Of the three classics of post-WWII Japanese cinema, Kurosawa Akira (黒澤明 or 黒沢明 or 黑澤明), being the first to achieve a breakthrough internationally, is the most popular, followed by Mizoguchi Kenji (溝口 健二), while the third one remained concealed from the Western public for some more time, being considered “too Japanese” to be marketable by Japanese film exporters.
This third one, the most Japanese of the three (and maybe even in Japanese cinema in general) is Ozu Yasujirō (小津 安二郎). His eventual later arrival into Western cinemas caused a kind of a culture shock. Being so different from the other two, as well as so different from anything that was known in Western cinema until then, he shed a new light not only on Japanese cinema, but on filmmaking in general[2].
I was lucky to discover him on local TV a long time ago when a run of his films were broadcast nationally. I too was mesmerised by what I have seen. Alas, such events do not come often enough.
So when I saw that a local cinema, acting both as an art one and a cinémathèque, was announcing a programme of Ozu’s (小津) films, I knew that this was an opportunity that must not be missed. In short, we had a chance to see twelve of his post-WWII films in eight days[3], his almost complete opus made from the year 1949 until his death in 1963[4]. (The only film missing was the 1950 drama The Munekata Sisters (宗方姉妹).)
The films we saw, unfortunately not in their chronological order, were the 1949 Late Spring (晩春), the 1951 Early Summer (麥秋[5]), the 1952 The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice[6] (お茶漬の味), the 1953 Tokyo Story (東京物語), the 1956 Early Spring (早春), the 1957 Tokyo Twilight (東京暮色), the 1958 Equinox Flower (彼岸花[7]), the 1959 Good Morning (お早よう) and Floating Weeds (浮草), the 1960 Late Autumn (秋日和[8]), the 1961 The End of Summer (小早川家の秋[9]), and the 1962 An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味[10]).
Ozu’s (小津) film titles concerning seasons, Late Spring (晩春), Early Summer (麥秋; Barley Harvest Time), Early Spring (早春), Equinox Flower (彼岸花), Late Autumn (秋日和; A Calm Autumn Day), The End of Summer (小早川家の秋; Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family) and An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味; The Taste of Sanma), depict the passing of a particular period in one’s life. On the other hand, one of the three typical qualities of the traditional Japanese haiku (俳句) poetry (but also present in renga (連歌 ‘collaborative poetry’) and renku (連句 ‘linked verses’) poetry) is a kigo (季語 ‘season word’), a word or phrase associated with a particular season, usually drawn from an extensive but defined list of such terms called saijiki (歳時記 ‘year-time chronicle’). Knowing Ozu’s (小津) affinity for traditional Japanese art, this can hardly be a mere coincidence.
Three of the films stand out thematically. Good Morning (お早よう) is an outright comedy. People in the West do not realise that, but the Japanese also have a sense of humour[11]. Two boys are protesting their parents’ refusal to acquire a TV set by abstaining from speaking. Early Spring (早春) is a melodrama, probably what would F. W. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans look like if made in Japan by a Japanese director. Tokyo Twilight (東京暮色) is a bleak, grim, dark melodrama, a film noir shot by a Japanese filmmaker.
The rest of Ozu’s (小津) output screened here are ordinary films about ordinary stories of ordinary lives by ordinary people, showing just how unique and interesting the real world is. The genre he was working in was called by a pseudo-Japanese word invented by Western film scholars, shomin-geki (庶民劇)[12], derived from shomin (庶民) ‘common people, populace, masses, plebeian’. In Japanese the correct word for this genre of films is shōshimin-eiga, derived from shōshimin (小市民) ‘petty bourgeois, lower middle class’. Ozu (小津) told and re-told stories of Japanese families engaged, almost to the point of obsession, with the marriage of a daughter. As the years of production progress, the emancipation of children from their parents concerning the choice of their life partner becomes more and more obvious[13]. His themes concern the family and the place of the individual in a strictly conservative, even conformist society of post-war Japan, and how that was changing, including the clash of generations: the elderly losing their previously unrivalled respect and the younger generations rebelling against the centuries-old status quo, threatened by an outsider, but not intruder! all the way to the disintegration of the core family at the ends of his films, leaving the family members facing an uncertain future. Interestingly enough, it is mainly women who advocate the change, trying to find greater equality in society, while the men appear passive and confused. However, what matters to the brides in his stories is not the new life they are beginning but the old one they are ending by getting married. Ozu (小津) was a conservative witnessing the breakdown of the traditional Japanese life style and the galloping Westernisation and Americanisation under the post-WWII occupation.
