Of all the great Japanese directors, Yasujiro Ozu is the filmmaker most often cited as the “most authentically Japanese” (Kemp 135). Possessing an austere, distinctive visual style that was unconventional and non-Western, Ozu’s work was rarely seen outside of his native Japan, even during the time when other Japanese auteurs – Kurosawa and Mizoguchi – were gaining international acclaim. The release of Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari) in 1953 – the film widely regarded as his masterpiece – coincided with the time when Western audiences were gaining their first major exposure to Japanese cinema; “Akira Kurosawa made his breakthrough with Rashomon three years earlier, and Kenji Mizoguchi was moving to the forefront of the international festival scene” (Bordwell 1). However, despite this period of newfound international attention, Ozu’s films remained widely unscreened outside Japan; “their minimal narratives and idiosyncratic style resembled few other films, and distributers feared they were ‘too Japanese’ for international audiences” (Prelinger 1). As a result, the international market would not widely recognize the prolific director until a screening of Tokyo Story in New York in 1972 – nearly a full decade after Ozu’s death (Bordwell 1).
Yasujiro Ozu was born on December 12, 1903 in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo, Japan. The son of a fertilizer merchant, Ozu was an “indifferent student” in school, and often cut classes to attend film screenings (Crow). In high school, he was accused of sending a love letter to a younger female student, which had him expelled from school; Donald Richie notes that the event troubled Ozu, and while there is no evidence he actually sent the letter, he was “already on the disciplinary list: he drank, he smoked, he cut classes to go to the movies, and he received several zeros for conduct” (Richie 24). Ozu never forgot the incident that removed him from school, and even includes a reference to the notorious love letter in the script of his final film (Richie 24).
Ozu’s film career began in 1927, with the completion of his first film, Sword of Penitence (Zange no yaiba). This film would be the first and only costume drama of Ozu’s career; “apart from [this] directorial debut… all Ozu’s films were set in contemporary Japan” (Kemp 136). Ozu was so dissatisfied with the final cut of Sword of Penitence that he disowned it, yet he did not abandon filmmaking and continued to make films at a swift pace, completing over fifty feature films in his thirty-five-year career (Kemp 136). Stemming from an admiration for the silent comedies of Harold Lloyd and Ernst Lubitsch, the earliest Ozu films were silent comedies in the Japanese nonsense-mono style: “slapstick sketches… strung together with just a sliver of plot” (“Hard at Work” 1). In these early comedies, Ozu did not yet display the acclaimed visual techniques of his later work.
The first major film of Ozu’s oeuvre to display his signature visual style is 1932’s I Was Born, But… (Otona no miru ehon – Umarete wa mita keredo). For the first time, an Ozu film seriously explored the parent-child family relationship – a subject that dominates many of his films. Focusing on the theme of the dissolution of the family, Ozu helped define the shomin-geki, a Japanese “modern family drama,” and continued to display his mastery of the form until his death (Atkinson 5). He believed films were more valuable in their ability to create characters than develop plots; as Richie writes, “he was more interested in who his people were than in what they did” (Richie 2). His first major commercial and critical success, I Was Born, But… won first prize at the prestigious Kinema Junpo Awards “and is to this day the earliest Ozu print in regular circulation” (“Daddy Dearest” 1). Another Ozu silent, 1933’s Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro) introduced audiences to a recurring Ozu character type – the “loveable ne’er-do-well… usually called ‘Kihachi’” (Richie 1) played by Takeshi Sakamoto. Sakamoto became one of Ozu’s most popular collaborators, and would reprise his role of Kihachi in a series of films.
As Japanese cinema continued to progress in the 1930s, Ozu was forced to confront a technical development in the industry – the advent of sound films. Although Ozu’s production company, Shochiku Studios, produced the first Japanese feature-length talking picture in 1931, Ozu delayed his personal transition to sound films. Resistant to what he perceived as only a current fad, he believed that “silent film was an art form on the verge of artistic perfection and that sound was something of a rude interruption in reaching that goal” (“Bringing It All…” 1). Ultimately, Ozu converted to talking pictures, beginning in 1936 with The Only Son (Hitori musuko), but continued to make exclusively silent films in the early-to-mid-1930s while developing his mature filmmaking style.
