A Japanese woman who recently turned 116 and was a keen mountaineer will be named the world's oldest person by Guinness World Records after the previous record holder, 117-year-old Maria Branyas Morera of Spain, died Monday in a nursing home in Spain.
Tomiko Itooka, that's the woman's name, lives in Ashiya City, Hyogo Prefecture, and is the eldest of three brothers.
Itooka was born in Osaka on May 23, 1908, the year a long-distance radio message was first sent from the Eiffel Tower and the Wright brothers made their first demonstration flights in Europe and America.
She married at the age of 20 and is the mother of two daughters and two sons. During the war, she replaced her husband as the manager of a textile factory in South Korea and later, after her husband's death in 1979, she lived alone in Nara Prefecture, where she devoted herself to mountaineering.
When she was already 70 years old, the woman twice climbed Mount Ontake, a mountain over 3,000 meters high located between Nagano and Gifu prefectures in central Japan.
Until the age of 100, he could climb the steps of the Ashiya shrine without a cane, local press reported, but since 2019 he has been living in a nursing home and uses a wheelchair to get around.
