Homelessness part of the puzzle of missing elderly people

With national attention galvanized on missing centenarians, a 68-year-old homeless man living alone along the embankment of the Sumidagawa river in Tokyo's Taito Ward was slumped deep in thought, depressed at what the future holds for him.

"I don't even have a health insurance card. If I fall ill, it's over. I figure that by living this way, I only have about five years left," said Masao Washio, as a steady drizzle fell Thursday.

Washio is listed in the resident's registry in Atami, Shizuoka Prefecture, where he lived with his family until 12 years ago. But he has since lost touch with his kin and last spoke to his daughter three years ago.

Despite his impoverishment, Washio was aware of the plight of missing centenarians, a story that has captured headlines across Japan and around the world in recent days.

He said the news of elderly people dying alone unknown to family members is not just someone else's predicament but a fate he also expects to face. Washio said he considers himself to be "next in line as a possible missing elderly person."

Divorced from his wife, he has few people to relate to now. His oldest daughter is 19. He keeps a suit in a pay locker at a nearby station for the day she marries. But she, too, is out of contact.

Washio said he also stopped bothering a younger brother, saying he didn't want to cause his sibling further trouble after receiving financial assistance totaling around 3 million yen ($35,000) from him.

"Even if I die, no one will know," Washio said.

Contacted by telephone, the brother told The Asahi Shimbun that he had no interest in discussing the matter.

While they have been largely neglected by society, attention is now being directed toward aging homeless people and their grim prospects.

Earlier during the week, a woman who, if alive, would be 125 years old was found to have been registered as living in a park in Kobe's Higashi-Nada Ward. City officials, who were unable to say when the woman was registered as living at the park address, have done nothing to confirm her whereabouts or taken steps to remove her from the registry. To this day, she remains unaccounted for.

According to a tally by The Asahi Shimbun, as of Thursday, at least 279 people aged 100 or older have been confirmed as missing by local authorities across the nation. The figure includes those who have been listed for police searches by kin or others.

Of the total, 112 were reported in Hyogo Prefecture, 88 in Osaka Prefecture, 21 in Kyoto Prefecture and 13 in Tokyo, reflecting the alienation facing many elderly people in large urban areas.

By contrast, no missing senior citizens were reported in 26 prefectures in the Tohoku or Hokuriku regions of the main Honshu island, where traditional community ties remain relatively strong.

According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, there were an estimated 16,000 homeless people across the nation in 2009.

Many families of missing senior citizens told The Asahi Shimbun that their kin disappeared decades ago. Some were known to suffer from dementia and apparently had disappeared while wandering out alone.

In one case reported to police in November 2000, a senile woman aged 90 at the time disappeared in Oarai, Ibaraki Prefecture, while her family's attention was distracted. The family contacted the police to search for her.

The town office decided not to amend the resident's registry entry out of consideration for the family, one official said.

Kazuhiro Gokan, a judicial scrivener who heads a group of members of the judiciary providing legal support to the homeless, said that the oldest homeless person he had come across was an octogenarian.

"You need to be physically strong to live on the streets," Gokan said, adding that he believed any missing senior citizen listed as being 100 years old or over was probably dead.

While many municipalities have begun amending their entries in the basic resident register, efforts to extend help and protection to missing people have yet to take off.

A 54-year-old man originally from Tochigi Prefecture, who has been living in a car and on the street for nearly seven years, said he learned in June that his name had been deleted from the resident's registry. When he visited the office of Itabashi Ward in Tokyo, where he once resided, to have a residency certificate issued, he was given a sheet that confirmed his entry had been deleted.

"I felt so frustrated," he said. "I thought about crushing the paper in my hands and throwing it away."

He said that after a bag containing his personal effects was stolen, the residency certificate was essential as he needed identification to apply for a job, or even to borrow a book at the public library.

He said the only piece of evidence of his existence he had was a broken postal savings card. "It's to show who I am just in case something happens to me," the man said.

Tsuyoshi Inaba, who heads the Independent Life Support Center Moyai, a support group for the homeless and the needy, said that with the general lack of public interest in the homelessness situation today, "the number of elderly people whose whereabouts are unknown will likely balloon into a large figure."

A 53-year-old man who made his home in Ueno Park in Tokyo's Taito Ward said he left his hometown of Kiryu, Gunma Prefecture, after moneylenders started calling his home to collect on a 2-million-yen loan he had incurred and failed to repay.

Since then he has not contacted his parents.

"I figured that I would only cause trouble for them," he said. While he said he longed for life with a family at night, he was determined that he would die as "an unknown person, just like those elderly people in the news."