By 1949, Yasujiro Ozu already completed over thirty films, but it is the period beginning with 1949’s Late Spring (Banshun) and ending with the director’s death in 1963 that contains Ozu’s most acclaimed films and those that best exemplify his iconic style. During this period, he focused the majority of his output on the same motif: “the attempt by an aging parent to marry off a dutiful daughter” (Prelinger 1). Ozu was deeply interested in “intergenerational communication,” (“Family Reunion” 1) and made films that “[refused] plot in any melodramatic sense,” (Richie 3) but exhibited a “faith that everyday life, rendered tellingly, provides more than enough drama to engage [audiences] deeply” (Bordwell 3). The plots of these films have an element of familiarity from one film to another; they are human dramas “laced with comedy” (Andrew 17) that maintain a consistency of style, mood, and cast (many performers appear in multiple films). The films are “meditative and relaxed, but never boring,” and are told from a point-of-view of “sympathetic sadness” stemming from the “Japanese concept of mono no aware: the perspective of a weary, relaxed, even disappointed observer” (Prelinger 1).
Just as the focus of Ozu’s plots remained consistent throughout much of his career, even more consistent is his iconic visual style, described here by Geoff Andrew:
“The hallmark elements of the style are, famously, the use of relatively short shots, taken with a mostly stationary camera from an unusually low angle in relation to the characters in the frame; simple cuts rather than fades, wipes, or dissolves; montage sequences of landscapes and buildings not only to begin films but also to provide punctuation and linkages between narrative scenes… Ozu characteristically displays a great visual wit, teasing and confounding our expectations in his imaginative use of offscreen space, and constantly surprising us with the way he positions a dazzling array of bright red objects… within the predominantly muted pastels of his meticulous compositions (Andrew 12, 17).”
The “unusually low angle” that Andrew refers to is a positioning of the camera “about three feet above the ground – roughly the eye line…of someone sitting cross-legged on a tatami mat” (Kemp 135). Ozu’s directing style, rejecting editing effects such as fades and dissolves, is so conservative and simplistic that Michael Atkinson refers to him as “one of the very few cinema giants you could never accuse of pretention” (Atkinson 4). The visual style of Ozu’s films is so different, yet stable that “even without seeing Ozu’s name in the credits, anyone who has ever sat through even one of his films would probably recognize [another] as his work within a minute or so, so idiosyncratic, consistent, and bold is his signature” (Andrew 12).
While Ozu’s mature directorial vision is clearly visible in Late Spring (1949), it is 1953’s Tokyo Story that introduced cineastes worldwide to Ozu’s work, and the film critics regard as his masterpiece (Bordwell 1). The film – starring frequent Ozu collaborators Chishu Ryu and Setsuko Hara – tells the story of an elderly couple that leaves the suburbs to visit their children in Tokyo, only to find that they have become an irrelevant nuisance in their busy children’s lives. All of Ozu’s stylistic elements are present in the film – tatami-high camera placement, short scenes, straight cuts, etc. Also notable in the film is Ozu’s treatment of dialogue; “Ozu refuses to cut away from a speaking character…as if to say every person has the right to be heard in full” (Bordwell 3). In a sense, this respectful treatment of each character’s dialogue coincides with the film’s non-judgmental treatment of the characters; each character has a justifiable reason for behaving how he/she does, and Ozu does not pass negative judgment on any of them. In the years following its release, the critical reception of Tokyo Story has been so great that the film ranked among the ten greatest films ever made in the last two Sight & Sound international critics’ polls (Bordwell 1).
Similar to his reluctance to sound in the 1930s, Ozu was again hesitant to adopt other technologies that came into wide use in Japan in the 1950s – color photography and widescreen lenses. However, when he eventually decided to shoot a film in color, Equinox Flower (Higanbana) in 1958, Ozu “found the transition to be a smooth one, enjoying the ways in which the properties of the reds, in particular, enhanced his vision of a changing society” (“In Full Bloom” 1). Once adopting color, Ozu would never return to black-and-white filmmaking, shooting all of his final six films in color, including 1959’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa), a full-color, talkie remake of one of his most successful silent films. Unlike his eventual transfer to color film, Ozu rejected shooting in widescreen his entire life, despite pressure from his studio to adapt to the widely-used CinemaScope, “a format standard by then… but one that [Ozu] once compared to toilet paper” (Richie 6).
