TOKYO (Reuters) -- Japan may still retain its claim as home to the world's oldest person, despite the death on Friday of the Japanese woman who had held the title.

Kamato Hongo, who was recognized as the world's oldest person by the Guinness Book of World Records, died in the southwestern city of Kagoshima aged 116.

After Hongo's death, Mitoyo Kawate, a 114-year-old woman in Hiroshima in southwestern Japan, became the oldest person in Japan, Japanese media reported on Saturday.

It was not immediately clear whether Kawate was the world's oldest person.

Charlotte Benkner of North Limo, Ohio, was the oldest American, and celebrates her 114th birthday on November 16.

It records the oldest man as 113-year-old Joan Riudavets Moll, from Menorca in Spain, following the death in September of Yukichi Chuganji, a Japanese man who died at the age of 114. Another person who might have been the world's oldest person, a Cambodian tiger hunter who relatives believed was 122 years old, died in October.

Having survived the horrors of the "Killing Fields" genocide in the 1970s, Sek Yi was revered across the impoverished southeast Asian nation on account of his advanced years.

But his birth records were destroyed by Pol Pot's ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge guerrillas, forever denying him the possibility of setting an official world record.