Yale Professor: Mandatory ‘Mass Suicide’ of Elderly a Solution to ‘Japan’s Rapidly Aging Society’
“In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”
Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has been suggesting mass suicide to solve the problems caused by Japan’s aging society.
The low birth rate isn’t just affecting America. It’s hit Asia hard as well. There’s also the early retirement age, slimming down the money needed for pensions. From The New York Times:
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” Seppuku is an act of ritual disembowelment that was a code among dishonored samurai in the 19th century.
Last year, when asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr. Narita graphically described to a group of assembled students a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 horror film in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” Dr. Narita told the questioner as he assiduously scribbled notes. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”
At other times, he has broached the topic of euthanasia. “The possibility of making it mandatory in the future,” he said in one interview, will “come up in discussion.”
Narita told an audience while on a panel hosted by Globis, a Japanese graduate business school: “if this can become a Japanese society where people like you all commit seppuku one after another, it wouldn’t be just a social security policy but it would be the best ‘Cool Japan’ policy.”
The government program “Cool Japan is an initiative to further strengthen the ties between Japan and other countries (in such areas as economics, culture, and diplomacy).”
Narita said people took his comments out of context. He explained he addressed “a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business in politics – to make room for younger generation.”
So force them to kill themselves?
Narita also claimed he used “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku” as an “abstract metaphor.” He promised not to use the words again.
The explanation doesn’t make Narita sound better.
Narita’s emailed responses don’t match his previous comments: “I am not advocating its introduction. I predict it to be more broadly discussed.”
Narita has a large following in Japan. He’s been on magazine covers and gone on comedy shows. Energy drinks put him in their advertisements. Pushing “social taboos” and bringing up his Yale position has gained him followers in America.
Many critics think it’s too little too late for Narita, mainly due to his large following, despite the promise never to use the words again with good reason.
Those who forget history are bound to repeat it. Mandatory suicide is a more sensitive subject in Japan than in America. Read about Japan in WWII:
Dr. Narita’s language, particularly when he has mentioned “mass suicide,” arouses historical sensitivities in a country where young men were sent to their deaths as kamikaze pilots during World War II and Japanese soldiers ordered thousands of families in Okinawa to commit suicide rather than surrender.
Critics worry that his comments could summon the kinds of sentiments that led Japan to pass a eugenics law in 1948, under which doctors forcibly sterilized thousands of people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness or genetic disorders. In 2016, a man who believed those with disabilities should be euthanized murdered 19 people at a care home outside Tokyo.
University of Tokyo sociologist Yuki Honda called Narita’s comments “hatred toward the vulnerable.”
Others know many of Narita’s followers are frustrated with Japan’s aging society:
“It’s irresponsible,” said Masaki Kubota, a journalist who has written about Dr. Narita. People panicking about the burdens of an aging society “might think, ‘Oh, my grandparents are the ones who are living longer,’” Mr. Kubota said, “‘and we should just get rid of them.’”
Masato Fujisaki, a columnist, argued in Newsweek Japan that the professor’s remarks “should not be easily taken as a ‘metaphor.’” Dr. Narita’s fans, Mr. Fujisaki said, are people “who think that old people should just die already and social welfare should be cut.”
Japan has a problem. The country has a low birth rate and the oldest population. The elderly must return to work because the government doesn’t have enough money for pensions.
Forcing suicide is never an option, especially with the government involved.
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Comments
I notice these Malthusians never lead by example.
Is he trying to say he’s not actually one of these anti-human adacemians that are so prevalent these days?
I was gonna say, “You first”, but you basically beat me to it.
He will change his mind as soon as he becomes “elderly”.
The same with-abortion folks, they want abortion for others not for themselves.
Instead of “euthanasia”, they could call it “abortion for adults”.
In Logan’s Run it is call “Carousel” but in Prog it’s culling the herd. Eliminate them, “recycle” their wealth and save having to take care of them. I wonder what he would say if he were quad’ed out and needing care?
