A professor at Yale University has sparked outrage for suggesting that elderly Japanese residents should take part in a “mass suicide” by disembowelment to help the country deal with its rapidly aging population. Yusuke Narita, 37, an assistant professor of economics at the Ivy League school, has gained hundreds of thousands of followers on social media as he touted the controversial solution in multiple interviews and publications — but he’s also drawn ire, The New York Times reported. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” Narita said during a news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” he added, referring to the practice of disembowelment utilized by dishonored Samurai in the late 19th century.
Last year, Narita answered a boy’s question about seppuku by telling a group of students about a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 flick in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to jump off a cliff. “Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” he said. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.” He also has discussed euthanasia, predicting that the “possibility of making it mandatory in the future” will become part of the public discourse. Yusuke Narita, 37, an assistant professor of economics at Yale
