Abstract
Study of Yoshimitsu Morita's 1983 film The Family Game (家族ゲーム) has long focused on the film's criticism of the middle-class nuclear family of 1980s Japan through searing satire. Marking the end of postwar politics and new economic heights, the 1980s brought with it the need to redefine and reify central concepts such as the family, and educational excellence became one of the lines of reference. Caught up in the educational rat race, the film's Numata family make efforts to project the illusion of family without meaningful connection to one another. Building upon previous analyses of satire and the family in the film, this article applies postmodern theorist Akira Asada's concept of infantile capitalism to analyse the intersection of the film's economic context with the family structures it criticises. Asada's theory of infantile capitalism outlines the economic mode of 1980s Japan as mimicking familial social structures in its attitude towards both work and social hierarchies. Through a close reading of The Family Game, this article argues that the criticisms levied by the film at the Japanese middle class family's obsession with education is part of a larger conversation with the postmodern paradigm and the very definition of the family. The trends criticized by the film and theorists of the 1980s did not stop with the end of the decade but instead continued, highlighting this moment in time as pivotal to understanding the continued intersection between family and education in Japan. Described by critic Takaaki Yoshimoto as "announcing the arrival of a new era ("新しい 時代の到来を告知していた"; 207; my trans.), Yoshimitsu Morita's genre bending 1983 film The Family Game (家族ゲーム) speaks to the specific milieu of 1980s Japan and the consolidation of a very particular ideal of family growing in the popular consciousness of the time. As implied by the title, the film revolves around the arrival of the tutor Yoshimoto, whose presence exposes family as a game that the Numatas play at. Coinciding with the first wave of postmodern discourse in Japan (Gerow 242 ) and the publication of Akira Asada's popular book, Kōzō to Chikara (Structures and Power), the film's tale of the Numata family uses absurdity and humour to both reflect the historical contexts of production and to comment on them, particularly the subject of family and its ties to education. The concept of family is always historically and culturally contingent, defined by the socio-political headwinds of a particular moment. In 1980s Japan, a postmodern paradigm in which meaning is increasingly fragmented and older narratives no longer hold the same weight, saw the concept of the family grasping for new meaning. The intersection throughout the '80s of the economic growth of the Bubble period, a national campaign of education designed to surpass Western countries, and a normative nuclear family structure became formative influences on the development of the postmodern family. Thematically, The Family Game criticises the middle-class nuclear family of the 1980s at the micro level for its fabricated, alienating nature, which is a function of the economic paradigm of 1980s Japan as laid out by Asada's concept of infantile capitalism. Using infantile capitalism as a theoretical lens, this paper will argue that education as represented in The Family Game fragments the Numata family, effectively critiquing the structure of the 1980s Japanese nuclear family unit and its successive structures. To begin, this paper will outline Asada's theory of infantile capitalism and how it is replicated within the Numata family in The Family Game. This will be followed by a brief description of the film's plot to contextualize my close reading of the text, which analyses the father, the mother and, finally, Yoshimoto (the tutor) in relation to infantile capitalism, illustrating the film's criticism of normative family goals in this era.
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