From: imbibe@mindspring.com   
      
   A Filmmaker Imagines a Japan Where the Elderly Volunteer to Die   
   By Motoko Rich, June 17, 2022, NY Times   
      
   TOKYO — The Japanese film director Chie Hayakawa was germinating the idea   
   for a screenplay when she decided to test out her premise on elderly friends   
   of her mother and other acquaintances. Her question: If the government   
   sponsored a euthanasia program    
   for people 75 and over, would you consent to it?   
      
   “Most people were very positive about it,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “They   
   didn’t want to be a burden on other people or their children.”   
      
   To Ms. Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of   
   Japan’s culture and demographics. In her first feature-length film, “Plan   
   75,” which won a special distinction at the Cannes Film Festival this month,   
   the government of a    
   near-future Japan promotes quiet institutionalized deaths and group burials   
   for lonely older people, with cheerful salespeople pitching them on the idea   
   as if hawking travel insurance.   
      
   “The mind-set is that if the government tells you to do something, you must   
   do it,” Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo before the film’s   
   opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others,   
   she said, are cultural    
   imperatives “that make sure you don’t stick out in a group setting.”   
      
   With a lyrical, understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa has taken on one of the   
   biggest elephants in the room in Japan: the challenges of dealing with the   
   world’s oldest society.   
      
   Close to one-third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has   
   more centenarians per capita than any other nation. One out of five people   
   over 65 in Japan live alone, and the country has the highest proportion of   
   people suffering from    
   dementia. With a rapidly declining population, the government faces potential   
   pension shortfalls and questions about how the nation will care for its   
   longest-living citizens.   
      
   Aging politicians dominate government, and the Japanese media emphasizes rosy   
   stories about happily aging fashion gurus or retail accommodations for older   
   customers. But for Ms. Hayakawa, it was not a stretch to imagine a world in   
   which the oldest    
   citizens would be cast aside in a bureaucratic process — a strain of thought   
   she said could already be found in Japan.   
      
   Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but it occasionally arises in grisly   
   criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a center   
   for people with disabilities outside Tokyo, claiming that such people should   
   be euthanized because    
   they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.”   
      
   The horrifying incident provided a seed of an idea for Ms. Hayakawa. “I   
   don’t think that was an isolated incident or thought process within Japanese   
   society,” she said. “It was already floating around. I was very afraid   
   that Japan was turning    
   into a very intolerant society.”   
      
   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 movie did not   
   seem dystopian. “She’s just telling it like it is,” Ms. Shoji said.   
   “She’s telling us: ‘   
   This is where we’re headed, actually.’”   
      
   That potential future is all the more believable in a society where some   
   people are driven to death by overwork, said Yasunori Ando, an associate   
   professor at Tottori University who studies spirituality and bioethics.   
      
   “It is not impossible to think of a place where euthanasia is accepted,”   
   he said.   
      
   Ms. Hayakawa has spent the bulk of her adult years contemplating the end of   
   life from a very personal vantage. When she was 10, she learned that her   
   father had cancer, and he died a decade later. “That was during my formative   
   years, so I think it had    
   an influence on my perspective toward art,” she said.   
      
   The daughter of civil servants, Ms. Hayakawa started drawing her own picture   
   books and writing poems from a young age. In elementary school, she fell in   
   love with “Muddy River,” a Japanese drama about a poor family living on a   
   river barge. The movie,    
   directed by Kohei Oguri, was nominated for best foreign language film at the   
   Academy Awards in 1982.   
      
   “The feelings I couldn’t put into words were expressed in that movie,”   
   Ms. Hayakawa said. “And I thought, I want to make movies like that as   
   well.”   
      
   She eventually applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New   
   York, believing that she would get a better grounding in moviemaking in the   
   United States. But given her modest English abilities, she decided within a   
   week of arriving on    
   campus to switch to the photography department, because she figured she could   
   take pictures by herself.   
      
   Her instructors were struck by her curiosity and work ethic. “If I mentioned   
   a film offhandedly, she would go home and go rent it, and if I mentioned an   
   artist or exhibition, she would go research it and have something to say about   
   it,” said Tim Maul,   
    a photographer and one of Ms. Hayakawa’s mentors. “Chie was someone who   
   really had momentum and a singular drive.”   
      
   After graduating in 2001, Ms. Hayakawa gave birth to her two children in New   
   York. In 2008, she and her husband, the painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to   
   return to Tokyo, where she began working at WOWOW, a satellite broadcaster,   
   helping to prepare    
   American films for Japanese viewing.   
      
   At 36, she enrolled in a one-year film program at a night school in Tokyo   
   while continuing to work during the day. “I felt like I couldn’t put my   
   full energy into child raising or filmmaking,” she said. Looking back, she   
   said, “I would tell    
   myself it’s OK, just enjoy raising your children. You can start filmmaking   
   at a later time.”   
      
   For her final project, she made “Niagara,” about a young woman who learns,   
   as she is about to depart the orphanage where she grew up, that her   
   grandfather had killed her parents, and that her grandmother, who she thought   
   had died in a car accident    
   with her parents, was alive.   
      
      
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