OK, this news story is just bizarre:
A Yale Professor Suggested Mass Suicide for Old People in Japan. What Did He Mean?
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.
“I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,” he said during one online news program in late 2021. “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.
Ummmm, whaaaa?
The news article continues:
Dr. Narita, 37, said that his statements had been “taken out of context” . . . The phrases “mass suicide” and “mass seppuku,” he wrote, were “an abstract metaphor.”
“I should have been more careful about their potential negative connotations,” he added. “After some self-reflection, I stopped using the words last year.”
Huh? “Potential” negative connotations? This is just getting weirder and weirder.
And this:
His Twitter bio: “The things you’re told you’re not allowed to say are usually true.”
On this plus side, this is good news for anyone concerned about social and economic inequality in this country. The children of the elites get sent to Yale, they’re taught this sort of up-is-down, counterintuitive stick-it-to-the-man crap, and to the extent they believe it, it makes them a bit less effective in life, when they enter the real world a few years later. Or maybe they don’t believe this provocative crap, but at least they’ve still wasted a semester that they could’ve spent learning economics or whatever. Either way it’s a win for equality. Bring those Ivy League kids down to the level of the rabble on 4chan!
And then this bit, which is like a parody of a NYT article trying to be balanced:
Shocking or not, some lawmakers say Dr. Narita’s ideas are opening the door to much-needed political conversations about pension reform and changes to social welfare.
In all seriousness, I’m sure that Yale has some left-wing professors who are saying things that are just as extreme . . . hmmmm, let’s try googling *yale professor kill the cops* . . . bingo! From 2021:
A Psychiatrist Invited to Yale Spoke of Fantasies of Shooting White People
A psychiatrist said in a lecture at Yale University’s School of Medicine that she had fantasies of shooting white people, prompting the university to later restrict online access to her expletive-filled talk, which it said was “antithetical to the values of the school.”
The talk, titled “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind,” had been presented by the School of Medicine’s Child Study Center as part of Grand Rounds, a weekly forum for faculty and staff members and others affiliated with Yale to learn about various aspects of mental health. . . .
“This is the cost of talking to white people at all — the cost of your own life, as they suck you dry,” Dr. Khilanani said in the lecture . . . “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a favor,” she said, adding an expletive. . . .
Dr. Khilanani, a forensic psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, said in an email on Saturday that her words had been taken out of context to “control the narrative.” She said her lecture had “used provocation as a tool for real engagement.” . . .
Don’t you hate it when you make a racist speech and then people take it out of context? So annoying!
The situations aren’t exactly parallel, as she was a visitor, not a full-time faculty member. Let’s just say that Yale is a place where you’ll occasionally hear some things with “potentially negative connotations.”
Getting back to the recent story:
Some surveys in Japan have indicated that a majority of the public supports legalizing voluntary euthanasia. But Mr. Narita’s reference to a mandatory practice spooks ethicists.
Jeez, what is it with the deadpan tone of this news article? “A mandatory practice” . . . that means someone’s coming to kill grandma. You don’t have to be an “ethicist” to be spooked by that one!
And then this:
In his emailed responses, Dr. Narita said that “euthanasia (either voluntary or involuntary) is a complex, nuanced issue.”
“I am not advocating its introduction,” he added. “I predict it to be more broadly discussed.”
What the hell??? Voluntary euthanasia, sure, I agree it’s complicated, and much depends on how it would be implemented. But “involuntary euthanasia,” that’s . . . that’s murder! Doesn’t seem so complex to me! Then again, my mom is 95 so maybe I’m biased here. Unlike this Yale professor, I don’t think that the question of whether she should be murdered is a complex, nuanced issue at all!
On the other hand, my mom’s not Japanese so I guess this Narita dude isn’t coming after her—yet! Maybe I should be more worried about that psychiatrist who has a fantasy of unloading a revolver into her head. That whole “revolver” thing is particularly creepy: she’s not just thinking about shooting people, she has a particular gun in mind.
In all seriousness, political polarization is horrible, and I think it would be a better world if these sorts of people could at least feel the need to keep quiet about their violent fantasies.
But, hey, he has “signature eyeglasses with one round and one square lens.” How adorable is that, huh? He may think that killing your grandparents is “a complex, nuanced issue,” but he’s a countercultural provocateur! Touches all bases, this guy.
Saving the best for last
Near the end of the article, we get this:
At Yale, Dr. Narita sticks to courses on probability, statistics, econometrics and education and labor economics.
Probability and statistics, huh? I guess it’s hard to find a statistics teacher who doesn’t think there should be broad discussions about murdering old people.
Dude also has a paper with the charming title, “Curse of Democracy: Evidence from the 21st Century.”