The final film of Ozu’s fifty-four film career, 1962’s An Autumn Afternoon (Sanma no aji), again revisits the familiar Ozu plot of a middle-aged man’s relationship with his unwed daughter. While the film is often retrospectively treated as Ozu’s testament piece, Andrew notes that Ozu had no intention of ending his career as a writer-director – “he had made notes for another project, provisionally titled Radishes and Carrots; and there is every reason to believe that, had he lived on, the Japanese master would have continued completing films at the steady rate of one a year” (Andrew 8). It is Ozu’s consistency in style that gives the film its implied feeling of punctuation to his career, for the film exemplifies the stable familiarity of Ozu’s entire filmography.
On his sixtieth birthday, December 12, 1963, Yasujiro Ozu passed away after a brief struggle with cancer. For a man who spent most of his career making films about families, relationships, and marriage, it is somewhat ironic that “Ozu had no known romantic affairs” and lived with his mother his entire life (“Ozu’s Diaries” 24). Several dozen diaries were discovered after the director’s death that have since been published; interestingly, Ozu has little to say about the creation of his own films, but a great deal to say about his enjoyment (or lack thereof) of others (“Ozu’s Diaries” 25). While it took a great many years for Ozu to gain international recognition as a cinematic master, his stylistic influence has been vast since its “discovery” outside his native Japan – several prolific Western auteurs cite Ozu as an influence, including Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders, and Martin Scorsese (Crow). Wenders’ 1985 film Tokyo-Ga is a documentary tribute to Ozu’s work, with Wenders visiting Tokyo in an attempt to capture the spirit of the city Ozu portrays in many of his films. In another film, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003), imitates Ozu’s visual style as a tribute, and the film is dedicated to him (IMDB). In addition to his stylistic influences, Ozu also helped progress Japanese cinema through his support of Kinuyo Tanaka’s “bid to become Japan’s first female director when she was furiously opposed by her own lover… Kenji Mizoguchi” (Kemp 137). Often perceived as too slowly paced for Western audiences, Ozu’s mastery of family drama and character study is, nevertheless, unparalleled. As for the cliché that attributes Ozu as the “most Japanese” of Japan’s masters, Ozu himself once stated, “whenever Westerners don’t understand something, they simply think it is Zen” (Kemp 137). Zen or not, Ozu’s art has withstood the test of time.
Works Cited
Andrew, Geoff. “A Fond Farewell.” DVD – An Autumn Afternoon. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Atkinson, Michael. “Home with Ozu.” DVD – Late Spring. The Criterion Collection, 2006.
Bordwell, David. “Tokyo Story.” DVD – Tokyo Story. The Criterion Collection, 2003.
Crow, Jonathan. “Biography: Yasujiro Ozu.” AllMovie. Online.
Kemp, Philip. “Yasujiro Ozu.” Ed. Schneider, Steven Jay. 501 Movie Directors. Hauppage, NY: Barron’s Educational Series, 2007. 135-137.
Koresky, Michael. “Bringing It All Back Home.” DVD – Passing Fancy. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Koresky, Michael. “Daddy Dearest.” DVD – I Was Born, But… The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Koresky, Michael. “Family Reunion.” DVD – Late Autumn. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Koresky, Michael. “Hard at Work.” DVD – Tokyo Chorus. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Koresky, Michael. “In Full Bloom.” DVD – Equinox Flower. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Prelinger, Rick. “Good Morning.” DVD – Good Morning. The Criterion Collection, 2000.
Richie, Donald. “Ozu’s Diaries.’ DVD – An Autumn Afternoon. The Criterion Collection, 2008.
Richie, Donald. “Stories of Floating Weeds.” DVD – A Story of Floating Weeds/Floating Weeds. The Criterion Collection, 2004.
“Yasujiro Ozu” The Internet Movie Database. Online.
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