A director imagines a Japan where the elderly volunteer to die

TOKYO — Japanese film director Chie Hayakawa was hatching an idea for a screenplay when she decided to test her premise on her mother’s elderly friends and other acquaintances.

His question: If the government sponsored a euthanasia program for people 75 and older, would you consent?

“Most people were very positive about it,” Hayakawa said.

“They didn’t want to be a load for other people or their children.”

For Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of Japan’s culture and demographics.

In his first feature film, “Plan 75,” which won special distinction at the Cannes Film Festival this month, the government of a near-future Japan promotes silent and institutionalized deaths and group funerals for lonely seniors, with cheerful vendors promoting the idea as if they were selling travel insurance.

“The mindset is that if the government tells you to do something, you should do it,” Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo ahead of the film’s Japanese premiere on Friday.

Follow the rules and not impose to others, he said, are cultural imperatives “that ensure you don’t stand out in a group setting.”

With a lyrical and understated touch, Hayakawa has taken on one of the biggest elephants in the room in Japan:

the challenges of dealing with the world’s oldest society.

About a third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other nation.

one in five people over the age of 65 in Japan live alone, and the country has the highest proportion of people with dementia.

With a rapidly declining population, the government faces potential pension deficits and questions about how the nation will care for its oldest citizens.

Aging politicians dominate government, and the Japanese media emphasize optimistic stories about happily aging fashion gurus or commercial establishments for older customers.

But for Hayakawa, it was no exaggeration to imagine a world in which older citizens would be sidelined in a bureaucratic process, a school of thought she said could already be found in Japan.

Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but occasionally emerges in lurid criminal contexts.

In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a center for people with disabilities on the outskirts of Tokyo, claiming those people should be euthanized because they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.”

The horrible incident provided the seed of an idea for Hayakawa.

“I don’t think it was an isolated incident or thought process within Japanese society,” he said.

“I was already floating. She was very afraid that Japan was becoming a society very intolerant”.

To Kaori Shoji, who has written about film and the arts for The Japan Times and the BBC and saw an earlier version of “Plan 75,” the film did not seem dystopian.

“She’s just telling it like it is,” Shoji said.

“She’s telling us, ‘This is where we’re headed, really.'”

That potential future is even more believable in a society where some people die from overwork, said Yasunori Ando, ​​an associate professor at Tottori University who studies spirituality and bioethics.

“It’s not impossible to think of a place where euthanasia is accepted,” he said.

Hayakawa has spent most of his adult life looking at the end of life from a very personal perspective.

When he was 10 years old, he learned that his father had cancer and died a decade later.

“That was during my formative yearsso I think it influenced my perspective on art,” he said.

The daughter of civil servants, Hayakawa began drawing her own picture books and writing poems at a very young age.

In elementary school, he fell in love with “Muddy River,” a Japanese drama about a poor family living on a river barge.

The film, directed by Kohei Oguri, was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1982 Academy Awards.

“Feelings that I couldn’t put into words were expressed in that movie,” Hayakawa said.

And I thought, me too I want to make films like this”.

Eventually, he applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, believing he would get a better grounding in filmmaking in the United States.

But given his modest English skills, he decided, a week after arriving on campus, to transfer to the department of Photography, because she thought she could take pictures by herself.

His instructors were impressed by his curiosity and work ethic.

“If he casually mentioned a movie, he would go home and rent it, and if it mentioned an artist or an exhibition, he would go investigate and have something to say about it,” said Tim Maul, a photographer and one of the mentors of Hayakawa.

“Chie was someone who really had drive and a singular drive.”

After graduating in 2001, Hayakawa gave birth to her two sons in New York.

In 2008, she and her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working on WOWa satellite broadcaster, helping prepare American films for viewing in Japan.

At 36, he enrolled in a year-long film program at a night school in Tokyo while continuing to work during the day.

“I felt like I couldn’t put all my energy into raising kids or making movies,” she said.

Looking back, he said:

“I would tell myself that it’s okay, just enjoy raising your children. You can start making movies later.”

For her final project, she did “Niagara,” about a young woman who finds out, as she is about to leave the orphanage where she grew up, that her grandfather had killed her parents and that her grandmother, who she believed had died in an accident car with her parents, she was alive.

He submitted the film to the Cannes Film Festival in a student work category and was surprised when it was selected for screening in 2014.

At the festival, Hayakawa met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film publicist, who subsequently invited Hayakawa to make a short film on the theme of Japan 10 years in the future.

It would be part of an anthology produced by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the famous Japanese director.

Hayakawa had already been developing the idea of ​​”Plan 75″ as a feature film, but decided to make an abridged version for the anthology, “Ten Years Japan.”

While writing the script, he woke up every morning at 4 to watch movies.

She cites Taiwanese director Edward Yang, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and Krzysztof Kieslowskia Polish art film director, as important influences.

After work, she would write for a couple of hours in a cafe while her husband looked after their children, a relatively rare occurrence in Japan, where women still bear a disproportionate burden of housework and childcare.

After Hayakawa’s 18-minute contribution to the anthology surfaced, Mizuno-Gray and her husband, Jason Gray, worked with her to develop a lengthy script.

When filming began, it was in the midst of the pandemic.

“There were countries with COVID where they were not prioritizing the lives of the elderly,” Hayakawa said.

“Fact is stranger than fiction in a way.”

Hayakawa decided to take a more subtle tone for the feature film and inject more sense of hope.

He also added several narrative threads, including one about an elderly woman and her tight-knit group of friends, and another about a Filipino caregiver who takes a job at one of the euthanasia centers.

It included scenes from the Filipino community in Japan, Hayakawa said, as a contrast to the mainstream culture.

“Their culture is that if someone is in trouble, you help them right away,” Hayakawa said.

“I think that is something that Japan is losing”.

Stefanie Arianne, the daughter of a Japanese father and a Filipino mother who plays Maria, the caregiver, said Hayakawa had urged her to show emotional restraint.

In one scene, Arianne said, she had the instinct to shed tears, “but with Chie, I really he dared me not to cry”.

Hayakawa said that he did not want to make a film that simply considered euthanasia to be right or wrong.

“I think what kind of ending to a life and what kind of death do you want is a very personal decision,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s such a black and white thing.”

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