Apart from the noted silent film Otona no miru ehon Umarete wa mita keredo (1932) the reputation of once Shochiku assistant Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) in the West is chiefly based on the work during the last period of his career - the fifteen films the director completed between 1947 and his untimely death in 1963.
The backdrop to all these simple tales was the aftermath of the occupation of Japan and the influence of America's values. But it was the impact of this change of the ordinary individual within the family unit that obsessed Ozu; as seen in 1952's The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice. The film was a simple tale of a marital crisis experienced by a middle-aged couple, whereas Soshun (1956), the marital crisis strikes a young couple after the husband, an office clerk that comes down with a terminal case of ennui, resists not the devil's playground and has himself a torrid affair. He then accepts a job transfer out of the country where he is rejoined by his wife and they both agree to start over again. But though the films are based on keen observation of real people and their life's details, they are not basically fictionalized documentaries. There is an unnerving intensity which emerges from the biographical aspect of Ozu's work. Ozu's father was seldom home when the director was growing up; the boy and his mother soon shared a sacrosanct relationship, spending his entire adult life caring for her, rather than marrying.
 |
| Director Ozu always played happy families. From 1951's Early Summer (Bakushu) |
Ten of Ozu's fifteen post-war films concern the difficulties posed by the death and absence of a parent, or uncertainty about a child's marriage. Ozu scripted all of the films of his specific period in close collaboration with Kogo Noda, a writer with whom he felt in simpatico with. The obsessive aspect of Ozu's work is enhanced by his reliance on the same actors and actresses and to such an extent that they virtually constituted a personal company a technique employed by future director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.