Democracy really sucks, huh? You want to get rid of all the olds, but they have this annoying habit of voting all time. Seriously, that paper reads like a parody of ridiculous instrumental-variables analyses. I guess if this Yale thing doesn’t work out, he can get a job at the University of California’s John Yoo Institute for Econometrics and Democracy Studies. This work is as bad as the papers that claimed that corporate sustainability reliably predicted stock returns and that unionization reduced stock price crash risk. The only difference is that those were left-wing claims and the new paper is making a right-wing claim. Statistics is good that way—you can use it to support causal claim you want to make, just use some fancy identification strategy and run with it.
A wistful dream
Wouldn’t it be cool if they could set up a single university for all the haters? The dude who’s ok with crush children’s testicles, the guy who welcomes a broad discussion of involuntary euthanasia, the lady who shares her fantasies of unloading her revolver . . . the could all get together and write learned treatises on the failure of democracy. Maybe throw in some election deniers and covid deniers too, just to keep things interesting.
It’s interesting how the university affiliation gives this guy instant credibility. If he was just some crank with an econ PhD and a Youtube channel who wanted to talk about killing oldsters and the curse of democracy, then who would care, right? But stick him at Yale or Stanford or whatever, and you get the serious treatment. Dude’s econometrics class must be a laff riot: “The supply curve intersects 0 at T = 75 . . .”
John Yoo wasn’t giving lectures that were pro-crushing children’s testicles, and he didn’t say it was “ok”. He was asked whether a treaty or law could prevent the president from doing this, and he said that no treaty could and that whether a law could or not depending on why the president wanted to do this. I’m not saying this is great, but this seems like it’s in a different bucket.
Emily:
Of course Yoo didn’t give lectures that were pro-crushing children’s testicles! The question was asked to him, it was a tough question, and he answered it in a terrible way, hence his continuing notoriety.
But the Yale psychiatrist was gaving lectures that were pro-shooting people! I think there is a distinction between going out of your way to bring up and endorse the idea of violence without anyone even asking you having a worldview that ends in this conclusion. (Which wasn’t that it was morally permissable but rather legally permissable.)
Like, if I say that a foreign government is murdering children and that we should not stop them, I’m not endorsing child-murder. The Yoo issue was different because it was our government, but on the spectrum of violence-endorsement, I think it’s somewhere in the middle, between “it is not feasible or legal for our government to try to prevent all the murders” to “I think about murdering people and it’d be awesome.”
Emily:
I think they’re all horrible in different ways.
The Yoo thing is horrible because, first, he was actively involved in a justifying real-world torture policy, and, second, he was so committed to this policy that he made an extreme claim regarding the legality of torture. On the other hand, he didn’t personally torture anyone, he just empowered others to do it. Maybe if he were asked to personally crush a child’s testicles, he’d decline. I guess we’ll never know.
The Khilanani thing is horrible because she’s talking about shooting people. On the other hand, she’s talking about fantasies, not actions. Lots of people have violent fantasies. If she actually started shooting people, that would be another story.
The Narita thing is horrible because he’s talking with a straight face about murder, and it’s treated as this quirky culture story. On the other hand, he’s just talking about hypothetical murder, and he’s not quite advocating it, just saying it’s a “complex, nuanced issue.”
Anyway, these are just my takes. I’m not out there censoring anyone; I’m just bothered that these people are out there. The idea that students are taking Yoo’s classes, or people are getting care from a therapist who publicly shares racist violent fantasies . . . I guess it bothers me that so many people think it’s ok.
For whatever reason, all these people bother me, and to me they represent different aspects of normalizing violence. But their motivations seem different. Yoo seems like some combination of careerist and arrogant ideologue, and perhaps he sees himself as a modern-day Lenin or Trotsky in his uncompromising ideals. Khilanani and Narita seem more like attention-seekers, and perhaps they seem themselves as modern-day equivalents of civil rights movement poets or literary provocateurs such as Oscar Wilde or Jonathan Swift.
Thank you, Andrew. Your takes, as usual, are very thoughtful.
“I think it’s somewhere in the middle, between “it is not feasible or legal for our government to try to prevent all the murders” to “I think about murdering people and it’d be awesome.””
Well, the crushing testicles thing is just a stand-in for Yoo’s support of torture of detainees. He helped construct the framework to justify this and make it possible. (Google the “Torture Memos”.) So I think you’re reading is too charitable.
If I had to choose between people who have violent fantasies and people who actively support violence (torture) as it’s happening, I’ll take the fantasies.
Moral issues aside (they are important, but has been mentioned by others), what bothers me the most about scholars justifying torture is scientific integrity.
While using torture is a favorite movie trope (in genres with gratuitous violence), there is absolutely no evidence about it being effective as an interrogation technique. Quite the contrary.
Practically, the question is not a trolley problem where you contemplate doing something abhorrent in exchange for something useful, it is doing something abhorrent for no apparent benefit. A legal scholar should be able to recognize this.
