Chie Hayakawa imagines a Japan where old people volunteer to die

Tokyo:

Japanese director Chie Hayakawa was germinating the 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 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.”

For Ms. Hayakawa, the seemingly shocking response was a powerful reflection of Japan’s culture and demographics. In its feature debut, ‘Plan 75,’ which won a special accolade at this month’s Cannes Film Festival, the government of a near-future Japan promotes silent institutionalized deaths and group burials for lonely elderly people. , with jolly salespeople tossing around the idea as if peddling travel insurance.

“The mindset is that if the government tells you to do something, you have to do it,” Ms. Hayakawa, 45, said in an interview in Tokyo ahead of the film’s opening in Japan on Friday. Following the rules and not imposing on others, she said, are cultural imperatives “that ensure you don’t stand out in a group setting.”

With a lyrical and understated touch, Ms. Hayakawa tackled one of the biggest play elephants in Japan: the challenges of coping with the world’s oldest society.

Nearly a third of the country’s population is 65 or older, and Japan has more centenarians per capita than any other country. 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 shortages and questions about how the nation will care for its oldest citizens.

Aging politicians dominate the government, and the Japanese media emphasizes upbeat stories about aging fashion gurus or commercial accommodations for older customers. But for Ms Hayakawa, it was no exaggeration to imagine a world in which older citizens would be pushed aside in a bureaucratic process – a trend of thinking that she said could already be found in Japan.

Euthanasia is illegal in the country, but it sometimes occurs in macabre criminal contexts. In 2016, a man killed 19 people in their sleep at a disability center outside Tokyo, saying those people should be euthanized because they “have extreme difficulty living at home or being active in society.

The horrific incident gave Ms. Hayakawa the seed of an idea. “I don’t think this is an isolated incident or a thought process within Japanese society,” she said. “It was already floating. I was very afraid that Japan would become a very intolerant society.

For Kaori Shoji, who has written about film and the arts for the Japan Times and the BBC and seen an earlier version of “Plan 75,” the film didn’t feel dystopian. “She just tells it like it is,” Ms. Shoji said. “She tells us, ‘This is where we’re headed, actually. “”

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

Ms. Hayakawa has spent most of her adult years contemplating the end of life from a very personal perspective. When she was 10, she learned that her father had cancer and he died a decade later. “It was during my formative years, so I think it had an influence on my view of art,” she said.

The daughter of civil servants, Ms. Hayakawa began drawing her own picture books and writing poems at an early age. In elementary school, she 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 Oscars in 1982.

“Feelings that I couldn’t put into words were expressed in this film,” Ms. Hayakawa said. “And I thought I wanted to do movies like that too.”

She eventually applied to the film program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, believing she would get a better grounding in filmmaking in the United States. But given her modest English skills, she decided, a week after arriving on campus, to switch to the photography department, as she thought she could take pictures on her own.

His instructors were struck by his curiosity and work ethic. “If I mentioned a movie casually, she would come home and go rent it, and if I mentioned an artist or an exhibition, she would go find it and have something to say about it,” said Tim Maul, 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, painter Katsumi Hayakawa, decided to return to Tokyo, where she began working at WOWOW, a satellite broadcaster, helping 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 all my energy into raising kids or making movies,” she said. Looking back, she said, “I would think it’s okay, just enjoying your kids’ education. You can start filming later.

For her latest project, she directed “Niagara”, the story of a young woman who learns, as she is about to leave the orphanage where she grew up, that her grandfather killed her parents, and that her grandmother, whom she believed to have died in a car accident with her parents, was alive.

She submitted the film to the Cannes Film Festival in a category for student works and was shocked when it was selected for screening in 2014. At the festival, Ms. Hayakawa met Eiko Mizuno-Gray, a film publicist , who then invited Ms. Hayakawa. make a short film on the theme of Japan 10 years in the future. It would be part of an anthology directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the famous Japanese director.

Ms. Hayakawa had already developed the idea for “Plan 75” as a feature film, but decided to make a shortened version for “Ten Years Japan.”

While she was writing the screenplay, she got up every morning at 4 a.m. to watch movies. She cites Taiwanese director Edward Yang, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong and Krzysztof Kieslowski, the Polish art house director, as important influences. After work, she would write for a few hours in a cafe while her husband looked after their children – relatively rare in Japan, where women still bear the disproportionate burden of household chores and childcare.

After Ms. Hayakawa’s 18-minute contribution to the anthology was released, Ms. Mizuno-Gray and her husband, Jason Gray, worked with her to develop an extended script. By the time filming began, it was in the middle of the pandemic. “There were countries with Covid where they weren’t prioritizing the lives of older people,” Ms Hayakawa said. “Reality has surpassed fiction in a way.”

Ms. Hayakawa decided to adopt a more subtle tone for the feature film and inject more hope. She also added several narrative threads, including one about an elderly woman and her close-knit group of friends, and another about a Filipino caregiver who accepts a job at one of the euthanasia centers.

She included scenes from the Filipino community in Japan, Ms. Hayakawa said, in contrast to the mainstream culture. “Their culture is that if someone is in trouble, you help them immediately,” Ms Hayakawa said. “I think that’s something Japan is losing.”

Stefanie Arianne, the daughter of a Japanese father and a Filipino mother who plays Maria, the carer, said Ms Hayakawa urged her to exercise emotional restraint. In one scene, Ms Arianne said she had an instinct to shed tears, “but with Chie she really challenged me not to cry”.

Ms. Hayakawa said she didn’t want to make a movie that would simply see euthanasia as good or bad. “I think what kind of end of life and what kind of death you want is a very personal decision,” she said. “I don’t think it’s something so black or white.”

Hikari Hida contributed report.