This paper proposes a simple approach to measuring social change using text data. The approach is based on the idea that any significant change in a society should affect the distribution of the words used in the society. Essentially we use the total variation distance between the distributions of words in adjacent months as a measure of social change during the lattermonth. Basedl on text data from the Nikkei Newspaper from 1989 to 2015, the largest social change observed in Japan during this period took place in March 2011, the month of the Great East Japan Earthquake.