Description: Presented at Living to 100 Symposium, January 2002. This paper is a first attempt to assess which group of mortality trajectories proposed by various researchers is confirmed by empirical data between the age of 110 and 115 years when the exponential trajectories on the one hand and the logistic or quadratic trajectories on the other hand have diverged sufficiently.

Description: Paper presented at Living to 100 symposium January 2002. Study describes the increase in life expectancy at birth in Japan, the emergence of centenarians, the trends in the number of deaths of centenarians, and the increase in maximum reported age at death. Death rates above the age of 100 in Japan since 1963 are computed and analyzed. This study completes and updates results presented in a previous study Robine and Saito, 200X.