Japan is ageing faster than any other country in the world, boasting one of the highest life expectancies. Women typically live to 87 and men to 81. Almost 40% of its population is over 60, a figure expected to continue expanding as the population shrinks. Couples in Japan now have an average of just 1.3 children – far below the 2.1 children societies need to remain stable.
Japan once placed its elderly at the top of the social hierarchy, even holding a national holiday to honour their contributions to society. But no longer: Fumio Kishida, the country’s prime minister, recently said the ageing population poses an “urgent risk to society”. Announcing a new government agency to address the issue, he said: “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”
In her new film, Plan 75, Chie Hayakawa posits a policy the agency could try: voluntary euthanasia for the over-75s. Instead of being burden, a bother, a resource-draining nuisance, anyone aged 75 can simply place themselves in the calm, efficient hands of the state and painlessly slip away. Those with money and family can do so at the end of a two-day premium package, after spa treatments and special meals. Those without are given enough cash to pay for basic funeral costs before lying down on a campbed in a dark, silent room divided by curtains where they quietly acquiesce to being gassed to death.
“My family will be so proud of me,” chirrups one elderly woman in an advert for the scheme. “It’s something we should think about,” another says equably to her friends, as they enjoy a dish of fruit together after a karaoke session.
Shot in natural light, in the present day, in almost real time and in an almost documentary style, Plan 75 slowly reels audiences in, focusing on the impact the scheme has on a small group of people across society as the horror builds. It opens with a radio reporting that a gunman has opened fire in an old people’s care home – the latest in an epidemic of violence targeted at the elderly. The reporter goes smoothly on to discuss the roll-out of the government’s euthanasia scheme. “The whole world is watching its success,” he says.
If this sounds like gothic horror or dystopian sci-fi, Hayakawa begs to differ. “This is human drama,” she says. “It’s too real to be sci-fi. I specifically made this film to avoid a programme like this becoming a reality.” The scheme is still a fiction and, as yet, there hasn’t been any real-life, age-related violence in Japan. But Hayakawa has been watching Japanese society for almost a decade and has been increasingly concerned and angry about its direction. “A state-sanctioned solution like Plan 75,” she says, “is far from impossible in a country that is growing ever more intolerant to socially weak people: the elderly, the disabled and the people who have no money.”
Over the past decade, she adds, the Japanese concept of self-responsibility has become an obsession. “It means that we have to take care of ourselves instead of relying on the government or being a burden to society – and it has created a kind of hatred towards the elderly and the weak.” The pressure, she says, comes from the government and the media. “They create shame among those who need welfare, meaning those who need it don’t apply for it – which makes their lives even more desperate. But it also infects the younger generations, building up a huge resentment towards all older people.”
Michi Kakutani, the 78-year-old woman played by Chieko Baisho who is at the heart of the film, is so desperate to avoid claiming welfare that she accepts a nightmarish job directing traffic around motorway roadworks in the dead of night. Having signed up to Plan 75, she is given her weekly 15-minute phonecall – a service ostensibly provided so she can discuss concerns about her agreement to terminate her life, although we later hear the call-handlers being instructed to use these conversations to dissuade their elderly callers from opting out.
In one heartbreaking scene, however, the call-handler goes off script and Kakutani begins talking about a deeply traumatic experience during her youth. Just as she reaches the climax, however, the 15-minute limit is reached and the call is ended. Alone in her dark, silent and empty flat, with her phone still clasped in her hand, Kakutani repeatedly bows: she is genuinely grateful to the disembodied voice for giving her even that sliver of time.
What’s especially interesting about the film is Hayakawa’s refusal to come down on one side: the film shows the ripples from the centre right out to the edges of a society that condones this sort of scheme. “My feeling is not pro or anti-euthanasia or assisted suicide,” says Hayakawa. “But I raise a question about the society that can be so inhuman to offer death instead of a way to help vulnerable people feel less isolated or afraid. To give them a reason to live instead of a way to die.”
Hayakawa says that when the film came out in Japan, lots of online commentators felt the scheme was exactly what their society needed. More disturbingly, when she was researching the character of Kakutani, she interviewed 15 elderly women: most said they would also welcome Plan 75. “They wanted it for the security it would give them,” says Hayakawa. “Not because they want to get rid of themselves right now, but because they feel a lot of concern about being old and don’t want to be a bother to anybody, including their kids or family. They said that when they got dementia or they felt very sick, they wanted this option.”
Added to the fear of being a burden, Hayakawa says, is the fear of kodokushi, or lonely death: the increasingly common phenomenon of people dying alone and not being discovered for a long time. “It’s a sad and scary thing,” she says. “If you die alone and are not discovered for several months, your body’s decayed – and then who will clean up that body and that apartment?”
Hayakawa says that some people might think that if a person wants to choose when to die, there’s no problem. “But it’s not that simple,” she adds. “I want people to have more imagination because, once we have this kind of system, there’s a certain group of people who feel they have no option but to take it.” Added to that is the inevitable creeping expansion of the programme: Plan 75 is deemed such a success as the film progresses – generating large sums of money for those involved – that its scope is quietly expanded.
Hayakawa has carefully constructed a world in which Plan 75 seems like a reasonable solution when viewed from a purely rational standpoint. But the guilt of all those who allow it to take place – abrogating their responsibilities – eats away at the young people who are cogs in the Plan 75 machine. We see them becoming like the living dead: ghosts whose deadening eyes almost visibly throb with the effort of trying not to see the bodies piling up before them.
These young people don’t hate their elders. They are inhuman but not inhumane: they are compassionate and kind towards the older people they usher towards an early death. It is, in a very real sense, what the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”.
“Yes,” says Hayakawa, “that quote greatly inspired me. The bureaucracy takes over. They’re just doing their jobs but have stopped thinking about what sort of a system they are working for. That is reality in Japan. That is why I made this film.”
• This article was amended on 9 May 2023 to correct the spelling of the main character’s name. Also, the picture set in the bowling alley is from a scene in the film, it is not of Hayakawa directing Baisho as stated in an earlier caption.
• Plan 75 is released in UK cinemas on 12 May
