Japanese sushi legend Jiro Ono won three Michelin stars for more than a decade, the world’s oldest head chef to do so.

He has served the world’s dignitaries and his art of sushi was featured in an award-winning film.

After all these achievements and at the age of 100, he is not ready to fully retire.

“I plan to keep going for about five more years,” Ono said last month as he marked Japan's “Respect for the Aged Day” with a gift and a certificate ahead of his birthday.

What’s the secret of his health? “To work,” Ono replied to the question by Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike, who congratulated him.

“I cannot come to work every day... I try to work as much as I can, even when I am 100. Working is the best medicine, I think."

Ono, the founder of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a tiny, 10-seat sushi bar in the basement of a building in Tokyo’s posh Ginza district, turned 100 Monday.

In one of the world's fastest-aging countries, he is now among Japan's nearly 100,000 centenarians, according to government statistics.

Born in the central Japanese city of Hamamatsu in 1925, Ono began his apprenticeship at age 7 at the Japanese restaurant of a local inn.

He moved to Tokyo and became a sushi chef at 25 and opened his own restaurant — Sukiyabashi Jiro — 15 years later in 1965.

He has devoted his life seeking perfection in making sushi.

“I haven’t reached perfection yet,” Ono, then 85, said in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi," a film released in 2012.

"I’ll continue to climb trying to reach the top but nobody knows where the top is.”

Director David Gelb said his impression of Ono was “of a teacher and a fatherly figure to all who were in his restaurant.”

At the beginning, Gelb felt intimidated by the “gravitas" of the legend but was soon disarmed by Ono's sense of humor and kindness, he told the Associated Press in an interview from New Orleans.

Ono is devoted to what he serves to his regular clients, even turning down the Japanese government when it called to make a reservation for then-U.S. President Barack Obama and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2014.

Ono’s son Yoshikazu, who has worked with his father and now serves as head chef at the Ginza restaurant, said Obama smiled and winked at them when he tried medium fatty tuna sushi.

His restaurant earned three Michelin stars in 2007, as he became the first sushi chef to do so, and has kept the status until 2019, when he was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the oldest head chef of a three-Michelin-star restaurant, at age 93 years and 128 days.

In 2020, Sukiyabashi Jiro was dropped from the guide because it started taking reservations only from regulars or through top hotels.

In recent years Ono serves sushi only to his special guests, “as my hands don't work so well.”

But he hasn’t given up. His son says Ono, watching television news about the death of Japan’s oldest male at 113, said 13 more years seems doable.