What definition of standard of living do you have in mind? I know of several and Japan doesn't lead in all of them. What's even more important is that even the

What definition of standard of living do you have in mind? I know of several and Japan doesn't lead in all of them. What's even more important is that even the definitions where Japan leads it doesn't do so by as big of a margin as it does in the extremes of human longevity. Take Switzerland for example. It also has a high standard of living, and ranks #2 just after Japan in average life expectancy. [1] Yet there's not a single Swiss person in that top 43 oldest people list. Of course Switzerland has a much smaller population (8M) than Japan (127M). However we can use a combination of countries. Let's take the top 10 countries by average life expectancy. The first is Japan with its 127M people, and the other 9 (Switzerland, Singapore, Australia, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Israel, Sweden, France) have a combined population of 227M people. Yet even with almost double the population, in regards to the top 43 oldest people, this combination only gives us 6 entries (France 3, Italy 2, Spain 1) against Japan's 20. A high standard of living certainly has an effect, but I feel it barely scratches the surface of the full answer. -- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...