Everyone makes bad jokes once in a while and has to explain himself. Not everyone publicly tells a culture that its only course of action is mass seppuku by the elderly.
Yale professor Yusuke Narita, unlike most people, has spent a decent part of his career talking about mass suicide and disembowelment of elderly Japanese. Apparently this is some sort of dark joke.
NO, IT'S NOT RACIST OR EUGENICIST TO SUPPORT BIG FAMILIES
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said of Japan’s aging population and strained public pension system. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”
In his many mentions of mass suicide, Narita does not appear to actually be advocating it but merely stating that he believes it will become a topic of debate as Japan’s crisis advances.
What exactly is Japan’s crisis that inevitably brings up mass suicide?
Japan has the highest old-age ratio in the world: about 30% of its population is over 65.
A very old population is bad for many reasons. One is the inability to finance its public pension system. (This is one reason Japan has the highest debt of any developed country.) More importantly, there are simply not enough workers and producers to get the population the goods and services it needs.
How did this happen?
It happened because the Japanese stopped having babies.
Japan never had a baby boom, and in the 1960s had one of the lowest birthrates in the world. In 1974, Japan dropped below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman. Then in 1983, Japan began a long steep plunge in its birthrate from low to very low. Its birthrate has been below 1.5 for a generation now.
Its marriage rate has been plummeting too.
If you go two generations without replacing yourself, you will have an aging and shrinking population. Japan’s population peaked in 2010 and has been slowly shrinking since then.
There are fewer young people every year and more old people. This is inherently destabilizing, as this discussion of seppuku shows. Here’s a highlight from the New York Times article on professor Narita:
"Despite a culture of deference to older generations, ideas about culling them have surfaced in Japan before. 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.'
"Last year, 'Plan 75,' a dystopian movie by the Japanese filmmaker 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."
So the destabilizing effects of the aging society lead to destabilizing discussions like this.
As the rest of the Western world follows in Japan’s demographic footsteps, we might want to look over there for a warning — and then start having children.