I would consider mass suicide, as long as the first people to do mass suicide are those who call for mass suicide.
Additionally, I am all for populations eating bugs and manufactured meat, as long as the people who call for eating bugs and manufactured meat are the first to eat it.
I am all for banning all fuels, as long as the people who are calling for banning fuels are the first to stop using them.
I am all for banning gas appliances, as long as those calling for banning gas appliances are the first to stop using them.
In other words you first, professor.
While I am whole-heartedly for those advocating a lower standard of living to live by example, I will not follow a fanatic out into hermitage just because he believes enough to practice what he preaches.
I seem to recall an old SNL skit where Rosanne Rosannadanna went on about “Youth {n Asia”.
One has to wonder if the professor’s grandparents are still alive- talk about an awkward family dinner table conversation on holidays.
Clearly to the Progs an individual life has no real value or meaning.
“I’ve noticed that everyone who is for abortion has already been born.”
― Ronald Reagan
Sick
Remember the dark early days of Covid when some so called experts stated that the elderly deserved benign neglect at best? This is the same view on a ,massive scale
COVID wasn’t deadly enough to do the job, so they need to use more force.
you had NY put covid positive people in nursing homes to up the death count…
this is another way to erase history as well. Without grandparents around to tell their stories, everything becomes new. A new world every generation. A brave new world for the young?
The generation on the bench is not ready to play in the big leagues. They can’t even figure out that women have vaginas.
lord–this guy is one pretentious “academic”–would like to see him take a shot of sake, strap-on an airplane and fly off to crash it into a ship
had an uncle who flew against the japanese–though he and his colleagues may not have been able to comprehend the fervor of those young pilots, they nevertheless respected such incredible courage
in the vein of someone’s earlier suggestion, would like to take a .45, charge it, then hand it to this young fool and say “here you go “
Instead of forcing the elderly to kill themselves, I advocate forcing the young to procreate.
You think the vast majority can raise kids who can keep society going? What evidence do you have they would/could do so?
Also, you’re giving them ammunition for their Handmaid’s Tale fantasies.
I had my first at 25, and I was totally unprepared, but I had a mother and aunts to teach me. Young people start out as incompetent parents. Experienced adults are very valuable. I will forever be grateful for the things my grandmother taught me about how to raise my children.
My first wife was 21 when we had our first. Her parents were a godsend. But we managed to learn.
You can’t force them directly, but it should be possible to be sneaky. I would suggest a super-contagious coronavirus that is engineered to cancel all female birth control. If you assume only 50% would immediately proceed to abortion, then you still get a huge bump in birth rate.
The solution is much easier. If countries want their citizens to have more children, they should stop oppressing their parents.
I went to a university that actually taught me stuff and made sure I knew it; and got long-term positions in companies where people actually made useful stuff and sold it to help other people run their businesses. My kids have to deal with headhunters in India to get 6-to-18-month contract gigs at scalped rates after which they have to do it all over again.
It should be the policy of this country to see to it that any one working adult should be able to support a family. Right now, we have working adults supporting politicians’ friends and family, instead of their own.
The easy days of the immediate post WWII economy are not coming back. When a world wide war fought nearly everywhere except the continental US turns every other Nations factories to rubble …it’s pretty easy to be the most productive economy in the world.
That said, we need to reshore our manufacturing base. The lock downs and knock on impact on supply chains revealed to many the problem with globalism. We buy cheap imports but traded good paying manufacturing jobs for low paying service jobs. Until we reverse that the well paying jobs don’t exist. A person working a low skill service job isn’t gonna make enough to be the sole earner for a family.
Until scarcity hit the laptop class they thought everything was ok b/c their lives were pretty good. When a high paid member of the credentialed class couldn’t buy toilet paper, ibuprofen or baby formula things got very real very suddenly. Maybe some of them will remember that but I have doubts.
