In a country famous for the longevity of its inhabitants — this year Japan's population of people age 100 or over topped 70,000 for the first time — Aomori Prefecture is an outlier.
That's because Aomori consistently ranks bottom for average life expectancy for both men and women.
According to the government's most recent statistics, the average life expectancy for men in the prefecture is 78.67 years, and 85.93 for women. In contrast, men in Shiga Prefecture live the longest in Japan on average — just over three years longer than their northern counterparts. Women in Nagano Prefecture live the longest, at 87.68 years.