

He often appears with Gen X rabble-rousers like Hiroyuki Nishimura, a celebrity entrepreneur and owner of 4chan, the online message board where some of the internet’s most toxic ideas bloom, and Takafumi Horie, a trash-talking entrepreneur who once went to prison for securities fraud. He has even spawned an imitator on TikTok.

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. Narita conducts technical research of computerized algorithms used in education and health care policy. In 2016, a man who believed those with disabilities should be euthanized murdered 19 people at a care home outside Tokyo. 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.Ĭritics 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 Japanese folklore, families carry older relatives to the top of mountains or remote corners of forests and leave them to die.ĭr.
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Last year, “ Plan 75,” a dystopian movie by the Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa, imagined cheerful salespeople wooing retirees into government-sponsored euthanasia. A decade ago, Taro Aso - the finance minister at the time and now a power broker in the governing Liberal Democratic Party - suggested that old people should “ hurry up and die.”

“After some self-reflection, I stopped using the words last year.”ĭespite a culture of deference to older generations, ideas about culling them have surfaced in Japan before. “I should have been more careful about their potential negative connotations,” he added. The phrases “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku,” he wrote, were “an abstract metaphor.” 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.” In written answers to emailed questions, Dr. The country is also grappling with growing numbers of older people who suffer from dementia or die alone.
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Given Japan’s low birthrate and the highest public debt in the developed world, policymakers increasingly worry about how to fund Japan’s expanding pension obligations. Narita’s popularity could unduly sway public policy and social norms.
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A Corruption Scandal: Japan’s prosecutors accused Dentsu, an advertising company that was one of the driving forces behind the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, of conspiring to evade the public bidding process leading up to the Games.“So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.” Narita told the questioner as he assiduously scribbled notes. “Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” 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. Last year, when asked by a school-age boy to elaborate on his mass seppuku theories, Dr.
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“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. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. In interviews and public appearances, Yusuke Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale, has taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society. His pronouncements could hardly sound more drastic.