I’ve long thought it highly suspicious that the “women’s movement” evolved to push women into the workforce just at the same time it became impossible for a single person (usually the father) to sustain a family on a single salary. It seems to me that the purpose of encouraging women to go to work was to conceal the destruction of the dollar by allowing many families to remain afloat by having both parents working in an economic environment in which single-income families would go under.
Almost there, what with the “vaccine” that’s supposed to combat that virus causing miscarriages and sterility at an alarming rate.
First…
Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has been suggesting mass suicide to solve the problems caused by Japan’s aging society.
Note that he lives in America and, by definition, wouldn’t be affected by these ideas.
Second…
This is a genocide of sorts. Given the patriarchal nature of business in Japan, probably patricide. He’s basically demanding the death of a tribe not his own. So, not particularly cool.
Also, he’s probably over 30, which makes him OLD in the eyes of da yout. So, get to it, Skippy. Set the example.
Otherwise, shut up and go away.
Note that “Dr” Narita is at YALE. PhDs pompously call themseves Doctors, when culturally ony physicians and dentists used that title. The Ivies have become frauds. The Asian-American lawsuit will prove that in court.
Unless one is going on to a professional school, like medical school, a Bachelor’s degree is an expensive piece of useless paper, earned by having been a willing subject of leftist indocrination..
I hold a degree from a top-rated liberal arts college. Today it is a”sanctuary campus” and the students are told to call the college president by her first name: Wendy.. It now boasts a black student center. And half the students think socialism is better than capitalism.
The only colleges worth attending are Hilldale and the new Univ. of Austin. The rest are centers of indoctrination, at high cost; full pay at my alma is up to $75K yearly now, but the crappy dorm rooms trmain crappy.
Go full “Logan’s Run.” I wonder if he is from the same Yale med school that brought us Bandy X. Lee, the “doctor” that insisted she could diagnose Pres. Trump’s “mental issues” from afar, but summarily refused to do the same to Biden.
Real bunch of class acts that Yale is turning out…
If it is mandatory, it isn’t “suicide”.
planned parent/hood
Soylent Green: The ultimate recycling program.
.
The only problem is prions, since they aren’t destroyed by cooking. But that may not be a problem if you expand the recycling cycle by using pigs as an intermediate to process the Soylent Green into pork. In fact, you can cut out a step and just feed the oldsters and prisoners to the pigs directly while still alive.
I’m no biologist, but I am a fan of the X-Files. I seem to remember they had an episode where exactly that was going on… except the prions easily survived the entire process, and were taking out the pork-eating townspeople, which was the week’s mystery. Was that just “science-fiction science,” or what?
If I recall that episode correctly, they were not cycling through another species, but directly consuming the soylent green.
He’s so stupid he doesn’t understand he’s getting older too
When is the sell by date on his butt?
If he has HIV he doesn’t care. He won’t live past his sell-by date anyway.
As dear old mom always told me when I was young and impatient about following an older, slower person, “if you live long enough, you’ll be old one day too.”
When I first misread the headline, I thought this idea was coming out of Japan itself, and I thought it extremely odd. Then I saw it was coming out of Yale, and all was explained.
The young are generally stupid about the value of age. Mick Jagger would “rather be dead than sing Satisfaction when I’m 45.” Pete Townshend: “Hope I die before I get old.” Now Mick’s 79, Pete’s 77, and you’d have to pry them off the Earth like f*g barnacles.
Japan has a bigger demographic crisis than the USA in terms of supporting their pensioners. The youngest baby boomers, born in 64 are only 59. Granted the larger front half of the boomers has already hit retirement age and are drawing Social Security. The other problem is that many don’t/didn’t/couldn’t save or they made bad choices with retirement funds and rely wholly on Social Security. Gonna be bad when it runs out and can’t provide full benefits.
The Japanese are basically facing today what we will face in ten to fifteen years. Their central bank is effectively buying all their govt debt which is not sustainable long term. Their economy as a whole has been a zombie for decades. That’s what the man is talking about a solution to an otherwise (probably) unsolvable problem. If nothing else it has people talking about and thinking about the issues and potential solutions besides Logan’s Run.