This reminds me of a Margaret Atwood story in which the younger generations get so fed up (aka envious) about the wealth of the older generations that groups of young protesters start burning down retirement and nursing homes. In one scene, an older woman (who is a resident of an old folks home) is watching coverage of the protests and one participant being interviewed says that we need to “Torch the dusties” (which is the name of the short story).
I was curious about your association of euthanasia (or this instance of euthanasia discussion) with the “right wing”. I didn’t realize it had such an association. I usually associated “right-wing” with more conservative values (such as respecting your elders… presumably murdering them as at least a prima facie appearance of not respecting them… maybe Narita has a more nuanced take), and euthanasia policies seem to be passed in places that would be considered on the left-side of the spectrum (I have heard some right-wing people express conspiracy fears that those voluntary euthanasia policies are the first step to mandatory euthanasia due to governments’ control over healthcare in many places). From glancing through the article, it seems that Narita is channeling Japan’s younger generations’ frustrations with not having opportunities that they feel are being taken up by older generations (which kinda has hints of Mao’s Cultural Revolution which seemed to give more power to younger generations to exert their will over the old (at least at the surface level… it’s obviously more complicated than that)). Plus you had all those scary death panels that Democrats tried to make part of the ACA (read this sentence in a sarcastic/jokey tone) :).
Of course, maybe it’s inappropriate to use terms developed in a “western civilization” context as labels of a debate occurring in Japan (shrug). But that lady who fantasized about killing white people: definitely left-wing… I know I find provocation through violent imagery the most effective tool for “real engagement”.
p.s. There’s some joke in which the punchline builds on an auditory confusion between “euthanasia” and “youth in Asia” but I can’t remember it.
Jfa:
One of his themes is “pension reform,” which is mainstream conservative, not right wing. The bit about the “curse of democracy” and the 4chan connection are the parts I considered to be right wing. The “involuntary euthanasia” thing, that’s not right wing or left wing, it’s just creepy as hell.
The Nazis started their mass murder with disabled Germans (Aktion T-4) and since COVID escaped China in 2020 there have been widespread suggestions by people with authority in the USA and UK that Brits and Americans should just let the old and immunocompromized die rather than inconvenience the rest of the population. The ideology of useless eaters and “life unworthy of life” who burdened the rest of the population was central to Nazi genocide. So yes, what Professor Narita suggests has very strong right-wing associations.
Those “right wingers”! Supporting slavery; running around the US, Europe, and the Commonwealth advocating eugenics; slaughtering starving farmers in Ukraine and later across China; advocating for the right kill unborn babies; slaughtering and imprisoning disagreeable intellectuals; advocating for population control based on quack scientific claims like the Population Bomb; undermining access to low cost energy around the world! It’s no wonder Andrew thinks “right wingers” would want some systematic rule by which to knock off the elderly. They’ve been seeking the right to control and kill innocent people for hundreds of years!!!
Thankfully at least though they’re out there right now protecting murderers from the death penalty! You gotta give them some credit!
Ultimately though, I think the “right wingers” will come to their senses and see: the best way to support their policies isn’t to knock of elderly people who cost too much, or even do what they’re already doing, which is advocating that they be denied treatment. That’s a sensitive situation! They’ll follow the obvious course, and the course of their ancestors: slaughter the billionaires! When we have all of their money, elderly people can live in retirement homes with six round the clock full time attendants who make the $150K minimum wage forever!!
Don’t forget! They’ll be college educated attendants! Fully educated in the critical statistically proven nuances of washing out bedpans, which will be essential in keeping people alive so “right wingers” can reward their constituents with critical government jobs attending to the elderly! But they’ll be stuck at minimum wage, since by that time even four year olds will be college educated, as the horrible “right wingers” seek to keep university attendance growing and keep the grad rate skyrocketing.
Chipmunk, if hearing about the Nazi murder of disabled people makes you this defensive, I think you should think long and hard about the life choices and friends which brought you to this point.
“Chipmunk, if hearing about the Nazi murder of disabled people makes you this defensive, I think you should think long and hard about the life choices and friends which brought you to this point.”
I’m not at all sensitive about Nazis. It’s silly ignorance in claiming they were “right wing” that’s so disturbing.
Sean: the Nazis were a left wing socialist party. The fact that they hated the Soviets is irrelevant. The Chinese came to hate the Soviets as well, and now they’re embracing Putin, so I guess that tells you about the left. The fact that they were racists who tried to exterminate the Jews also puts them square in the left wing canon, as the Soviets and the CCP sought to do, and Putin and the modern CCP still seek to do.
Sean: if you’re a leftist, you’re aligning with the mass murders, not me.
Correction:
The soviets and the CCP sought to eliminate racial groups, and Putin and the CCP still seek to eliminate or quash some racial groups. (not the Jews, though, as my comment mistakenly implied)
Chipmunk: The Nazis were not left wing. The inclusion of “socialist” in their name is akin to the inclusion of “Democratic People’s Republic” in the official name of North Korea or the Congo. The Nazis were patently an example of right-wing fascism.
