On Feb. 6, Nobuteru Ishihara, secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party, recounted on a BS Asahi talk show a visit he recently made to a medical facility where patients were hooked up to gastric feeding tubes, or irō. He said it reminded him of the 1979 science fiction-horror movie "Alien," whose most memorable image was that of a creature gestating in the abdomen of a human.
The remark was criticized. Health minister Yoko Komiyama said it hurt the feelings of people who undergo such treatment, though she didn't mention that they are typically unconscious at the time and thus even less likely to care what a politician is saying about anything. What she really meant is that it hurt the feelings of the patients' families. Her own father died while being connected to a gastric feeding tube.
Ishihara apologized, but his point, which was lost in the subsequent controversy, is that irō "do not pay respect to human dignity." He added that he and his wife had decided to tell their own doctors to never insert the devices in their bodies, which are most often used when a patient is close to dying. Ishihara's sentiment is not unusual, but public figures have to be careful how they express it.