Yasujirō Ozu

Yasujirō Ozu
File:Yasujiro Ozu cropped.jpg
Born	(1903-12-12)12 December 1903 Tokyo, Japan
Died	12 December 1963(1963-12-12) (aged 60) Tokyo, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1929 – 1963

Yasujirō Ozu (小津 安二郎, Ozu Yasujirō, 12 December 1903 – 12 December 1963) was a Japanese film director and script writer. He began his career during the era of silent films. Ozu made fifty-three films: twenty-six in his first five years as a director, and all but three for the Shochiku studio. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. Marriage and family, especially the relationships between the generations, are among the themes in his work. His outstanding works include Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), Tokyo Story (1953), and Floating Weeds (1959).

Biography

Early life

Ozu was born in the Fukagawa district of Tokyo, the second son of five brothers and sisters. His father was a fertilizer seller. He attended Meiji nursery school and primary school. In March 1913, at the age of ten, he and his siblings were sent by his father to live in his father's home town of Matsuzaka in Mie Prefecture, where he lived until 1924. In March 1916, at the age of 13 he entered what is now Ujiyamada High School. He was a boarder at the school and did judo. He frequently skipped school to watch films such as Quo Vadis or The Last Days of Pompei. In 1917 he saw the film Civilization and decided that he wanted to be a film director.

In 1920, at the age of 17, he was thrown out of the dormitory after being accused of writing a love letter to a good-looking boy in a lower class, and had to commute to school by train.

In March 1921 he graduated from the high school. He attempted the exam for what is now Kobe University's economics department, but failed. In 1922 he took the exam for a teacher training college, but failed it. On 31 March 1922 he began working as a substitute teacher at a school in Mie prefecture. He is said to have travelled the long journey from the school in the mountains to watch films at the weekend. In December 1922, his family with the exception of Ozu and his sister, moved back to Tokyo to live with his father. In March of 1923, when his sister graduated, he also went to Tokyo.

Entering the film business

With his uncle acting as intermediary, Ozu entered the Shochiku Film Company as an assistant in the cinematography department on 1 August 1923, against the wishes of his father. His family home was destroyed in the earthquake of 1923, but no members of his family were injured.

On 12 December 1924, Ozu started a year of military service. He finished his military service on 30 November 1925, leaving as a corporal.

In 1926 he became a third assistant director. In 1927 he was involved in a fracas where he punched another employee for jumping a queue at the studio cafeteria, and when called to the studio director's office he used it as an opportunity to present a film script he had written. In September 1927 he was promoted to director in the jidaigeki (period film) department, and directed his first film, Zange no Yaiba (The Sword of Penitence, now lost). Ozu's story, based on the American films Kick In and Hoodman Blind, was dramatized by Kogo Noda, who would become his co-writer for the rest of his career. On 25 September he was called up to military reserves until November, and the film was partly finished by another director.

In 1928, Shiro Kido, the head of the Shochiku studio, decided that the company was to concentrate on making short comedy "no star" films without star actors. Ozu made a series of these films. The film "Body Beautiful", released on 1 December 1928, was the first Ozu film to use his trademark low camera position.. After a series of "no star" pictures, in September 1929 Ozu's first film with stars, "I graduated but...", starring Minoru Takada and Kinuyo Tanaka, was released. In January 1930 he was entrusted with Shochiku's top star Sumiko Kurishima in her new year film, "An Introduction to Marriage". His subsequent films of 1930 impressed Shiro Kido enough to invite him on a trip to a hot spring. His film "Young Miss", with an all-star cast, was the first time he used the penname James Maki, and was also his first film to appear in film magazine Kinema Jumpo's "Best Ten" at third position.

His Umarete wa mita keredo (I Was Born, But..., 1932), a comedy with serious overtones on adolescence, not only marks the beginning of this transition, but was also received by movie critics as the first notable work of social criticism in Japanese cinema, winning Ozu wide acclaim. In his early works he used the pseudonym "James Maki" for his screenwriting.

In 1935 Ozu made a short documentary with soundtrack: Kagami Shishi, in which Kokiguro VI performed Kabuki dance of the same title. This was made by request of the Ministry of Education. Like the rest of Japan's cinema industry, Ozu was slow to switch to the production of talkies: his first film with a dialogue sound-track was Hitori Musuko (The Only Son) in 1936, five years after Japan's first talking film, Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine.