Ozu’s (小津) earliest post-WWII films were censored by the occupational foreign powers. The primitive barbarians occupying Japan could not understand the high culture and civilisation developed in Japan over centuries and feared it immensely. Although in 1945, their Supreme Commander abolished all forms of censorship and controls on Freedom of Speech, this was only a formal act with no repercussions in real life: the occupational forces imposed a strict censorship on everything Japanese.
This is evident in the oldest film screened here (at the same time, the first film by Ozu (小津), that I have ever seen[14]), Late Spring (晩春). The censors objected to the marriage of the heroine to a man she has met only once through a single arranged meeting, because they considered the Japanese custom of arranged meetings for prospective marriage partners, miai (見合い[15]), to downgrade the importance of the individual[16], rejecting the idea of the decision to marry as a collective family decision. (We are talking about the world of civilised Japan here, not about barbarian Christian Europe where similar customs were norms until recently.) Moreover, the planned trip to Kyoto by father and daughter so she can visit her dead mother’s grave was excised from the film because the censors interpreted such a visit as “ancestor worship[17].” Moreover, all references in the script to the devastation caused by the Allied bombings had to be removed. Moreover, even the mentioning of USA film star Gary Cooper in the film was frowned upon, 神神 know why. Moreover, even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect and cancelled from the script. However, Ozu (小津) managed to make a film that abounds with symbols of Japanese tradition, the one so superstitiously feared by the barbarian foreign invaders.
Unlike Kurosawa (黒澤 or 黒沢 or 黑澤) and Mizoguchi (溝口), Ozu (小津) presents us with actors with ordinary, everyday faces, and anyone who is convinced that “all Japanese look the same” should see a film by Ozu (小津). A number of actors appeared in several of his films. The most obvious example is Ryū Chishū (笠 智衆), who played in 52 of Ozu’s (小津) 54 films, landing a major or minor role in every one of the director’s post-WWII films[18]. The other familiar appearance is the lovely Hara Setsuko (原 節子)[19], born Aida Masae (会田 昌江), who, although acting in only six films by Ozu (小津), remained forever connected with the director’s name. In three of his films, Late Spring (晩春), Early Summer (麥秋) and Tokyo Story (東京物語), she plays characters named Noriko (紀子), mutually unrelated[20].
Watching Ozu’s (小津) films, every now and then one bumps into familiar faces. Thus Sugimura Haruko (杉村 春子) and Miyake Kuniko (三宅 邦子) played in nine of the screened films, Takahashi Toyoko (高橋豊子) in eight, Suga Fujio (須賀不二夫), Sakura Mutsuko (桜 むつ子), Nakamura Nobuo (中村伸郎) and Sugawara Tsūsai (菅原通済 or 菅原通濟) in six, Nagaoka Teruko (長岡輝子) in five, Tōno Eijirō (東野英治郎), Tanaka Haruo (田中 春男), Toake Hisao (十朱久雄), Sada Keiji (佐田 啓二) and Shimazu Masahiko (島津雅彦) in four, Saburi Shin (佐分利 信) and Kita Ryūji (北 竜二) in three, with thirty-six more actors having a role in two or three films screened here. To demonstrate how versatile these actors were, here is an example: in Tokyo Story (東京物語) Ryū Chishū (笠 智衆) and Higashiyama Chieko (東山 千栄子) played a married couple, parents-in-law of the character played by Hara Setsuko (原 節子), while in Early Summer Higashiyama (麥秋) plays the mother of both Ryū (笠) and Hara (原)[21]. Despite the age differences, none of these family relations look unnatural and forced[22].
The cast of significant characters in Ozu’s (小津) films is often numerous, up to two dozens, thus providing an example of ensemble acting in its purest form. None of the performers was allowed to dominate a film. Ozu allegedly rejected takes of scenes in which an individual’s performance drew attention to their acting at the expense of others in the film.
