ABSTRACT
It is not easy to evaluate change. It is not even easy to reach a consensus on what is change. People who argue about social change often have different things in mind. In particular, when people say that Japan has become a society of inequality, the baseline for their “become” depends on who is speaking. Some, when they say “changed,” are thinking of when they were young or when they were working; others are comparing young people today with young people when they themselves were young. Equally difficult is to pin down “inequality.” Some people have a vivid sense of not being equal to a majority of undefined “neighbours”; others feel unequal when they compare themselves with some celebrity that the media is making a fuss of. What prompts people to have this sense of inequality and to what degree they have it, depends on the person who is feeling it and on the object that provokes it. Discussion of inequality is difficult, and there are no objective bases for measuring its reality. Nevertheless, that is no reason for abandoning as incomprehensible a subject that has been of central social importance since human society began.
