Yale University professor Yusuke Narita is suggesting mass suicide for elderly people in Japan, according to a report by the New York Times. The professor is now backtracking, claiming that his in-depth discussion of mass suicide is “an abstract metaphor.”
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” Narita, an assistant professor of economics at Yale. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?”
Seppuku refers to “an act of ritual disembowelment,” noted the New York Times, which also described the Yale professor as an individual who has “taken on the question of how to deal with the burdens of Japan’s rapidly aging society.”
Last year, after being asked to elaborate on his mass suicide ideas, Narita suggested it could be a “good thing” to “work hard toward creating a society” like the one depicted in the 2019 horror film Midsommar, in which a Swedish cult has elderly members of its community commit suicide by jumping off a cliff.
“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” the Ivy League professor said. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”
When it comes to euthanasia, Narita has suggested “the possibility of making it mandatory in the future.”
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