Ozu (小津) preferred not only certain actors but also particular other collaborators to work with in his films. All of the films screened here were co-written by Noda Kōgo (野田 高梧), art director and production designer Hamada Tatsuo (浜田辰雄), cinematographer Atsuta Yūharu (厚田雄春) and film editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu (浜村義康) worked in ten films each, composer Saitō Takanobu (斎藤高順) in seven films, producer Yamanouchi Shizuo (山内静夫) in six films, producer Yamamoto Takeshi (山本武) in four films, and there are six more collaborators working in two or three films included in the programme. This is also true for the production company, Ozu (小津) remained faithful to Shochiku (松竹) throughout his career.
In his post-WWII films, Ozu’s (小津) own personal style of filmmaking flourished. The most notorious segment of his style is his camera. His static, unmovable camera. For Ozuphiles seeing a travelling camera in his film can come as a shock at first, but then you realise that he has arrived at this solution gradually through his films. In his last film An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味) there is not a single camera movement in the entire film. Exceptions like camera fixed in a vehicle are not real camera movements, they remain fixed in relation to the vehicle itself, and it is the vehicle that is doing the movement[23]. This static camera has two serious repercussions on Ozu’s (小津) style.
The first is the need for more shots than in a film with movable camera. In his film Floating Weeds (浮草) there are 962[24]. Which at the film’s 116 minutes running time gives us an average of 7½ seconds per shot! The high number of individual shots can be partially attributed to Ozu’s (小津) filming of dialogues by alternatively taking the viewpoint of the interlocutors. The person speaking is always looking directly into the camera, that is the person he is speaking to, giving the audience the feeling that they are standing in the middle of the conversation and are being addressed directly by the characters. So every dialogue is fragmented into a series of individual shots instead of the usual shots ‒ reverse shots. The second repercussion connected with a high number of individual shots is that a static camera means that shooting inside a flat cannot follow the character, but when the character leaves the filmed interior in one shot, the camera must “jump” to another interior, into which the character is entering, to film another shot (as was the case in the era of silent films)[25]. That in turn makes the viewer a bit unable to grasp the space as a whole keeping it disjointed in an almost abstract way. The flat results to be a series of interiors joined by wormholes[26]. The flat’s floor plan is not explicit.
The other defining feature of Ozu’s (小津) camera is its position at about three quarters of a metre above the floor. The camera takes the viewpoint of an invisible, non-participating viewer sitting Japanese-style on the floor, increasing the sensation of the audience being within the space of the film and thus making them far more receptive to the characters. Thus the name tatami shot. The lower position of the camera requires that all the interiors have ceilings, a feature rarely found in Western cinema.
The third characteristic of Ozu’s (小津) camerawork is that when an action is happening in a space that has one of its horizontal dimensions significantly bigger that the other, the camera is always aligned with the bigger one, thus framing the characters by the rooms they are in. This is especially evident in shots of corridors. The openness of Japanese homes enables Ozu (小津) to include something going on in the background while the story unfolds before us: people walking, passing by, doing something. Seldom is the background static.
The shots do not begin and end with the characters or the action, but with locations. We can see just the room where the next shot is going to take place for several seconds before any character enters it. The same is valid after the characters leave the premises. A similar approach was later employed by Werner Herzog in his famous 1979 remake Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht.
To come as closer as possible to an invisible, passive viewer, Ozu (小津) almost always used only one lens, a 50 mm, which he said was the closest to the way the human eye sees.
Such an approach to camerawork distanced Ozu (小津) from the style dominated at Hollywood, which advanced with the hysterical MTV and post-MTV editing of today’s blockbusters: full of action, devoid of stories.