Note: I’m not arguing “right vs. left wing” here. The USSR’s government famously *was* authoritarian socialist, and did plenty of bad things too. I just never understood the absurdist claim that the Nazi Party was “leftist,” it’s so patently ridiculous (and relies on a second grader’s grasp of language without the slightest appreciation for context, nuance, and history) that it calls into question everything else the author is claiming.
Sean wrote: ” there have been widespread suggestions by people with authority in the USA and UK that Brits and Americans should just let the old and immunocompromized die rather than inconvenience the rest of the population.”
Well, here in Japan, the month that Japan saw the largest number of Covid deaths (January 2023, over 10,000 deaths) was the month that the Japanese government decided to downgrade it’s Covid response.
In real life, I think it’s just pig-headedness on the part of the LDP (the ruling party here) i.e. they had already decided that they wanted to downgrade the response, and, as in other things, have been careful to not let themselves be confused by facts. But it sure smells like they’re real happy about having to pay out less in pensions and retirement benefits.
*: It’s a long story, but the LDP has a humongous majority in both houses in Japan’s parliament, and can do whatever they please for the next 3 years and they’re ramming through a variety of extremely unpopular programs. The last I checked, the current PM’s popularity was around the lowest any PM’s popularity has ever been. But the LDP seems to think that people will have forgetten about how pig-headed they’ve been the next time elections roll around. Who knows….
I can’t comment on the justification of different COVID responses in Japan because I don’t speak or read Japanese, I don’t have Japanese friends, and nobody is paying me to follow COVID policies around the world. I can comment on justifications in the rich English-speaking countries.
It’s not clear to me that what you are discussing is a left or right issue. Eugenics had quite a “progressive” following in the early 1900s. Both communist Russia and China had an ebb and flow eugenic policies. Forced abortions and sterilizations of disabled people were some of the outcomes. So the idea that society should “do something” about “useless eaters” is only limited to the right-wing is just not true. (Of course, this is all assuming that there is utility in describing things as left and right and that what defines those terms is stable through time.)
Stepping away from the ugly reality of actual history and practice, there are plenty of ways to specifically dichotomize political philosophies that roughly correspond with “left vs right.” If we’re thinking about the Anglo Edmund Burke conservatism and Thomas Paine liberalism, then both would hold the proposal in question to be outrageous. However, Burke would probably say that state sponsored social security is a net negative for everyone, and would advocate for private charities. The extent to which private charity exceeds or falls short of social security would be said to be a more true reflection of societal valuation of the elderly’s lives, and it could be argued that this has some continuity with “let the elderly die”.
On the other hand, we can put Benito Mussolini in one pole and Karl Marx in the other. In that paradigm, Mussolini would be explicitly on the side of murdering the elderly and Marx would be explicitly on the side of supporting them. Marx’s exists (in principle) to maximize the welfare of the many; Mussolini’s society exists explicitly to maximize its force, for which the non-working serve no purpose.
I agree that there is lots of convergence in practice; real people and societies fail to match their stated values. However, seeing the support of nonworking people as an undue burden rather than a primary purpose of the state consistently matches political philosophies identified with the right.
Yeah, I don’t get that either. In the US currently there’s a greater preference for Euthanasia among the left. And since it’s been brought up in the debates above, facism and national socialism were from the progressive wing and not, for example, the conservative Reagonite tradition. It’s not the Pope or Evangelicals calling for Euthanasia typically.
@somebody: I’m not sure I’d agree with most of your comment. Marx was more about getting resources from one group and giving it to another. It’s been a while since I read Kapital or the Manifesto but I never got the sense that “maximizing welfare” was at the top of mind for Marx like it was for, say, Bentham (who (applying today’s labels) at the time he lived would have been considered left while today he might be considered right). I think your implication that support for private charity over state funding is in continuity with “letting the elderly die” ignores the cost-benefit calculations that state sponsored healthcare use in making decisions, which denying treatment because it’s too expensive could be seen as having some continuity with “letting the elderly die”. And again, the progressive movement and other dalliences of “left” regimes with eugenics is quite a counterexample to your claims about how “the left” views the duties of the state towards the nonworking and/or disabled. I just think that the urge to label something as left or right is often not that useful and blinds avenues of inquiry and, in this case, is not even appropriate.
Based on Das Kapital and Wage Labor and Capital, the two works from Marx that I’ve read, this is just wrong. As far as I can tell, the idea that Marx was about redistributive policies is just a popular misconception.
Between “any treatment at all is too expensive” and “some treatments can be too expensive”, the former is obviously more aligned with letting the elderly die.
