, those aged 65 and
up made up a quarter of Japan’s population.
In 2022, this aging population has risen to almost
30%, and we expect that number to hit 40% by 2050.
But still, this doesn’t answer the question of why the Japanese
government couldn’t seem to keep track of these elderly folks.
In 2010 about 20% of citizen records were still written on paper.
One ward in Tokyo had only finished
digitising their data that same year.
However, the main issue in Japan is an old
system of family recordkeeping called Koseki,
directly translated as “household register”.
Basically it’s a documentation system that is kept and maintained
by a single household, with information on every member of a
family, with details on major milestones that affect census data.
It’s all the documentation we have in one.
Birth, death, marriage, and divorce
certificates all combined into one form.
Oi Susumu, the section chief of Suginami Ward’s
records department says that “The koseki is your
ID, from cradle to grave, based on the family unit.
It's proof of your roots”
Huh, that’s catchy.
The register system based on households dates back
to the 19th century, and was originally used to
facilitate conscription, mandatory military service.
As long as citizens lived in the same households with extended families,
stayed put, and actually updated their registers, it worked perfectly.
Nowadays though, many young people live in single households
and may move far away from their home villages, even abroad.
Oi continues, saying “If no one in your family reports
births, deaths and marriage, these won't be recorded in
the koseki.” In other words, people begin to disappear.
What happens is a number of Japanese citizens, at least in the books,
living upwards of 150 years, with one man listed as old as 200!
The problem was clear.
“It's not feasible to physically check every single
elderly person in this ward,” said Suginami ward
head of senior citizens section, Wakui Yoshihisa.
“We now have 54,000 residents aged 75 and over.
So we need to monitor them indirectly.”
How do you track people indirectly?
The easiest way is to record their use of public
services, like health care and meals on wheels.
However, it’s not perfect, people will still fall through the cracks.
The only way to ensure that every person is accounted
for, is to issue personal, individualised identification
that is used to access government services.
Sodei Takako, gerontologist and professor emeritus at
Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, argued at the time of
Sogen Kato’s discovery, that it was time to switch to
an individual ID system, like many other countries.
"If the local government tried to find the whereabouts
of people over 70 or 75, the number of missing people
will be doubled or maybe sometimes three times.”
The worry was that unless the Koseki system is updated, and
an individual ID system is implemented, Japan's recent and
prolonged economic slow down will mean that more and more families
will be dependent on elderly members’ pensions to survive.
Unless something is done, then more deaths will be obscured
behind family registers, leaving more opportunities for fraud.
There’s good news though!
The Japanese government did implement an
individual ID system, called My Number, in 2015.
They even made a rabbit mascot named Maina-chan.
This individual ID system is only in its infancy, and the Koseki
system is still widely in use across Japan, so it’ll be hard
to tell if the change is making a significant difference in
helping the government avoid fraud and letting the dead rest.
The real number of centenarians was grossly exaggerated
in the old system, however there are still an awesome
amount of people over the age of 100 living in Japan.
In 2022, of a population of 125 million, that number hit 90,526.
A rate of 72 people over the age of 100 per 100,000 people.
Which is crazy if you consider that out of the US population of 336
million in 2021, there were 89,739 citizens over the age of 100.
A rate of only 26 people over the age of 100 per 100,000 people.
The US has over twice the population that Japan does, yet
they have the same number of individuals older than 100.
Canada, of a population of 38 million, only has 9,545 as of 2021.
We’ll get there someday!
And I’m doing my part, I’ll never die.
Interestingly enough, of those aged 100
and above, 80%, give or take, are women.
Isn’t that crazy?
Oh, and speaking of women, currently,
the oldest person in Japan is a woman!
Tatsumi Fusa at the ripe age of 115.
You go girl!
Japanese people are famed for their longevity.
They have low mortality rates from heart disease, breast cancer, and
prostate cancer likely due to their balanced diet, and high intake of
plants like soybeans and non sugar-sweetened drinks like green tea.
Japanese people also have low death rates from infectious and
cerebrovascular disease, as well as low mortality rates from pneumonia.
All of these things and more contribute to the
phenomenal life expectancy seen in Japanese citizens.
Unfortunately, a population that lives so long, coupled with a
system easily exploited, well, that’s how you lose 230,000 people.
Hopefully with the new ID system no more elderly Japanese citizens
will fall through the cracks, but as their population ages, and their
birth rate stagnates, the coming years will pose many challenges
for the Japanese government, and the Japanese people, to overcome.
Based on our last video about a man who
also died from tea, but not by choice...
We played a little game on Twitter, and congratulations!
Only 15% of you chose the tea of death!
The man in the video was assassinated, but the strange substance
in the tea had never been used as poison before in history.
And for good reason…