Ozu’s (小津) use of music in films is also highly individual. Music is not there to accentuate the action, it is mostly used in transition shots (called “pillow shots” by some critics for reason totally unfathomable to me), which, by the way, are always highly stylised in an almost abstract manner, although they represent real objects in space, peaceful images that give the audience a pause to reflect on the plot so far. These shots are longer than establishing shots in other filmmakers’ works, containing very little movement in the distance or even no movement at all. But let us go back to the music: it is getting louder when such transition shots begin and fading out when they end. However, it is never fading out completely, sometimes a very hushed music remains in the scenes telling the story, almost imperceptible. Some of the music employed reminded me of the music in Jacques Tati’s films (although Nino Rota’s circus-like music for films of Federico Fellini has also been suggested), which is interesting because of another relation between Tati and Ozu (小津) ‒ both are supporters of the “good old days” against the anonymity and impersonality of modernism[27]. Ozu (小津) also shows an affinity for rhythmic sound from the surroundings: trains, motorboats and typewriters. The former two could represent separation, moving on, but also coming together, coming back, while the latter is usually employed in the scenes concerning one’s workplace, which is unexceptionally an administrative, white-collar one, possibly symbolising the repetitive dullness of the jobs.
Another typical feature of Ozu’s (小津) films are the title and credits. Their design is always the same: characters (white and red in his colour films) on a background of a sackcloth canvas. The only exception is his last film, An Autumn Afternoon (秋刀魚の味), where the title and credits are set against a backdrop of painted fronds.
Another important part of Ozu’s (小津) style is ellipsis. Just like in the classical Greek tragedy, key moments that would be overemphasised and exaggerated in Hollywood, are seldom depicted mimetically, but often retold diegetically[28]. They are replaced by transitional shots, after which we learn what happened in the meantime. In this way, Ozu (小津) avoids extreme emotions on-screen, immersing the viewer into the story not only by watching and listening to it, but also by pondering about it.
There is only one film in this series in which extreme emotions are displayed, in the quarrels between ex-lovers in Floating Weeds (浮草). Not only harsh words are being said, even some physical violence is shown[29]. Unlike Hollywood melodramas overdriving on emotion and style, Ozu’s (小津) stories are simple and calm affairs that are tinged with nostalgia offering the audience an opportunity to reflect and contemplate one’s own life. In his films none of the characters are marked out as being “good” or “bad”. Ozu (小津) sees the good in people however they might at first appear. Moreover, even when the themes of his films sound downbeat, they overflow with humour and optimism.
As mentioned before, just like Tati, Ozu (小津) is an advocate of the traditional ways of life vs. the modern ones, imported from the West (from the East in Japan). The new Civil Code of 1948 imposed and enforced by the barbarian occupying forces stimulated Japan’s rapid re-growth as a capitalist state that embraced Western capitalist ideals while simultaneously destroying older traditions such as the Japanese family and its values. The division between tradition and Western imports exists within and between his characters as well, depicted by everyday details: traditional clothing vs. Western clothing (except in workplaces, where Western clothing is the norm), traditional furniture vs. Western furniture, traditional food vs. Western food. Although Ozu (小津) himself never judges his characters explicitly, on the contrary: he seems to love all the characters he puts on screen, a feeling of “traditional‒good, Western‒bad” somehow manages to creep through the surface. However, the director himself acknowledges the unstoppability of changes introduced from the West, that things continue to change and that that is inevitable.
Even the Tōkyō depicted in Ozu’s (小津) films is not the brightly neon-lighted, video-add-abundant cyberpunk city we are so accustomed to see, but a city that, although industrialised, is full of small alleys with small premises, a city with suburbs consisting of traditional houses, regularly built beside a dyke whose height usually surpasses that of the houses themselves and which presents the traffic connection to some more urban area.
I doubt that in any Western film the characters spend so many time at the table as in Ozu’s (小津) ones. A meal is a setting in which family problems are discussed, decisions made and marriages fixed. Another interesting bit for our Western minds is how often taking a bath is mentioned. It seems as if at one’s arrival home a bath is the first thing they have on their mind. On the other hand, it is often other family members who invite the one coming home to take a bath. While in Western eyes and ears this would be tantamount to saying “Man, you do stink badly!” these ones always sounded to me as a way to show one’s care for the other: “I have been thinking of you and prepared everything that you might have a pleasant bath after a day at work.” Hey, but that is only me (and maybe the Japanese)!
When a meal is consumed in a restaurant, the waitress bringing the ordered food always, invariably, says the same sentence: “Excuse me for keeping you waiting.” It is actually not about the meal preparation and serving time at all. It is a phrase, a token of Japanese politeness. (I wish that some waiters in the West would be so polite!)
