Yale professor suggests Japanese elderly commit "mass suicide" by disembowelment

Tries to walk back the outrage, but argues that "mandatory euthanasia" is worth discussing.

An assistant professor of economics at Yale, Yasuke Narita, 37, has picked up hundreds of thousands of social media followers for suggesting that elderly Japanese residents help the country deal with its aging population by conducting a “mass suicide” by disembowelment.

He’s been making this suggestion for a few years now, but there was a flurry of reports on it last week, springboarding off a New York Times article.

Japan has the oldest senior population ratio in the world, with 29.1% of its people over the age of 65. Coping with the pressure on the country’s pensions and healthcare systems is a recurring theme. In fact, in 2013, then-Finance Minister Taro Aso said the elderly should “hurry up and die” to save Japan their medical costs.

Narita apparently endorses this idea. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said on a news program a little over a year ago. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”

The choice of words is provocative, to say the least: ‘seppuku’ refers to the act of disembowelment performed by samurai.

Perhaps recognizing the inflammatory language, Narita appears to backed off, slightly. He told the Times that his remarks had been “taken out of context” and that he was actually referring to getting older people out of leadership positions in business and politics. “I should have been more careful about their potential negative connotations,” he said, adding that the phrases “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku” were just told the paper about the phrase “mass suicide” or “mass seppuku,” was just an “abstract metaphor.”

Maybe so — where have we heard the excuse “taken out of context” before? — but he’s hit this theme pretty clearly and unambiguously several times.

From a New York Post article on this controversy: “Last year, Narita answered a boy’s question about seppuku by telling a group of students about a scene from ‘Midsommar,’ a 2019 flick in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to jump off a cliff. ‘Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,’ he said. ‘So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.’ He also has discussed euthanasia, predicting that the ‘possibility of making it mandatory in the future’ will become part of the public discourse.”

He also notes, on his Twitter bio: “The things you’re told you’re not allowed to say are usually true.”

How widespread is this point of view. The New York post article notes, “Newsweek Japan columnist Masato Fujisaki said Narita’s supporters “believed old people should just die already and social welfare should be cut.” And there’s also this: “Last year, a dystopian movie by Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa called ‘Plan 75’ imagined salespeople offering elderly citizens an incentive to self-euthanize and no longer be a burden to society.”

On the other hand, journalist Masaki Kubota labeled Narita’s ideas as “irresponsible,” and Narita himself — in addition to the “out of context” defence — according to the Post article, emailed the Times to say “euthanasia (either voluntary or involuntary) is a complex, nuanced issue. I am not advocating its introduction. I predict it to be more broadly discussed.”

Exactly. Therein lies the problem, as far as I’m concerned. Moving it from “beyond the pale” to “more broadly discussed” is the all-important transition. We become slowly conditioned to letting it be on the table. Of course, we are reassured, nobody is talking about literal disembowelment — nudge, nudget, wink, wink. There are more humane ways, right?

And so we gradually move from the genteel ageism of Narita 1 (pushing older people out of leadership positions in business and politics) to Narita 2, “mandatory euthanasia”. In other words, forced mass murder. Is this the real agenda all along?

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