The Oddness of Things: Morality Games and Interpretations of Social Change Among Elders in Rural Japan

Abstract

This article explores perceptions about social change as they relate to ideas about the family as a moral unit in rural Japan. I draw upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Ludwig Wittgenstein to develop a means for understanding discontinuities that arise amidst rapid social change. The article focuses on emotions of discomfort and surprise at the way rural Japan turned out for older people in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and discusses the gendered nature of a moral discourse on social change that has arisen in the post-war era. Using Wittgenstein's ideas of language games, I argue that the older generation is largely displaced from the prevalent language (morality) games that surround them among other generations; as a result, they find that the world is odd and experience feelings of being out of place in modern Japanese society.

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