Here is an article that recently appeared in Japan Times online:
GROWING OLD HEALTHILY
What’s Japan’s secret of ‘many happy returns’?
By TOMOKO OTAKE
Staff writer
Japan may never have become the world’s No. 1 economy, and, faced with other rising Asian powers, it probably never will be. Nonetheless, there is one thing at which Japan proudly excels above all nations: its people’s longevity.
Japanese are the longest-lived people in the world, logging an average life span of 81.9 years, according to a 2004 World Health Organization report. And in the nation’s rapidly graying society, it’s not hard to find people who are living proof of that longevity: More than one in five of the 126 million population are 65 or older. Of those, amazingly, more than a million are 90 or older.
Read the full article here.