Ms. Itooka was born Tomiko Yano on May 23, 1908, in the city of Osaka, one of three children in a family that ran a clothing store. At that time, her country was a rising imperial power that had just defeated czarist Russia in war and was embarking on expansion into mainland Asia.
In the year of her birth, Japan signed an agreement with President Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state that averted conflict with the United States in exchange for Washington recognizing Japan’s annexation of the Korean Peninsula. During the span of her life, she saw her nation emerge as an Asian colonial empire, fall in fiery defeat in 1945 and rise again as an industrial giant and peaceful democracy.
Growing up in prewar Japan, she played volleyball in high school before marrying the owner of a textile company, Kenji Itooka, with whom she had two daughters and two sons. During World War II, she stayed in Japan to run the business while her husband went to Korea, then a Japanese colony, to oversee a factory there.
“She single-handedly managed a Japanese office and raised her children during this period,” according to the Gerontology Research Group, which keeps a database of the world’s oldest people.
In 1979, her husband died after 51 years of marriage. Ms. Itooka then moved to Ashiya, a city outside Osaka, where she remained an avid hiker into her 80s. At 100, she was said to be still ascending the stone steps of her local Shinto shrine without a cane.
