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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