Wartime

On 9 September 1937, at a time when Shochiku was unhappy about Ozu's lack of box-office success (despite the praise and awards he received from critics), the thirty-four-year-old Ozu was conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army. He spent two years in China in the Second Sino-Japanese War. He started as a corporal but was promoted to sergeant on 1 June 1938. He arrived in Shanghai on 27 September 1937 as part of an infantry regiment which handled chemical weapons. From January until September 1938 he was stationed in Nanjing, meeting Sadao Yamanaka, who was also stationed nearby. In September, Yamanaka died of illness. In 1939, Ozu was dispatched to Hankou, where he fought in the Battle of Nanchang and the Battle of Xiushui River. In June, he was ordered back to Japan, arriving in Kobe in July, and his conscription ended on 16 July 1939.

In 1939, he wrote the first draft of the script for The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice but shelved it due to changes insisted on by military censors. The first film Ozu made on his return was the critically and commercially successful Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, released in 1941. He followed this with an autobiographical theme: Chichi Ariki (There Was a Father, 1942), describing the strong bonds of affection between a father and son despite years of separation.

In 1943, Ozu was again drafted into the army to make a propaganda film in Burma. However, he was sent to Singapore instead, to make a film called "Deruhi e, Deruhi e" (translation "To Delhi, to Delhi") with Chandra Bose. During his time in Singapore, having little inclination to work, he spent an entire year reading, playing tennis, and watching American films provided by the Army information corps. He was particularly impressed by Citizen Kane. He occupied a fifth-floor room facing the sea in the Cathay Building where he entertained guests, drew pictures and collected carpets. With the end of the second world war in August 1945, Ozu destroyed the script and footage shot of the film. He was detained as a civilian and worked in a rubber plantation. Of his film team of 32 people, there was only space for 28 on the first repatriation boat to Japan. Ozu won a lottery giving him a place, but gave it to someone else who was anxious to return.

Postwar

Ozu returned to Japan in February 1946, and moved back in with his mother, who had been staying with his sister in Noda in Chiba prefecture. He reported for work at the Ofuna studios on 18 February 1946. His first film released after the war was The Record of a Tenement Gentleman in 1947. Around this time, the Chigasakikan ryokan became Ozu's favoured location for scriptwriting.

Kaneto Shindo, a member of the Shochiku studio at the time, visited Ozu and Noda as they wrote the script for "Late Spring" together at Chigasakikan, and described the screenwriting process. Ozu and Noda stayed in an eight-mat room at the back corner of the ryokan, facing the sea, from 10 March to 24 April 1949. The script was written on 211 pieces of 200-character genkō yōshi with 103 scenes. The two men woke at 9 or 10 in the morning, then Ozu made breakfast with Noda helping, either fried eggs, miso soup and grilled dried fish, or bacon and sausages. Once breakfast was made they had a drink of Nihonshu and ate breakfast until noon. They used the dining tables to write the script on, with one dining table for the script and the other with fruit or chocolate, and a 1.8 liter bottle of Nihonshu. After noon they had a nap then welcomed visitors around 2 pm. Then, depending on their mood, they might work through the night into the morning on the script. Noda did most of the actual writing, with Ozu scrutinizing.

Tokyo Story was the last script written at Chigasakikan. After that, Ozu and Noda used a small house in the mountains at Tateshina in Nagano Prefecture called Unkosō to write scripts, with Ozu staying in a nearby house called Mugeisō.

Ozu's films were most favorably received from the late 1940s, with works such as Late Spring, 1949, The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, 1952, Tokyo Story, 1953—considered to be his masterpiece—Early Spring, 1956, Equinox Flower, 1958, his first film in colour, Floating Weeds, 1959 and Late Autumn, 1960. Ozu often worked with screenwriter Kogo Noda; other regular collaborators included camera man Yuharu Atsuta and the actors Chishu Ryu, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko Sugimura.

File:Engaku-ji Ozu-Yasujiro's-Grave.jpg

Ozu's grave at Engaku-ji

His work was only rarely shown overseas before the 1960s. Ozu's last film was An Autumn Afternoon in 1962.

He served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan from 1955 to his death in 1963.

Ozu was well known for his drinking. He and his screenwriting collaborator Kogo Noda used to measure the progression of their scripts by how many bottles of sake they had drunk. Occasionally visitors to his grave pay their respects by leaving cans and bottles of alcoholic drink. Ozu remained single and childless throughout his life and stayed alone with his mother who died less than two years before his own death.

Ozu died in 1963 of cancer on his 60th birthday. The grave he shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name—just the character mu ("nothingness").

Legacy and style

File:Setsuko Hara and Yasujiro Ozu in Tokyo Story.jpg

Yasujirō Ozu (far right) on location of Tokyo Story (1953)

Ozu became widely recognized internationally when his films were shown abroad. Influential monographs by Donald Richie, Paul Schrader, and David Bordwell have ensured a wide appreciation of Ozu's style, aesthetics and themes. Ozu was dubbed the tenth greatest director of all time by the BFI's Sight & Sound poll of Critics' top ten directors.

