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Now and again tales of the weird and wonderful overtake the daily round of news stories about the economy and other such things that regularly make you sigh. So it makes a nice change to find a story that makes you wonder at the ingenuity and incredulity of some folk.
Take the example of Tokyo’s oldest man, Mr Kato. Local welfare officials decided to honour him with a cake on his 115th birthday and pitched up with it at his address in Adachi ward. Overruling his granddaughter who said that he didn’t want to see anybody, they entered the house and found that Mr Kato was a mummified corpse laying in bed, dressed in his pyjamas and covered with a blanket.
According to his family Mr Kato, ‘confined himself in his room more than thirty years ago and became a living Buddha’. Being dead, Mr Kato was, of course, unable to explain how he had managed to spend 9.5 million yen (£70,000) in widower's pension payments after his wife died six years ago.
Doubtless, at some point in the future a whole range of officials will be called to account for why benefits were paid to a dead man for so long without any of them paying a courtesy call on him!
Especially on his 100th birthday!
.
Now and again tales of the weird and wonderful overtake the daily round of news stories about the economy and other such things that regularly make you sigh. So it makes a nice change to find a story that makes you wonder at the ingenuity and incredulity of some folk.
Take the example of Tokyo’s oldest man, Mr Kato. Local welfare officials decided to honour him with a cake on his 115th birthday and pitched up with it at his address in Adachi ward. Overruling his granddaughter who said that he didn’t want to see anybody, they entered the house and found that Mr Kato was a mummified corpse laying in bed, dressed in his pyjamas and covered with a blanket.
According to his family Mr Kato, ‘confined himself in his room more than thirty years ago and became a living Buddha’. Being dead, Mr Kato was, of course, unable to explain how he had managed to spend 9.5 million yen (£70,000) in widower's pension payments after his wife died six years ago.
Doubtless, at some point in the future a whole range of officials will be called to account for why benefits were paid to a dead man for so long without any of them paying a courtesy call on him!
Especially on his 100th birthday!
.
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