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.

Keywords:

• Gender
• Social Change
• Morality
• Language Games
• Japan

Acknowledgements

Data for this article were collected during several trips to Japan between 1995 and 2007, funded by a variety of sources, including a Fulbright Doctoral Research Fellowship and grants from the Michigan Exploratory Center for the Demography of Aging, the Northeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Mitsubishi Japan Endowment at the University of Texas at Austin. The support is greatly appreciated. I thank Robert Oppenheim and Thomas Tweed, both of the University of Texas at Austin, and L. Keith Brown, of the University of Pittsburgh, for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript. The comments of the anonymous reviewers were also quite helpful in revising the initial manuscript and their efforts are much appreciated.

Notes

1. See Brown (1966), Nakane (1967) or Traphagan (2000b) for a discussion of kinship.

2. As Knight and Traphagan (2003) point out, however, one must be quite cautious in interpreting these data because there has been a significant growth in the number of multi-family dwellings in which younger and older generations live in the same structure, but appear on population records and surveys as though they are living entirely separately (see also N. Brown 2003).

3. In February of 2006 the municipalities of Mizusawa, Esashi, Maesawa, Koromogawa and Isawa merged to form the City of ÔshÛ. Kanegasaki, however, remains an independent municipality.

4. I have discussed this point in relation to men, particularly eldest sons, elsewhere (see Traphagan 2004a).

5. For a discussion of the cultural and moral content in Japan associated with the idea of enduring difficult tasks, see Singleton (1993).

6. This case is also discussed in Traphagan (2000a, p. 42).

7. Again, it is important to keep in mind that this is a perception held by older people and does not necessarily correspond to the perceptions held by younger women about the power of their elders.

8. For example, over the past several years, Akita Prefecture has consistently ranked in the top five prefectures for suicides in general, and Iwate has ranked in the top ten (Traphagan 2005, p. 317). Elder suicides are particularly high in these areas, which Kurosu (1991, p. 604; see also Matsumoto 1995 and Nakata 2002) attributes to breakdowns in social integration in rural areas. The sources cited in this note all provide useful statistical data on the topic.

9. The total fertility rate for Japan has been below replacement level of 2.1 since 1973 and has been below 1.5 for more than a decade. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Traphagan (2000b, p. 369) and also Raymo (1998) in relation to delayed marriage.

10. Note that the comments of this man and others cited here do not necessarily reflect that actual feelings of women in Japan. Surveys tend to suggest that these comments do not reflect the sentiments of women. However, the point is to show the type of thinking and ideas operating in the minds of my informants and not to judge whether or not those ideas are accurate.

11. The concept of the yome is complex, relating to a woman who is legally transferred to her husband's household and who is largely conceived of as becoming part of his lineage (including being buried with her in-laws and husband after death and cremation, although this is increasingly contested). The yome is expected to care for her in-laws as they grow older and also to care for all members of the family until she eventually graduates into the position of elder woman in the household and, thus, has some power over the new yome (i.e. the wife of her co-resident son).

12. Elsewhere (Traphagan 2000a, p. 34), I have discussed this issue in terms of attitudes about socialising women in rural areas to want to become farmers as adults. This is a direct response to the shortage of women interested in marrying eldest sons living on farms and the consequent growth in the importation of foreign women as brides for these men (See Suzuki 2005).

13. I suspect that there are similarities in urban areas, particularly among merchant families, although little research has been conducted along these lines in urban areas. For an excellent discussion of ageing and filial piety in urban areas, see Jenike (2004).

14. For a discussion of contact between younger and older generations and attitudes about roles and responsibilities in Japan, see Rindfuss, Liao and Tuya (1992).

15. Although problems with Geertz's concept of culture as somehow disembodied exist, as noted at the beginning of this paper, in some places his definition of culture also has elements of this when he discusses ‘symbolic action’ that embodies meanings interpreted and assigned particular value and import within the public sphere (Geertz 1973, p. 10).

16. Springs (2008, p. 940) argues that the implications of Wittgenstein's later work for ethnographic research is that the practices of a particular group of people are not reducible to a theoretical language, and thus are not translatable into idioms associated with social science without major loss of information. The methodological implications of this suggest that while cultural practices can be described, they cannot be judged or explained. Although I would agree that no judgement can be made about whether or not a particular form of life is good or bad, I would disagree with the idea that we cannot explain human behaviour. Any explanation will be inherently limited, but the act of explanation is, itself, a kind of language game through which elements of the object of study are represented.