Ozu is probably as well known for the technical style and innovation of his films as for the narrative content. The style of his films is most striking in his later films, a style he had not fully developed until his post-war talkies. He did not conform to most Hollywood conventions, most notably the 180 degree rule. Also, rather than using the typical over-the-shoulder shots in his dialogue scenes, the camera gazes on the actors directly, which has the effect of placing the viewer in the middle of the scene. Ozu did not use typical transitions between scenes, either. In between scenes he would show shots of certain static objects as transitions, or use direct cuts, rather than fades or dissolves. Most often the static objects would be buildings, where the next indoor scene would take place. It was during these transitions that he would use music, which might begin at the end of one scene, progress through the static transition, and fade into the new scene. He rarely used non-diegetic music in any scenes other than in the transitions. Ozu moved the camera less and less as his career progressed, and ceased using tracking shots altogether in his color films. However, David Bordwell argues that Ozu is one of the few directors to "create a systematic alternative to Hollywood continuity cinema, but he does so by changing only a few premises."

He invented the "tatami shot", in which the camera is placed at a low height, supposedly at the eye level of a person kneeling on a tatami mat. Actually, Ozu's camera is often even lower than that, only one or two feet off the ground. He used this low height even when there were no sitting scenes, such as when his characters walked down hallways.

Ozu eschewed the traditional rules of filmic storytelling, most notably eyelines. In his review of Floating Weeds, film critic Roger Ebert recounts

[Ozu] once had a young assistant who suggested that perhaps he should shoot conversations so that it seemed to the audience that the characters were looking at one another. Ozu agreed to a test. They shot a scene both ways, and compared them. "You see?" Ozu said. "No difference!"

In narrative structure, Ozu was an innovator in his use of ellipses, in which many major events are left out, leaving only the space between them. For example, in An Autumn Afternoon a wedding is mentioned in one scene, and then in the next, a reference is made to the wedding that has already occurred. The wedding, however, never occurs on screen. This is typical of Ozu's films. Usually Ozu elides moments that Hollywood films use to stir an emotional reaction from the audience, thus eschewing melodrama.

Tributes and documentaries

In the Wim Wenders documentary film Tokyo-Ga, the director travels to Japan to explore the world of Ozu, interviewing both Chishu Ryu and Yuharu Atsuta.

In 2003, the centenary of Ozu's birth was commemorated at various film festivals around the world. Shochiku produced the film Café Lumière (珈琲時光), directed by Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsiao-Hsien as homage to Ozu, with direct reference to the late master's Tokyo Story (1953), to premiere on Ozu's birthday.

John Walker, former editor of Halliwell`s Film Guide, placed Tokyo Story top in a list of the best 1000 films yet made.

Ozu's Tokyo Story has appeared several times in the Sight & Sound poll of best films selected by critics and directors. In 2012, it topped the poll of film directors' choices of "greatest film of all time".

