Respecting and taking good care of the elderly and holding them up as seniors of the family and society are noble virtue and universal ethics of human society.
Contrary phenomena, however, are widespread in the Japanese society where the aged are subjected to maltreatment, contempt and abuse, far from receiving deserved attention and care of the family and society. They are thus spending the remaining years of their lives in misery, misfortunes and sufferings, prompting the public astonishment.
News are breaking out on shocking crimes, which are too cruel to be mentioned. Some of them are the following:
“An 83-year-old woman kills her husband by stabbing in the neck in Miyagi prefecture”, “Yokohama district court sentences a 76-year-old woman to 8-year imprisonment for killing her husband by sawing his neck”, “A young man in Nagasaki city kills a grandmother in her nineties with a hammer”, “In Osaka, a daughter tramples on her sick mother’s back and breaks her ribs to death”, “A 95-year-old mother and 71-year-old daughter-in-law commit suicide together in Niigata prefecture” etc.
According to the related data, nearly 6,500 people aged 65 and over committed suicide in 2018 alone.
It is no mere coincidence that the Japanese media reported that it is becoming a household phrase among the aged that “life in retirement is tantamount to a probationary period.”
A dark society is not something abstract.
It is the society bereft of love, virtue and affection toward humans, where human beings are turning bestial, being reduced to the slaves of capital.
The rampant practices of all hues of crimes and decadent immorality and depravity being exercised in Japan are attributable to the anti-popular policy of its government, and these are the inevitable products of a decayed society where extreme hatred of human beings and selfishness are omnipresent.
All these are only magnifying the skepticism about true meaning of “freedom, democracy and respect for human rights” trumpeted so speciously by Japan in the international arena.
Cha Hye Gyong
Researcher, Institute for Studies of Japan
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, DPRK
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