Ideas that stupid and evil generally come from elite Western universities
I have a very short, measured response to folks like this. YOU FIRST AZZHOLE.
The very old are pretty much indifferent to death. Not buying green bananas and all that.
If a day shows up, you live it; but if you don’t wake up, no big deal.
It’s when you start lowering the cutoff age that you run into serious resistance.
Not enough young people – simple solution. Just ship or fly a few million of Biden’s illegals to Japan at our expense. Travel costs of any kind are vastly cheaper than the myriad of social welfare costs to have them here.
“Billy rapped all night about his suicide
How he’d kick it in the head when he was 25
Don’t want to stay alive when you’re 25”
All The Young Dudes
Welcome to the Carousel……
RENEW!! RENEW!!! RENEW!!!!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/
Interesting that he’d use the word “seppuku” since that would imply that he believes the elderly have dishonored themselves by living too long.
Let’s not forget that government anti-smoking campaigns have contributed significantly to there being a large aging population. And that takes a financial toll on Social Security, Medicare as well as pension plans, etc. It has also had a negative effect on tax revenues, though to a lesser extent.
Not that I support killing off the elderly, but I do like to clearly see what the trade-offs are for government policies. Because, yes, even living longer has some negatives for society.
It’s not as if mass or ritual suicide is a new idea to the Japanese. He’s just suggesting a different motivation.
Communism, fascism, Maoism – call it what you want.
But genocide is the end game. ALWAYS.
“Mandatory suicide” is an oxymoron.
Has anyone approached his parents or grandparents for comment? If they really supported their woke son, they would have leaped off a tall building by now. What awful parents!
Obviously this so called Professor is a selfish narcissist who like anyone raised without any sense of morality has no appreciation for the sanctity in life of the baby in utero or the elderly simply due to his lack of familiarity with four eternal words-Thou shall not kill
He’s welcome to be the subject of a “N of 1” study.
Tell me it wouldn’t work. However, as for the ““Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,”…no, it’s not difficult.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,”
Umm, it really isn’t. It’s an easy question to answer.
What we have is here an amoral narcissist “academic” who LOVES attention. Everything about him is designed around it; his comments, even his idiotic asymmetrical glasses. There’s no point in getting angry with the little dweeb because he’s the academic equivalent of a toddler smearing himself with feces and grinning. That’s not so say he doesn’t believe it, just that his primary goal is the attention he gets. I can’t even summon up the emotional interest to get upset with him; instead he just bores me.
But my own apathy frightens me. I care nothing at all about his life. If something unpleasant were to happen to him I’d chuckle and then shrug. I’m increasingly feeling that way towards all these woke morons and extremist academics. I always used to believe in the line “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Now? I don’t think I’d lift a finger to defend this psycho-dweeb’s rights. I wouldn’t do anything to harm him in any way, but if he were to be dragged off I also wouldn’t care.
Did you notice his glasses. Can you take anyone wearing THOSE seriously?
Another example of academics and bureaucrats preaching behavior for the masses that they will not follow as they are too good and too esential.
This rationale that society can’t afford old people is another example of what happens when we let government and government programs (i.e. pensions and Social Security programs) become the norm. To paraphrase Franklin, those willing to trade liberty for security will have neither…
Maybe they should tell families if they have more than two children they will not have to pay income taxes as long as they stay married.
This is the kind of logic you get when you believe that society is more important than the individual.
It prevailed in Germany a century ago when they started getting rid of the feeble and in the infirm, before they went after the Jews and others.
Ah, don’t you just love “academics”!
The World would be a much better place if the majority of them could persuades to commit mandatory mass suicide!
Mandatory “mass suicide: because the demographic stack is out of whack.
Anybody still not get that we’re just livestock this g
this guy
If it’s mandatory it isn’t suicide.