Japanese Postmodernism, Infantile Capitalism and the Family Unit in Yoshimitsu Morita’s The Family Game (1983)

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.