A high-ranking Japanese minister is apologizing today after he insulted a quarter of the Japanese population by stating that the elderly should “hurry up and die” because their care was draining the country’s social service system.
Taro Aso, Japan’s finance minster and also deputy prime minister, is a wealthy businessman with a history of saying offensive things that get him in trouble.
“Heaven forbid if you are forced to live on when you want to die. I would wake up feeling increasingly bad knowing that [treatment] was all being paid for by the government,” he said Monday during a meeting of the National Council on Social Security Reforms. “The problem won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die.”
Nearly a quarter of Japan’s population of 128 million is over age 60, with growth projections to more than 40 percent in the next 50 years. The problem is exacerbated because Japan’s average life expectancy is 83, one of the highest in the world. Rising social service costs for the elderly moved Japan to double the sales tax last year to 10 percent.
Ironically, the first term of Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, ended with his resignation in 2007, partly because of a string of gaffes committed by members of his Cabinet. Now he’s starting off his new term with Aso’s verbal blunder.
Aso, 72, said he had written a note to his family saying he didn’t want expensive life-prolonging medical treatment.
“I don’t need that kind of care,” he said in comments quoted by local media. But he didn’t stop there. He referred to elderly patients who are no longer able to feed themselves as “tube people,” and said the country’s health and welfare ministry was “well aware that it costs several tens of millions of yen” a month to treat a single patient in the final stages of life.
Aso later tried to fix his blunders, acknowledging that his language had been “inappropriate” in a public forum and insisting he was talking only about his personal preference.
“I said what I personally believe, not what the end-of-life medical care system should be,” he told reporters. “It is important that you be able spend the final days of your life peacefully.”
This was just the latest in a string of unfortunate comments by one of Japan’s wealthiest politicians. In 2008, while he was serving as prime minister, he described “doddering” pensioners as tax burdens, and said they should take better care of their health.
“I see people aged 67 or 68 at class reunions who dodder around and are constantly going to the doctor,” he said at a meeting of economists. “Why should I have to pay for people who just eat and drink and make no effort? I walk every day and do other things, but I’m paying more in taxes.”
In 2001, Aso said he hoped that Japan could become the kind of successful country in which “the richest Jews would want to live.”
He also once compared an opposition party to the Nazis, praised Japan’s colonial rule in Taiwan and, when he was foreign minister, told diplomats from the U.S. that they would never be trusted in Middle East peace negotiations because they have “blue eyes and blond hair.”