Once again, I am talking about political philosophy and ideology. China has embraced privately owned corporations; that does not mean that privately owned corporations are not against Maoism and Marxism. The fascist values are thus stated:
“In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution… The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature’s plans, which care only for the species and seem ready to sacrifice the individual. It is much to be feared that the last word of democracy thus understood (and let me hasten to add that it is susceptible of a different interpretation) would be a form of society in which a degenerate mass would have no thought beyond that of enjoying the ignoble pleasures of the vulgar “
I’m not trying to play some kind of blame game here. It’s just that there’s a very clear IDEOLOGICAL alignment.
Reminds me of some Americans suggesting that 56 million senior citizens should brave a 5% infection fatality rate to get the economy running normally in March 2020
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/
For some people, comparatively small economic adjustments just seem impossible compared to massive death and suffering.
Dude’s econometrics class must be a laff riot: “The supply curve intersects 0 at T = 75 . . .”
It took me a while to get it. +1 I guess.
Hi Andrew
I watched one of the most dignified, caring, kind people die a slow and horrible humiliating death over the course of 6 months when she had a second stroke. That person was my mother who at 94 suffered a stroke and had to go into aged care. I went to the aged care home almost every day to be with her, to try to work out what she wanted and what she needed. After some months I withdrew all her life-prolonging medication, and all that was left was things to make her comfortable. I couldn’t really ask her if this was OK with her, because despite being a doctor herself, she was not able to understand what was going on. I understood though that she needed her diaper changed twice a day and sometimes the staff couldn’t attend for a while because of urgent cases, so she ended up with horrible, painful, red raw skin from contact with her own urine and faces, and this was not from deliberate neglect, just the way things were given the staffing levels. In the end I knew she had to die, and I hastened her death by withdrawing that medication. Judge me as you wish. If involuntary euthanasia was available I would, as her legal guardian, likely have used it to end her suffering. I hope and pray your 95 year old mother never goes through this but instead dies fairly quickly when her time comes, surrounded by those who love her, including you. I have never gotten over watching my beloved mother suffer physically and psychologically for more than half a year. To what end?
Tim:
Good point. I hadn’t thought about involuntary euthanasia in that way. I’d thought of “involuntary euthanasia” as killing someone against their wishes (which seemed to me the implications of Narita’s use of the term), but I see your point, that it could refer to letting someone die without being able to obtain their consent, which can be a different thing entirely.
My first thought was of the Terri Schiavo case, where she could not give consent (and would never be able to do so).
If you are used to be in the US it will be difficult to imagine how easy it is to meaninglessly prolong someone’s life in Japan.
My maternal grandfather had fibrosis in the lungs about 10 years ago that gradually deteriorated to the level that his O2 in the blood is too low even with assisted O2 breathing.
It’s a slow assured death. No person can live without breathing. There’s no chance of recovering. The deterioration is one directional.
What did my mother, her sister and my grandmother did then? Put him in an induced coma that he *knew* he will never return from. They put the machine directly from his neck, piercing through the skin not from the mouth to the throat, that’s how a real respirator actually works.
And that’s what everyone does because it’s so cheap, because only 10% is what they have to pay for it, and because no one wants to face the reality and accept someone’s eventual death. The rest comes from the tax. Currently there are 2.1 working age individuals per each elderly person over 65. In other words, I paid roughly 45% of what costed during his 1-month coma, and I had no say. Realistically speaking, though, I would not have said anything so blatantly about killing my own grandfather.
It will be different in the US because the healthcare here is shit and *you* have to pay the (almost illegally ridiculous amount of) cost, but you can at least be realistic about the cost. Here everything is money, even life, which I believe is too extreme though.
In other words the US already has the system for mass mandatory euthanasia, only for the poor. If you don’t have money, you must die.
What is the problem in Japan is that the doctors get no legal protection for stopping the treatment. For example when the family asks the doctor to stop the treatment and the doctor stop the treatment, but the family can retroactively change their minds after the person died and can sue the doctor. So the issue is real.
there is no need to introduce “involuntary euthanasia” in that scenario. standard rules of judicial decision-making for incompetent patients would allow euthanasia there, supposing that voluntary euthanasia were legal.
Someone should send him the following paper:
“Should We Sacrifice the Utilitarians First?”
https://philpapers.org/rec/SMISWS-2
Although I think it’s still a shit-take on the issue, I didn’t read your quote as advocating murder, more like suggesting a public service campaign to convince old people to kill themselves for the good of society. I don’t agree with that, but it’s not the same as gas chambers.
One problem is that once you suggest that marginalized people should kill themselves, some people will hear “and if they don’t cooperate we should force them.” Any bright high-schooler should be able to explain how this works with examples from the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. (I am told that contemporary Japan already has problems where eg. accused criminals are strongly encourage to confess, and if suspects refuse to do their patriotic duty the police take them into a back room and persuade them).
