During an online discussion in December 2021, Yusuke Narita — a Yale assistant professor of economics who has somehow attained celebrity status in Japan — suggested that old people in Japan should consider committing mass suicide. His reasoning was that it would help alleviate the country’s financial difficulties.

When the New York Times covered this story in February 2023, Narita drew severe criticism from an international audience. He later made an excuse that his words were merely “metaphors,” but around the same time, in Japan’s Kanto region, there were a series of robberies targeting the elderly that resulted in the death of a seventy-year-old woman in West Tokyo. It was only the latest attack in a growing trend. Despite its overall low crime rate, Japan has recently seen an uptick in hate crimes against the elderly and other vulnerable groups. In 2016, a former staff member killed nineteen patients in a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, near Tokyo. At the trial, the assailant explained that he hoped to reduce the burden on society by eliminating those who live on public money.

This hatred toward the vulnerable derives from a greater anxiety over Japan’s economic stagnation and low birth rate. The predicament has incited an obsession with “productivity” among policymakers — and public scorn for those “producing” neither wealth nor babies. In 2018, Liberal Democratic Party lawmaker Mio Sugita stated that the LGBTQ community was “unproductive” and therefore not worth public support.