ABSTRACT
Ogimi village stands between the mountains and the sea at the northern tip of the island of Okinawa, Japan. On any given morning at low tide, you can see elderly village women, many in their 80s and 90s, and some over 100 years old, out gathering seaweed for consumption. Later in the morning, they tend their gardens and gather to sing, dance, and play their unusual three-stringed instruments called sanshin (literally “three strings”), which somewhat resemble a violin, except the soundboard is covered with the dried skin of a poisonous snake. These women are remarkable for a geriatric population: they gracefully move through their dances like ballerinas, and they all have absolute recall, with memories stretching back to their earliest childhood. In a similarly aged population in North America or Europe, many people of 80 or 90 years old have motor neuron deficits with impairment of their gait and sometimes hand tremors or shaking. Half of such 85-year-olds in North America or Europe have cognitive deficits, with an inability to form short-term memories or, even worse, dementia, symptomatic of Alzheimer’s disease. Recently, Paul Cox asked a group of Ogimi women in their 80s about Alzheimer’s disease. They had not heard of it, and when the symptoms of this age-related disease were described, they were horrified.
