Ageing, personhood and care in Chie Hayakawa’s Plan 75 (2022)

How would you like to die? This question haunts Chie Hayakawa’s Puran 75/Plan 75 (2022), a film that imagines a near-future or alternative present-day Japan in which a government initiative offers financial incentives to citizens aged 75 and over who are willing to be euthanised. This blunt approach to population control targets the demographic challenges of Japan’s super-ageing population, yet the film’s nuanced characterizations and dreamy visual themes open up the narrative into an invitation to consider the tensions between abstract, top-down, strategic planning on population numbers and the realities of life lived as part of a community. Over the course of the film, the question ‘How would you like to die?’ morphs into ‘How should we live?’ Developing into a wider meditation on what makes a life not only liveable but also valuable, Plan 75 invites us to consider what it means to be a useful member of a community, and what we might owe the living, regardless of their perceived usefulness. In this way the film frames a thoughtful investigation of the politics of ageing within larger questions of personhood and value.

Plan 75 offers a fresh view on issues of ageing, care, and their representations in cinema by refusing the narrative of ‘decline’ common to depictions of elderly characters, who often suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, or physical disabilities brought on by ageing.1 Engaging audiences with vital characterizations of healthy elderly people, Hayakawa invites us to rethink what it means to be a person and to contribute to a society. Following Katsura Sako and Sarah Falcus’s argument that ‘narrative practices and the ways in which viewers relate to them can be understood as forms of care’, I suggest that Hayakawa’s reworking of narrative tropes about ageing to challenge the association of age with decline and disability can be understood as a form of care in itself.

Plan 75 engages consistently with questions of care, from the physical and economic demands of caring for an ageing population to a care-focused understanding of what constitutes citizenship itself. My essay draws from writing on feminist ethics of care to contextualize the often impossible questions posed by Hayakawa’s sensitive film. Scholarship on the ethics of care is interwoven with analysis of key scenes to explore the multiple meanings and uses of the concept of care. These variations in understanding and application render ‘care’ difficult to comprehensively define. The film presents care as a matrix-like structure rather than an easily defined concept that can be unproblematically applied; reading Plan 75 through the lens of an ethics of care thus allows for exploration of those varied understandings and applications. As the film shifts focus in its final scenes from narrative critiques of institutional modes of caring to a more open-ended visual mediation on how to live outside institutional schemes of ‘care’, the visual style becomes more abstract and affect-driven. Mirroring this development, I introduce a discussion of aesthetics of care to explore how Hayakawa’s film pushes us to feel, as well as to think, in more creative ways about ageing, care and personhood. My analysis of the film text is structured around topics raised by viewers in critical writing and in audience engagement events such as Q&A screenings with director Chie Hayakawa, in order to incorporate the exhibition context into an understanding of the wider impacts of the film. As an ethics of care evolves from close listening to others, this structuring device is a theoretical and methodological response to the issues raised in the film. The concluding section considers the contribution of filmmaking as an aesthetic practice to our understandings of what care and caring can actually look like.