I can’t find the full text of Khilanani’s speech online, but note her past-tense wording that she “*had* fantasies”, emphasis added. Also, I did not find any quotes from her suggesting that it would be permissible to act on those fantasies or that other people would be right to act out those fantasies. Is it possible that she began with a shocking fantasy to illustrate her emotional state at a certain point in time, and then used the rest of her speech to address the cause of her anger and propose constructive, non-violent solutions? I certainly think there is a big difference between “I once fantasized about X” and “we should do X”.
By contrast Narita can be clearly seen as advocating for mass suicide when he says things like “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear.” It seems like now he’s trying to walk it back to “just asking questions” about “nuance”, but that doesn’t obliterate his earlier statements.
This! I was a bit shocked to see such bandwagon jumping in regard to the Khilanani thing. Ditto with the description of her quote as being racist. I’m white and had similar thoughts when I watching the event film about Emmet Till, to name just one historical example that might trigger such thoughts.
The whole thing plays into the kind of outraged panic journalism that this blog normally critiques.
Adede, Thomas:
I don’t have a lot of confidence in a psychiatrist who goes around in public sharing her racist, violent fantasies. But that’s just my take. I wasn’t at her lecture so who knows how it went in context.
It’s also kind of amazing that she gave a talk called, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” I wonder if she ran that title by the seminar organizers ahead of time??
Andrew –
> I wasn’t at her lecture so who knows how it went in context.
I do think that hit takes without context should be generally be avoided – but
not sure how much context in this case makes anything clearer:
“My speaking metaphorically about my own anger was a method for people to reflect on negative feelings,” Khilanani added. “To normalize negative feelings. Because if you don’t, it will turn into a violent action.”
https://nypost.com/2021/06/07/nyc-psychiatrist-defends-out-of-context-fantasy-about-shooting-white-people/
Joshua:
Sure, but the title of the talk was, “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind.” As I said of Gary Becker, if you go out of your way to be provocative, you’re shouldn’t be surprised if you provoke people.
I dunno how much that matters. As the NYT article points out, no one in the USA has heard of him before (as indeed I had not). And it links him to other figures in Japan who have few or no such credentials. So whatever the benefit of such affiliations are, it appears to be neither sufficient in America nor necessary in Japan.
It’s also worth noting for context that while Japan has had a light COVID experience, it has its own concerns: it’s approaching its second decade of population shrinkage and has never been more top-heavy in terms of aging, with no demographic reversal in sight (locking in decline for the rest of this century); per capita income is utterly stagnant; young people have similar complaints to what you hear in the USA but much worse (aside from rent, where Tokyo is better off than SF/NYC/etc); the East Asian security situation hasn’t been this bad for quite a while; and COVID cut off foreign contact in a way that may have increased involution for decades to come. Japan may not be experiencing anything we can easily interpret in US political analogies (eg they’re much more racist but the racism against the burakumin or ethnic Koreans never manifests visibly or gets covered much here; they have many loonies like emperor-worshippers but nothing we recognize as QAnon, etc), but they’re still in a weird place.
As an example, take the assassination of Shinzo Abe in broad daylight at a speech using (even more shockingly) a homemade gun last July. Not an attempted assassination like Kavanaugh’s, a completed one. Abe was one of the longest-serving Japanese PMs and one of the most influential politicians worldwide of the past 2 decades, so, kinda a big deal. The failson assassin had grievances against the Moonies, murdering Abe simply because Moonie leaders were harder to find, and the response of Japan was to… rally around the flag and ignore everything he said for obvious reasons – wait no, actually, it was ‘give him everything he asked for and more by purging the Moonies in every way possible, attempting to destroy Abe’s party over their Moonie alliance (neither unknown nor scuzzier than alliances other parties have made), and make him a public hero’. This is especially bizarre when you reflect that if there was a time for Japan to be hysterical over the Moonies (or new age Buddho-christian syncretic cults in general), it was, like, the 1980s and maybe early 1990s, almost 40 years ago; not now that the Rev Sun is dead (2012) and they’ve been in decline for decades and divided by squabbles and feuding heirs. I have certainly been surprised by the reaction, because I figured “he probably has some valid points about the cult, but who’s going to listen to a confessed murderer caught on film, especially in peaceful Japan which abhors gun violence?” So, not exactly a *normal* moment in Japan right now.
Japan didn’t do a very good job of discouraging political assassins in the prewar era either.
One of the LDP’s main policies is boosting the Self Defence Forces, so a cruel irony of Abe’s assasination is that the bloke who did it learned about firearms when he was in the Self Defence Forces.
But, yes. Prime ministers have a long history of being prime targets for various folks with axes to grind, a history that is probably longer that you thought, since disgruntled ex-samurai of the Meiji period, like the disgruntled rightists of the Taisho and early Showa periods, were also into assasinating politicians.
Irrelevant because many of those assassins were effectively cut-outs for parts of the establishment or otherwise advocating popular policies which were live debates of the day and part of the imperializing process; there is no parallel here.
