“What’s a microwave?” she asked her husband, Eiichi.

Yumiko was in the early stages of dementia, struggling with vocabulary and unable to teach the kimono-dressing classes she had run for 25 years.

The difficulty with everyday tasks has made life challenging for her and Eiichi, who has been caring for her since 2008.

But she is also unable to deal with her finances – a situation that experts say is increasingly common in fast-ageing Japan and that puts trillions of yen worth of assets at risk.

Rika Kambayashi, a social worker in Kyoto, says she has seen many cases of dementia patients withdrawing large sums without a clear grasp of what they are doing or why.

In one example, she said, a woman in her 90s withdrew 20 million yen ($266,000) of her savings at a grandson’s urging.

“She was saying she withdrew nine or ten. It took me a while to realize she was talking about a number of banknote rolls,” Kambayashi said. A roll is typically one hundred 10,000 yen notes. “It was clearly a case of abuse.”

Dementia has been diagnosed in more than 5 million Japanese. The government estimates that number will increase to 7 million to 8 million, or 6 to 7 percent of the total population, by 2030.

The OECD has a somewhat lower estimate that dementia will affect 3.8 percent of Japan’s population by 2037, still the highest among the 35 OECD states and far above the average of 2.3 percent predicted for the group.

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