Several details in the films are maybe part of the tradition, and maybe not. When a company gets together for a drink of sake (酒)[30], no one regularly pours the drink to himself, but only to others. This is a known part of Japanese culture and is observed in Ozu’s (小津) films, where you can find just two or three occasions when this rule is broken. The other thing is when two characters perform the same movements in unison. I have heard somewhere (an unreliable source) that mimicking another person’s movements is a sign of respect. However, here it does not look so much as one character mimicking the other, but as a synchronously choreographed ballet. Look for it when the two sisters walk alone in The End of Summer (小早川家の秋).
A propos sake: Is drinking too much really such a problem in Japan? Or was it in the fifties and sixties? Ozu (小津) seems to put quite a stress on that, there are several scenes of over-drinking in this selection of his films.
In his film The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (お茶漬の味), Ozu (小津) bestowed us with a most beautiful love scene seen on a screen in a long time. The married couple that separated for a time in a sudden urge of irreconcilable differences (with quotation marks or without) meet again in the evening ready to reconcile and continue with their lives. It is late, their maid has already gone to bed and the two are hungry. The love scene consist of the two preparing a simple dinner (the one from the title) for themselves in a kitchen that both are unfamiliar with. I know, I know that words cannot evoke the restrained beauty of the scene, one simply has to see it. Hollywood will never be able to convey so many emotions with so scarce means!
For Ozu (小津) tiny rituals and habits of everyday life are what is important; a greeting, eating habits, dress sense etc. A greeting said walking by someone might not look like a big deal, but such rituals should be the catalyst to meaningful and unvarying conversation between people.
Watching a film by Ozu (小津) brings me into a state of serenity, as if the warmth implicitly expressed in his stories and characters keeps smouldering within the viewer long after the film is over, but also makes me thoughtful long after viewing it. And with a longing for living in a traditional Japanese home as depicted in his films[31].
And I am positive that what we have seen is a mere 50% (if!) of what a Japanese public would perceive in Ozu’s (小津) films[32]!
[1] Japanese sensei ‘master’.
[2] Unfortunately, Ozu (小津) did not live to see his success among Western filmgoers and critics.
[3] I was asked how I could sit through two consecutive feature films in one evening. Easily, this simply is such a rare an opportunity that cannot and must not be missed.
[4] He died on 12 December, his sixtieth birthday.
[5] Literally Barley Harvest Time.
[6] Ochazuke (お茶漬け < お茶 (o)cha ‘tea’ + 漬け tsuke ‘submerge’) is a simple Japanese dish made by pouring green tea, dashi (出汁), a class of soup and cooking stock used in Japanese cuisine, or hot water over cooked rice.
[7] Actually, a lycoris, a genus of 13–20 species of flowering plants in the family Amaryllidaceae, subfamily Amaryllidoideae, native to eastern and southern Asia. Lycoris are extensively cultivated as ornamental plants in China and Japan, and also in other warm temperate regions of the world. In Japan, they are widely used at the edges of rice paddy fields to provide a strip of bright flowers in the summer. Since these scarlet flowers usually bloom near cemeteries around the autumnal equinox, they are described in Chinese and Japanese translations of the Lotus Sutra as ominous flowers that grow in Jigoku (地獄; also known as the realm of the dead or “hell”), and guide the dead into the next reincarnation. Some legends have it that when a person sees someone that they may never meet again, these flowers would bloom along the path. Perhaps because of these sorrowful legends, Japanese people often used these flowers in funerals.
[8] Literally A Calm Autumn Day.
[9] Literally Autumn of the Kohayagawa Family.
[10] Literally The Taste of Sanma. Sanma (秋刀魚) or saira (佐伊羅) is the Pacific saury (Cololabis saira), a member of the family Scomberesocidae. This saury, which is a food source in some East Asian cuisines as well as in the Russian one (сайра), is also known by the name mackerel pike.
As a seasonal food, sanma is used in Japanese culture to represent autumn.