Abe had his political problems, of course, but there was no group interested in disposing of a retired PM, nor was he despised by the public, nor were the Moonies anywhere near the top of anyone’s priority list or inextricably connected to a major strategic shift like remilitarizing. (Remember, a decent chunk of the Japanese population wasn’t even alive during the Aum Shinrikyo attacks 28 years ago, and cults – already generally in decline – were pretty severely cracked down upon and the matter considered dealt with.) The LDP/Moonie connections are not any more news than, say, the Moonie/Republican Party connections; you could find material even in English if you cared, just no one did until suddenly they decided that the assassin bloke made some excellent points and maybe Abe was asking for it. A strange development, all around, and oddly sanguinary, like this professor’s comments on the elderly.
(On an anime note, I recently watched _Legend of the Galactic Heroes_, which is very highly rated. I think it’s rubbish, and here’s one reason why. One of the protagonist’s sayings is, as it happens, reflecting the fact that the original novels were written back in the 1980s-1990s & features a stereotypical evil cult, “cults never changed history” or something to that effect. He is ultimately killed by the cult, which does change their universe’s history; and here we have another cult which has changed Japanese history, even if indirectly, by helping topple the LDP & eliminating a statesman! The series doesn’t seem to realize how stupid such a claim is or how it is obviously untrue, in-universe or out-of-universe, and that’s emblematic of much of _Legend_. Greatly overrated.)
Lighten up: we’re quite aware that the pre-war assasinations were a different story.
Your second paragraph starts out quite wrong from the standpoint of someone who has been reading the Japanese press over the past few years. (And I doubt there are a lot of people who know about the US Republican Party Mooonie connections, even though the material is there.)
For example, Abe wasn’t merely a “retired PM”. He was still active as an elected politician, and one of the most powerful within the LDP. And the Moonies had not been cracked down on as a cult. At all. And lots of people despised Abe, since he was clearly dirty. (Abe clearly had his hands in (a) the sale (oops, give-away) of government land to a right-wing Osaka private grade-school, (b) the illegal use of campaign funds for the Sakura no Kai (his support group) parties, and (c) the campaing-law violations in Hiroshima Prefecture that put his minister of justice in jail. And probably was involved with the corruption associated with the Olympics, although that story is still just beginning to percolate up the political hierarchy. (Sapporo and Hokkaido (both residents and politicians) are ill-advisedly gung-ho about hosting a Winter Olympics, but the IOC is going to be giving Japan a wide berth for the next century or so thanks to the LDP business as usual (corruption up the wazoo) approach to running the last Olympics.))
Also, the LDP/moonie connection was not widely known by the Japanese public. There were activists working on the problem, trying to get relief for the families financially destroyed by the moonies, but that was out of sight/out of mind to everyone else. Until one of the victims of that predatory cult took it into his hands to try to do something about it. (Your “suddenly they decided that the assassin bloke made some excellent points” is almost correct (except that it should be “suddenly _realized_”), but no one thinks “Abe was asking for it”. Even people who despise Abe are nothing other than sad that he’s never going to be called to task for his corruption and never going to jail for the crimes he committed.
(I don’t do sci-fi or anime, so you’ll have to talk to someone else about that.)
FWIW, the LDP is in bed and cahoots with the moonies. It’s very bad, very ugly, and very problematic. The moonies are, of course, a sick cult (and, amusingly, anti-Japanese(!)), but they were brought to Japan by Abe’s uncle and other LDP politicians at the time because they liked the moonies anti-gay and other right-wing attitudes. Fast forward to the 2020s, and a number of current LDP politicians have signed statements promising to support moonie policies in exchange for the help of a small army of “volunteers” during election campaigns. Others received such support without (as far as is known) signing such a statement. Many of these would not have been elected without this help. This includes several cabinet members, a couple of whom were forced to resign from the cabinet, but some still remain in the cabinet, and none resigned from parliament.
(The moonies have been quite effective in recruiting and bleeding financially dry emotionally unstable folks, and apparently sending much of that extracted money to Korea. We think cults are a joke, but they are brilliant at smelling out and sucking in folks who are unhappy about something.)
Also, Abe left behind a raft of unresolved corruption cases (an LDP minister of justice (!!!) is currently in jail, convicted of election fraud), and my best guess is that Abe won’t be looked on well by history.
His Yale credentials are perhaps not necessary here in Japan, but they do a lot to boost his credibility, especially since people not in academia don’t have a clear understanding of what an assistant professor is an thus assume that he is a real Yale professor.
I am a bit surprised that with all this cold-necessity talk by Yale and Stanford about removing undesirables, namely the elderly and some white people, no one has yet brought up Galton, Fisher and Karl Pearson. They were the founders, not just followers, of the eugenics movement. Indeed, many of the early procedures and techniques in statistics were motivated by eugenics considerations. This is of course well known and well documented, albeit the racism is not to be discussed in polite company.
