A Yale professor suggested mass suicide for old people in Japan. What did he mean?
TOKYO – His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic.
In interviews and public appearances, Yale University assistant professor of economics Yusuke Narita has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly ageing society.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news programme 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 dishonoured samurai in the 19th century.
Last year, when asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Prof 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 die by suicide by jumping off a cliff.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” he told the questioner as he assiduously scribbled notes. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard towards 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”.
Prof Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context” and that he was mainly addressing a growing effort to push the most senior people out of leadership positions in business and politics – to make room for younger generations. Nevertheless, with his comments on euthanasia and social security, he has pushed the hottest button in Japan.
While he is virtually unknown even in academic circles in the United States, his extreme positions have helped him gain hundreds of thousands of followers on social media in Japan among frustrated youth who believe their economic progress has been held back by a gerontocratic society.
Appearing frequently on Japanese online shows in T-shirts, hoodies or casual jackets, and wearing signature eyeglasses with one round and one square lens, he leans into his Ivy League pedigree as he fosters a nerdy shock-jock impression. He is among a few Japanese provocateurs who have found an eager audience by gleefully breaching social taboos. His Twitter bio: “The things you’re told you’re not allowed to say are usually true.”
Last month, several commenters discovered Prof Narita’s remarks and began spreading them on social media. During a panel discussion on a respected Internet talk show with scholars and journalists, University of Tokyo sociologist Yuki Honda described Prof Narita’s comments as “hatred towards the vulnerable”.
A growing group of critics warn that Prof Narita’s popularity could unduly sway public policy and social norms. Given Japan’s low birth rate and the highest public debt in the developed world, policymakers increasingly worry about how to fund the country’s expanding pension obligations. Japan is also grappling with growing numbers of older people who suffer from dementia or die alone.
In written answers to e-mailed questions, Prof Narita said he was “primarily concerned with the phenomenon in Japan, where the same tycoons continue to dominate the worlds of politics, traditional industries, and media/entertainment/journalism for many years”.
The phrases “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku”, he wrote, were “an abstract metaphor”.
“I should have been more careful about their potential negative connotations,” he added. “After some self-reflection, I stopped using the words last year.”
His detractors say his repeated remarks on the subject have already spread dangerous ideas.
“It’s irresponsible,” said journalist Masaki Kubota, who has written about Prof Narita.
Mr Kubota said that people panicking about the burdens of an ageing society might think, “Oh, my grandparents are the ones who are living longer”, and “and we should just get rid of them”.
Columnist Masato Fujisaki argued in Newsweek Japan that the professor’s remarks “should not be easily taken as a ‘metaphor’”. Prof Narita’s fans, Mr Fujisaki said, are people “who think that old people should just die already and social welfare should be cut”.
Despite a culture of deference to older generations, ideas about culling them have surfaced in Japan before. A decade ago, then Finance Minister Taro Aso, who is now a power broker in the governing Liberal Democratic Party, suggested that old people should “hurry up and die”.
Last year, Plan 75, a dystopian movie by Japanese film-maker Chie Hayakawa, imagined cheerful salespeople wooing retirees into government-sponsored euthanasia. In Japanese folklore, families carry older relatives to the top of mountains or remote corners of forests and leave them to die.
Prof 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 kill themselves 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 sterilised thousands of people with intellectual disabilities, mental illness or genetic disorders. In 2016, a man who believed that those with disabilities should be euthanised killed 19 people at a care home outside Tokyo.
In his day job, Prof Narita conducts technical research involving computerised algorithms used in education and healthcare policy. But as a regular presence across numerous Internet platforms and on television in Japan, he has grown increasingly popular, appearing on magazine covers, comedy shows and in an advertisement for energy drinks. He has even spawned an imitator on TikTok.
He often appears with Gen X rabble-rousers like Mr Hiroyuki Nishimura, a celebrity entrepreneur and owner of 4chan, the online message board where some of the Internet’s most toxic ideas bloom, and Mr Takafumi Horie, a trash-talking entrepreneur who once went to prison for securities fraud.
At times, Prof Narita has pushed the boundaries of taste. At a panel hosted by Globis, a Japanese graduate business school, he told the audience that “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”. Cool Japan is a government programme promoting the country’s cultural products.
Shocking or not, some lawmakers say Prof Narita’s ideas are opening the door to much-needed political conversations about pension reform and changes to social welfare. “There is criticism that older people are receiving too much pension money and the young people are supporting all the old people, even those who are wealthy,” said Mr Shun Otokita, 39, a member of the Upper House of Parliament with Nippon Ishin no Kai, a right-leaning party.
But detractors say Prof Narita highlights the burdens of an ageing population without suggesting realistic policies that could alleviate some of the pressures.
“He’s not focusing on helpful strategies such as better access to daycare or broader inclusion of women in the workforce or broader inclusion of immigrants,” said University of Connecticut historian Alexis Dudden, who studies modern Japan. “Things that might actually invigorate Japanese society.”
In broaching euthanasia, Prof Narita has spoken publicly of his mother, who had an aneurysm when he was 19. In an interview with a website on which families can search for nursing homes, he described how even with insurance and government financing, his mother’s care cost him 100,000 yen – or about S$1,010 – a month.
Some surveys in Japan have indicated that a majority of the public supports legalising voluntary euthanasia. But Prof Narita’s reference to a mandatory practice spooks ethicists. Currently, every country that has legalised the practice “allows it only if the person wants it themselves”, said Tokyo City University professor of philosophy Fumika Yamamoto.
In his e-mailed responses, Prof Narita said that “euthanasia (either voluntary or involuntary) is a complex, nuanced issue”.
“I am not advocating its introduction,” he added. “I predict it to be more broadly discussed.”
At Yale, he sticks to courses on probability, statistics, econometrics, and education and labour economics.
Neither department chair in economics Tony Smith nor a spokesman for Yale replied to requests for comment.
Professor Joshua Angrist, who has won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science and was one of Prof Narita’s doctoral supervisors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said his former student was a “talented scholar” with an “offbeat sense of humour”.
“I would like to see Yusuke continue a very promising career as a scholar,” Prof Angrist said. “So my main concern in a case like his is that he’s being distracted by other things, and that’s kind of a shame.” NYTIMES
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