[11] The great mathematician and Japanologist Vladimir Devidé (1925‒2010) published an article on Japanese humour, unfortunately in a local rather obscure Oriental martial arts magazine. There he presented examples of it, of which I remember two:
During a USA-Japanese business meeting, the USA speaker started his speech, as is customary in the USA, with a joke. The Japanese all burst into laughter. But what was that the interpreter said to provoke such hilarity? “Our American colleague thinks he has just told a funny joke.”
There was a bridge in Japan that was the preferred place for suiciders to jump from. The landlord on whose land the bridge was located got annoyed by this and introduced a bridge toll. One day a man came to the toll booth and asked the man there: “Can I pay only half a toll. I do not intend to cross to the other side.”
[12] As opposed to jidaigeki (時代劇, ‘era drama’), what we would call a samurai film.
[13] In one case the emancipation was hinted by the fact that the character in question collects photos of Hollywood star Katherine Hepburn.
[14] And the precise moment in which I fell deeply in love with Hara Setsuko (原 節子).
[15] Literally ‘looking at one another’.
[16] Of course, overt racism, minimal wages that impede normal life for fellow human beings and homelessness probably did not downgrade the importance of the individual in their eyes! To say nothing of bombing large cities with nuclear weapons!
[17] Of course, visiting graves in the West and leaving flowers there is not a form of idolatry, it is… well, at the moment I cannot think of anything, but it simply must be something else.
[18] By the way, Ryū (笠), born in Tamamizu Village, Tamana County, a rural area of Kumamoto Prefecture in Kyushu, retained the rural Kumamoto accent of his childhood throughout his life. It may have held him back early in his career, but became part of his screen persona, denoting reliability and simple honesty. When the columnist Yamamoto Natsuhiko published a deliberately provocative piece called “I Can’t Stand Ryū Chishū”, in which he derided Ryū’s (笠) accent, there was a furious reaction, and his magazine Shūkan Shinchō (週刊新潮) was inundated with letters of protest.
[19] Film critic Graeme Clark called her “a ray of sunshine in many a Japanese movie of the fifties”.
[20] The family names of the three characters are Somiya (曾宮), Mamiya (間宮) and Hirayama (平山) respectively. Her remaining three films made with the director were: Tokyo Twilight (東京暮色), Late Autumn (秋日和) and The End of Summer (小早川家の秋), in which her characters were called Numata Takako (沼田孝子), Miwa Akiko (三輪秋子) and Kohayagawa Akiko (小早川秋子) respectively. Interestingly enough, in The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (お茶漬の味), Equinox Flower (彼岸花) and Good Morning (お早よう) there are characters named Setsuko (節子). Was Ozu (小津) missing her so much?
Moreover, there is another Noriko (紀子) in The End of Summer (小早川家の秋), played by Tsukasa Yōko (司葉子).
However, Ozu (小津) is known for the recurring use of the same first and family names in several of his films.
[21] Higashiyama Chieko (東山 千栄子) was born in 1890, Ryū Chishū (笠 智衆) in 1904, and Hara Setsuko (原 節子) in 1920.
[22] As was the case with Laurence Olivier as Hamlet who was eleven years older than Eileen Herlie as his mother Gertrude in the 1948 adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy!
[23] Albert Einstein (1879‒1955) could have something to say about this.
[24] More than twice the number of shots that Kurosawa (黒澤 or 黒沢 or 黑澤) would generally use.
[25] Sometimes characters enter a new room from the same side of the screen that they have exited the previous one, which only adds to the disorientation in space.
[26] In the sense of Einstein–Rosen bridges or Einstein–Rosen wormholes, speculative structures linking disparate points in space-time, not in the sense of actual holes made by actual worms in some actual material.
[27] The critic Adrian Danks draws more camparisons between Ozu (小津) and Tati in his review of Late Autumn (秋日和).
[28] The same is valid for some characters: suitors, bridegrooms and husbands, for instance, are oftentimes never seen, just mentioned.
[29] In no way comparable to the sadomasochist violence of Hollywood films!
[30] Actually nihonshu (日本酒 ‘Japanese liquor’) or seishu (清酒 ‘clear liquor’).
[31] But where the 地獄 would I store all my books‽
[32] Nevertheless I am sure that I am as 100% deeply in love with Hara Setsuko (原 節子) as any Japanese can ever be!
Linguist's eye on things 