Society Ageing Japan: Japanese Yale professor suggesting mass suicide

Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale University, argued in an interview that mass suicide could solve Japan's ageing population issue. His controversial views have made him popular with Japan's youth (he has 550,000 followers on Twitter), and he often makes online appearances with He often appears with Hiroyuki Nishimura, a celebrity entrepreneur and owner of 4chan, and Takafumi Horie, a trash-talking entrepreneur who once went to prison for securities fraud. He has also discussed euthanasia, a politically contentious debate in Japan, saying that making assisted suicide mandatory in the future will "come up in discussion".


His ideas were also propagated in "Midsommar", a disturbing movie I wish I hadn't seen.

When pressed by a teenager on his mass seppuku theory last year, Narita referred to a scene in the 2019 horror film "Midsommar" in which an elderly person is sent to die by suicide by jumping off a cliff, according to The Times. "Whether that's a good thing or not, that's a more difficult question to answer," Narita said, per the newspaper. "So if you think that's good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that."

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Yahoo News refers to the following NYT article (you might hit a paywall):

Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been "taken out of context," 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 youths who believe a gerontocratic society has held back their economic progress.

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There shouldn't even be a 'discussion' in this direction. It would increase the number of elderly people feeling guilty about being a burden on their descendants (and some of them will consider suicide or assisted suicide as a solution) and start to normalise behaviour such as younger people murdering 'difficult' elderly relatives, i.e., it will lead to a society with less tolerance of its weaker and less viable members. Having a severely disabled niece who will probably never walk or talk, the prospect of such a society fills me with horror. Japan is bad enough already with the way it treats people like cogs in a machine to be discarded when necessary, and such thinking will make it worse.

I will admit , having assisted suicide available in some cases is better than having to try and kill yourself. I've made sure my doctor is OK with it when I'm ready. Here in Maine , there are several hoops you have to jump through so the system is not abused. There are some cases I'm sure where life becomes not worth living and there is no way to help or make it better.
The fellow above's thinking reminds me too much of the movie "Soylent Green" and the belief that the elderly are throw away.

Compassionate end-of-life care should include discussion about the right to die; people should be able to determine their own fate, and like signing a DNR, should be able to establish their wishes before they become incapacitated by accident, old age, or illness. This is a completely different conversation worth having.

But this... absolute brainfart... This is the kind of idiotic, inhumane idea you should grow out of before you've even finished articulating it.

It's clear he's putting it forth in an effort to insert him onself into the zeitgeist as some kind of pseudo-intellectual iconoclast. I agree that especially in Japan this is a potentially dangerous idea to even posit. Considering his associations I shouldn't be surprised, anonymous message boards are brimming with sociopaths. This article is like someone decided to report on 2/4/8chan/kun/whatever post telling people to kill themselves. "Mandatory euthanasia," based on any criteria, is straight genocide. Full stop.

In Midsommar, I feel like the voluntary suicide of septuagenarians was used to both jar the audience and characters, providing the first gruesome and shocking moments of the film. It was used to express "in our cult, we do things a little different!" and showed their comfortable relationship with death, foreshadowing the rest of the film. It was portrayed as a kind of selfless, good thing that was done for the benefit of the group, but in practice it's stupid to set the criteria for "culling the herd" as something so arbitrary as a specific age; not only are the elderly perfectly capable of contributing to society in myriad ways, but also the way they set about it was needlessly cruel and inefficient. And there were just two of them... OH WHAT A BURDEN on the community, I guess it's time for grandpa to go break his legs and get smashed with a mallet. Honestly, I found Hereditary (Ari Aster's previous film) far more engaging and disturbing; Midsommar was a slow burn, and rather disappointing overall.

For someone to have seen that scene and thought not only that it's a good idea, but we should expand it to just killing old people... that's a sick bastard right there. And there's zero chance that this kind of policy wouldn't introduce a new dystopian class divide: the rich will be able to buy their way out of it, so we'd just be grinding up the poor to⁵⁴ keep people from drawing a pension too long. This does bring Soylent Green to mind, and also the quickly-forgotten 2011 film In Time.

Just look at this clout-chasing muppet, with his stupid, mismatched glasses. He's the (assistant) Yale professor, and I'M the one with imposter syndrome!?