Leg One: Kagoshima and Okinawa

11 minutes ago

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Top Ten or Bottom Three? The Journey Has Begun

For the past two years, I have been traveling across Japan asking a question at the heart of the Never Too Late Academy: What can we learn from the places where people live not only longer, but healthier, more engaged lives?

This autumn, that journey has become much more focused.

I am using my newly developed True Longevity Index™ as a compass to visit thirteen Japanese prefectures—the Top Ten and Bottom Three according to the current model.

I am not revealing the rankings yet.

Instead, I am traveling to each place, going beyond the prefectural numbers to find the smaller communities, people, and sometimes anomalies that can help us understand what the data might actually mean. And I am inviting readers to travel with me and guess which prefectures belong at which end of the Index.

Leg One is now complete: Kagoshima and Okinawa.

It took me south through the islands, known as the Land of the Immortals, including several days on Tokunoshima, where I went looking for answers to why there is a high density of centenarians, and came away thinking about something I had never seriously considered in all my longevity travels: water.

I also discovered an intriguing connection between exceptional longevity and unusually high fertility, visited the statue of a man once recognized as the oldest person in the world, and continued south to Okinawa, a place whose international reputation for longevity differs sharply from what Japan's current data tell us.

That is precisely why I developed the True Longevity Index™. Data gets me somewhere. Fieldwork changes the questions.

I have written more of Leg One in my Defying the Red Zone Substack, including what I discovered on Tokunoshima and why two ordinary glasses of water have now made their way into my longevity notebook.

And there is a game involved.

Kagoshima and Okinawa. One is in the TLI™ Top Ten. One is in the Bottom Three.

Which is which?

[Read Leg One and make your guess → SUBSTACK LINK]

Next comes Leg Two: back to the mainland, back behind the wheel of my little camper van, and four more prefectures.

The rankings stay secret until the journey is over.

True Longevity Index™, Red Zone Rebel™ and CCK Mindset™ are original frameworks and terminology developed by Lowell Sheppard as part of his ongoing longevity research in Japan. The True Longevity Index™ methodology and weighting framework are proprietary and remain under development. Commercial use or reproduction requires permission. The term “Red Zone” is used with acknowledgment of the prior work of demographic gerontologist Dr. S. Jay Olshansky.