Supercentenarian Profile

Sonoe Yoshida (吉田其枝)

Born:

1884-03-25

Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture,

Japan

Died:

1994-04-22

Kodaira City, Tokyo Prefecture,

Japan

✔ Age Certified by LongeviQuest

Sonoe Yoshida (Japanese: 吉田其枝) was a Japanese supercentenarian whose age has been validated by LongeviQuest.

BIOGRAPHY

Sonoe Yoshida (吉田其枝) was born in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, on 25 March 1884 as the eldest daughter of a Christian minister. She had five younger brothers and one younger sister, making her the eldest of seven children.

When she was four years old, a Christian kindergarten opened in her neighborhood. Since the founder was an American teacher who could not speak Japanese, Yoshida had the opportunity to be exposed to English from an early age. She spent her first year of elementary school in Kobe, and then moved with her family to Kochi, where her father had been reassigned. After two years there, the family relocated again to Nemuro, Hokkaido, her father’s third post.

At the age of 12, Yoshida, who loved studying, earnestly asked her parents to allow her to enroll in Kobe Jogakuin, her mother’s alma mater. The following year, at thirteen, she moved alone from Hokkaido to Kobe. However, the official admission age for Kobe Jogakuin was fifteen, and she was too young to enroll formally. The teachers, moved by her determination, made a special exception and admitted her as a preparatory student. She graduated from the middle school division six years later at the age of nineteen.

Afterward, she advanced to the higher division, supporting herself by assisting teachers and doing various chores to pay her tuition. Although the program normally took three years to complete, she graduated after five years. In total, she spent eleven years studying at Kobe Jogakuin.

After graduation, she soon married and had nine children, giving birth to her first child at twenty-five and her last at fortytwo. In her later years, she recalled that although she raised many children, she never found it difficult, as the family had household help. Despite being a highly educated woman at a time when women’s education was uncommon, she believed that a woman’s happiness lay in supporting her husband and devoting herself to raising children and caring for the home with love.

After World War II, when her husband suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, Yoshida took care of him while running an English tutoring school at their home in Suginami, Tokyo. She hand made textbooks for each student and taught with creativity and dedication, continuing her lessons until the age of 101.

In an interview at the age of 103, she said that her greatest happiness was “believing in the Christian God, being given time to read the Bible, and living each day freely.” She also shared that the love she received in her childhood from her Christian parents and teachers helped her endure every hardship in life.

In September 1993, Yoshida was reported as the ninth-oldest living person in Japan. She passed away from acute heart failure at a hospital in Higashimurayama, Tokyo, on April 22, 1994, at the age of 110 years and 28 days. At the time of her death, she was the oldest living person in Tokyo. After her passing, Tase Matsunaga of Edogawa Ward succeeded her as the oldest person in Tokyo.