From Meiji to Reiwa: Japan's centenarians provide window to past

Few Japanese born in the Meiji period lived long enough to see the dawn of the Reiwa era, but those that did offer a glimpse at past generations while providing context for the next.Indeed, era names, or "gengo," have come to represent the generation of people that lived through them, unlocking bygone memories -- some painful, some joyful, but all very personal to those who experienced them.Jiro Usui, a 108-year-old former physician, was born in 1911, the 44th year of the Meiji era, in Ogaki, a city in the central Japan prefecture of Gifu.The Taisho era began in 1912, the same year the Tita…READ FULL ARTICLE