I’ve known a number of people with phds from Yale, in a variety of disciplines, and they’ve all been deeply weird in one way or another. (This is above and beyond the deep weirdness necessary to get a phd in the first place)
Taking this farther back, William Osler (inevitably titled “The Great ” ) at Johns Hopkins drew considerable flack fir his suggestion that men over 60 were useless and should be euthanized. Somewher around 1906… https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/in-1905-a-canadian-hero-said-old-people-were-useless-and-sparked-an-internet-sized-public-shaming/wcm/d5ab86cf-3409-4e0f-8adf-ddd6c6d74b51/amp/
Andrew,
“Involuntary” here does not necessarily mean murder? Someone who cannot survive without medical intervention, and is killed, is also involuntary euthanasia also?
You wrote:
“Bring those Ivy League kids down to the level of the rabble on 4chan!”
This is way more accurate than you thought: The bloke who does 2chan (in Japan) and 4chan in the US (“Hiroyuki”) is a buddy of Yusuke Narita and they often appear together in YouTube videos in Japan. (When I asked the local expert on these sorts of things about Yusuke Narita, the first video she pulled up had the two of them.)
David:
Yes, the 4chan guy is mentioned in the news article. That’s why I mentioned it here!
First I think Hiroyuki is not Narita’s buddy, more likely just a colleague. Second if you know 4 chan, I think Narita won this game.
J,
I think part of the problem is the idea that spreading hatred is a “game.”
Is his view that different from this oldie-but-goody? https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/29/us/gov-lamm-asserts-elderly-if-very-ill-have-duty-to-die.html
I’m less optimistic than you are on whether entering the real world will inhibit the power of those from wealthy families who attended elite universities. We’ve already seen in other areas that when such people enter the workforce while holding odd ideas with no evidence base, they still enter positions of power thanks to their social networks (in the old, non-technical usage of that term) and then set about spreading those odd ideas through force majeure.
FWIW, our local expert spent several hours watching leftist Japanese YouTubers discussing this. Her theory is that Narita has been calling for Japanese, especially of the elder statesperson and/or repsected senior political analyst persuasion, to retire earlier (actually, it’s not retiring (since these blokes are often in their 80s) but withdrawing from active service), but got overly energetic about making said argument and put his foot in his mouth.
Japan does have a phenomenon, especially blatant, obnoxious, and problematic in political, especially right wing of the LDP flavor, circles in which mid-level politicians distribute favors to their underlings, and the longer they hang in there, the more they accumulate underlings who owe them debts of gratitude, and the more power they accumulate. Then, in their powerful old age, they sling around that power, even though they’ve gotten well past their sell-by date, causing all sorts of problems. Yoshihiro Mori and Taro Aso are the two prototypical examples. (These two, being a tad right of center, keep putting their feet in their mouths (usually saying something grossly sexist), getting raked over the coals by the press for a while, and then going back to business as usual (Mori had to resign from his position in charge of the Olympics, but Aso remains one of the most powerful politicians in Japan).
Apparently Narita is particularly irritated by the bloke who hosts/moderates/runs the (long-running: since 1987) all-night TV political discussion program Asa Mada Terebi (“TV Until Morning”), who is either having hearing problems, has stopped doing his homework (thus not understanding the issues being discussed), or is just plain losing it. I’ve seen brief clips from recent broadcasts, and it has gotten quite embarrassing; he used to be really good.
The last time Taro Aso put his foot in his mouth (a month or two ago), one of the leftist YouTubers branded him “King of Rogai”. Rogai is a politically incorrect Japanese terming meaning “problems caused by old people; harm to society by gerontocracy”. (To quote WWWJDIC, a seriously superb online Japanese-English dictionary.)
Japan also has a problem with elderly drivers causing accidents, but recently has taken to requiring folks my age and older to take actual driving tests, and finds that about 20% of us fail and get their licenses cancelled. (I turned in my Japanese driving license when I reached 65; it was a “Gold” license: I never had an accident, moving violation, citation, or even a parking ticket for the almost 30 years I maintained it. Of course, that’s because I’ve never driven in Japan…)
Andrew,
>I think part of the problem is the idea that spreading hatred is a “game.”
Fundamentally I think there’s no hatred and therefore there’s no spreading hatred in this game.
Simply, he used a method and achieved his purpose. I just think that’s it.
Yusuke Narita seems to have a fundamentally distorted perception. His details are hardly available outside of the Japanese-speaking community, but he grew up in a poor family where his father disappeared leaving behind debts, and he had to handle bankruptcy procedures for his mother who fell due to a subarachnoid haemorrhage when he was a teenager. His brother (pretty normal guy unlike Yusuke btw) said he was mostly absent from middle and high schools because he couldn’t wake up in the morning.
In a previous interview before that remark, he stated he’s living while constantly wishing for death. Explaining the value of life to someone who doesn’t even cling to his own might not work. He’s quite open to having conversations with just about anyone, so maybe you can talk to him directly.