Late Ozu: New Generation and New Salaryman Film

This chapter covers the last years of Ozu’s career in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Shochiku and the director himself were confronted by the younger generation’s challenge to established styles of everyday realism. The first part discusses the contextual basis of this change, from economic recuperation of postwar Japanese society, to the new wave of film industry, as epitomised by the boom of Nikkatsu’s Sun tribe films and the appearance of television. It is suggested that Ozu, though adopting certain aspects of the new changes, essentially maintained his styles and subject matters of urban everyday life and generational conflict, albeit with lesser critical perspective. This can be reflected in his ‘new salaryman films’ of this era, a genre that inherits the middle-classness of the shōshimin film, but with a brighter tone as to class consciousness, anticipating the appearance of television hōmudorama (home drama) genre. In the second part, such new salaryman films as Good Morning (1959) and An Autumn Afternoon (1962), are critically analysed, in terms of their active acknowledgement of new commodity culture and the ensuing banality of middle class everyday life.

Introduction: Ozu, History and the Everyday

This chapter introduces the scope and purpose of the book. It begins with a survey of the Western theories on the everyday, concentrating on Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, and suggests central concepts for analysing Ozu’s films such as ‘deviation’ and ‘permeation’. The concept of the everyday is then expanded into the Japanese context by examining the possibility of applying Western ideas to modern Japanese history. Lastly, reviewing the previous Ozu studies in academia, from Richie and Bordwell to Wada-Marciano and Phillips, this chapter introduces and examines the socio-historical approach as the primary methodology of this book.

Conclusion

Conclusion reemphasises the historicity of the everyday in Ozu’s films, which is not a void entity but characterized by various modern subjects – distinguished in class, gender and generation – with conflicting views, the interaction among which changes throughout history. Temporality (permeation of the past into the present) and spatiality (deviation) are also importantly discussed in relation to the working of Ozu’s everyday, especially in the postwar period when historical experience of wartime presents more complex layer of social critique. The role of the Japanese film industry (namely, Shochiku) is reiterated in terms of establishing Ozu’s everyday realism, which is constantly placed in negotiating relationship with the former’s commercial concerns. Lastly, a question is raised about whether Ozu should be regarded as conservative in representing the social reality, for which the particularity of his everyday realism is suggested as an answer.

Wartime Ozu: Between Bourgeois Drama and National Policy Film

This chapter deals with Ozu’s wartime works from the perspective of their continuing inquiry into the everyday as well as their relation to his postwar films so that they can be re-evaluated as a connecting bridge between the prewar and the postwar period. In the first part, Ozu’s complex stance on the war and the nationalistic ideology is examined through contextual survey of wartime history of Japan and Japanese cinema, and also analysing primary sources that has recorded Ozu’s own experience at battlefield. The second part analyses Ozu’s wartime bourgeois drama, The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1939), which, along with the previous work, What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), reveals gender politics of the female domestic everyday that operates antithetical to prevailing male-centric wartime collectivism. The last part of this chapter discusses Ozu’s humanistic position, by analysing two wartime films about paternity and its absence (The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942)) along with Burma Campaign (1942), which is Ozu’s only attempt at war film genre in a complete form.

Ozu in Transition: The Coming of Sound and Family Melodrama

This chapter deals with the period of the mid-1930s, when Ozu had to face new challenges from the pressure of commercialism to the coming of sound technology. The main question addresses whether and how the director maintained his critical view of Japanese modernity while using mass-oriented genre formats. Firstly, the conversion to sound in the Japanese film industry is investigated in relation to how it influenced Ozu’s filmmaking. It is followed by a discussion of Ozu’s Kihachi series (such as An Inn in Tokyo (1935)) and woman’s films (such as Woman of Tokyo (1933) and Dragnet Girl (1933)), as an evidence of the director’s expanding generic interest from the middle class into the working class and women. These generic terms will be finally confirmed through textual analysis of Ozu’s films to examine how Ozu’s everyday realism, while working within the context of established generic formats (such as ‘failed moga’ narrative in woman’s film), remains as a critical view of the Japanese modernity.

Postwar Ozu: Ozu’s Occupation-era Film and Tokyo Regained

This chapter examines the postwar’s impact on Ozu and his films of the late 1940s and early 50s, which include his representative works such as Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953). Based on the discussion of the change (and changelessness) in the postwar Japanese society and film industry in the first section, the chapter moves on to the analyses of Ozu’s films from this era, in terms of gender relationship (notably, between aging parents and the daughters), US Occupation and its cultural influence on Japanese society, and the conflict between the lingering past memory of war and the present everyday life, which exhibits Ozu’s sophisticated temporal consciousness. The spatial contrast, as epitomised by disparity between war-stricken Tokyo and other traditional spaces such as Kyoto or Nara, is also discussed in relation to the generational and gender divide prevalent in the films from this period (often in the form of marriage narrative).

Early Ozu: Shōshimin Film and Everyday Realism

This chapter examines the early phase of Ozu’s cinema, from 1927 to 1932, in the context of the development of Japanese cinema into a modern entertainment form. The first part examines the production strategy of Shochiku, especially in regard to the concept of Kamata-chō as the studio’s fundamental tenet, which was developed in the course of Shochiku’s effort to adopt a modern, Westernised cinematic style through the realistic depictions of urban everyday life, although the modernity had to be in constant conflict with more archaic forms and styles such as shinpa. In the second part, the genre of shōshimin (middle class) film is discussed as Ozu’s attempt to further complicate the format of Kamata-chō by developing its existing representation of modern everyday life into a critique of modernity. This point is examined by analysing Ozu’s two representative shōshimin films of the era, Tokyo Chorus (1931) and I Was Born But… (1932), in comparison with the work of other Shochiku directors, such as Shimazu Yasujiro.