Filmography

Filmography of Yasujirō Ozu
Year	Japanese Title	Rōmaji	English Title	Notes
Silent films
1927	懺悔の刃	Zange no yaiba	Sword of Penitence	Lost
1928	若人の夢	Wakōdo no yume	Dreams of Youth	Lost
	女房紛失	Nyōbō funshitsu	Wife Lost	Lost
	カボチャ	Kabocha	Pumpkin	Lost
	引越し夫婦	Hikkoshi fūfu	A Couple on the Move	Lost
	肉体美	Nikutaibi	Body Beautiful	Lost
1929	宝の山	Takara no yama	Treasure Mountain	Lost
	学生ロマンス　若き日	Gakusei romansu: wakaki hi	Days of Youth	Ozu's earliest surviving film
	和製喧嘩友達	Wasei kenka tomodachi	Fighting Friends Japanese Style	14 minutes survive
	大学は出たけれど	Daigaku wa detakeredo	I Graduated, But...	10 minutes survive
	会社員生活	Kaishain seikatsu	The Life of an Office Worker	Lost
	突貫小僧	Tokkan kozō	A Straightforward Boy	Short film
1930	結婚学入門	Kekkongaku nyūmon	An Introduction to Marriage	Lost
	朗かに歩め	Hogaraka ni ayume	Walk Cheerfully
	落第はしたけれど	Rakudai wa shitakeredo	I Flunked, But...
	その夜の妻	Sono yo no tsuma	That Night's Wife
	エロ神の怨霊	Erogami no onryō	The Revengeful Spirit of Eros	Lost
	足に触った幸運	Ashi ni sawatta kōun	The Luck Which Touched the Leg	Lost
	お嬢さん	Ojōsan	Young Miss	Lost
1931	淑女と髭	Shukujo to hige	The Lady and the Beard
	美人と哀愁	Bijin to aishu	Beauty's Sorrows	Lost
	東京の合唱	Tokyo no kōrasu	Tokyo Chorus
1932	春は御婦人から	Haru wa gofujin kara	Spring Comes from the Ladies	Lost
	大人の見る繪本　生れてはみたけれど	Umarete wa mita keredo	I Was Born, But...
	靑春の夢いまいづこ	Seishun no yume ima izuko	Where Now Are the Dreams of Youth?
	また逢ふ日まで	Mata au hi made	Until the Day We Meet Again	Lost
1933	東京の女	Tokyo no onna	Woman of Tokyo
	非常線の女	Hijōsen no onna	Dragnet Girl
	出来ごころ	Dekigokoro	Passing Fancy
1934	母を恋はずや	Haha wo kowazuya	A Mother Should be Loved
	浮草物語	Ukigusa monogatari	A Story of Floating Weeds
1935	箱入娘	Hakoiri musume	An Innocent Maid	Lost
	菊五郎の鏡獅子	Kagami jishi	Kagami jishi	Documentary
	東京の宿	Tokyo no yado	An Inn in Tokyo
1936	大学よいとこ	Daigaku yoitoko	College is a Nice Place	Lost
Sound, black-and-white films
1936	ひとり息子	Hitori musuko	The Only Son	Ozu's first sound film
1937	淑女は何を忘れたか	Shukujo wa nani wo wasureta ka	What Did the Lady Forget?
1941	戸田家の兄妹	Todake no kyodai	Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family
1942	父ありき	Chichi ariki	There Was a Father
1947	長屋紳士録	Nagaya Shinshiroku	Record of a Tenement Gentleman
1948	風の中の牝鶏	Kaze no naka no mendori	A Hen in the Wind
1949	晩春	Banshun	Late Spring	Ozu's first film with Setsuko Hara
1950	宗方姉妹	Munekata kyōdai	The Munekata Sisters
1951	麥秋	Bakushu	Early Summer
1952	お茶漬けの味	Ochazuke no aji	The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice	Adapted from censored 1939 script
1953	東京物語	Tokyo monogatari	Tokyo Story
1956	早春	Soshun	Early Spring
1957	東京暮色	Tōkyō boshoku	Tokyo Twilight
Colour films
1958	彼岸花	Higanbana	Equinox Flower	Ozu's first film in colour
1959	お早よう	Ohayo	Good Morning	Remake of I Was Born, But...
	浮草	Ukigusa	Floating Weeds	Remake of A Story of Floating Weeds
1960	秋日和	Akibiyori	Late Autumn
1961	小早川家の秋	Kohayagawa-ke no aki	The End of Summer
1962	秋刀魚の味	Sanma no aji	An Autumn Afternoon	Ozu's final work

References

• Bock, Audie, Yasujiro Ozu in Japanese Film Directors Kodansha International Ltd; (1978), ISBN 0-87011-304-6
• Hasumi, Shiguehiko (1998), Yasujirô Ozu, Paris: Cahiers du cinéma, ISBN 2-86642-191-4 
• Kiju Yoshida, Ozu's Anti-Cinema. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan; (1998), ISBN 1-929280-27-0
• Ozu Yasujiro zenshū (Ozu Yasujiro's Complete Works—two volume set of Ozu's scripts). Shinshokan; (March 2003), ISBN 4-403-15001-2 (in Japanese)
• Sato, Tadao (1997b), Le Cinéma japonais - Tome II, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, ISBN 2-85850-930-1 
• Torres Hortelano, Lorenzo J., Primavera tardía de Yasujiro Ozu : cine clásico y poética zen, Caja España (León), Obra Social y Cultural, ISBN 978-84-95917-24-9
• "Notes on Ozu's Cinematic Style," William Rothman in the Stanley Cavell special issue (Jeffrey Crouse, editor), Film International Issue 22, Vol, 4, No, 4, 2006.
• Template:Hasumi-shiguehiko-ozu-2003
• Template:Kaneto-shindo-shinario-jinsei

External links

• Yasujiro Ozu at the Internet Movie Database
• Digital Ozu - notes from an exhibition at Tokyo University.
• Directions for finding Yasujiro Ozu's grave at Engaku-ji
• The quiet master at The Guardian
• Ozu's Angry Women by Shigehiko Hasumi
• Yasujirō Ozu at Find a Grave
• Ozu-san.com - A Website Dedicated to Ozu Yasujiro
• Template:Jmdb
• OZU Yasujiro Story

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