• Plan 75

12/27/25 (Sat)

Hayakawa Chie’s 2022 work, amazingly her first feature film, is a beautiful and understated rumination on an aging society, an acute issue in Japan. The government has crafted a sweet-sounding plan offering incentives for those 75 and older to, in effect, kill themselves. Those who sign up receive a ¥100,000 cash payment (rendered oddly as $1,000 in the subtitles) and can spend their final hours wining and dining in a lovely facility, where they will then be gassed to death. Cremation and other costs are completely covered as well. While the program is nominally voluntary, the attraction is strong for lonely old people with nowhere else to turn, and there is considerable pressure to ease the burden on society by slipping peacefully away rather than dragging on unproductively for decades more.

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