Yasujirō Ozu

Ozu was born in the Fukagawa, Tokyo, the second son of merchant Toranosuke Ozu and his wife Asae.[2] His family was a branch of the Ozu Yoemon merchant family from Ise, and Toranosuke was the 5th generation manager of the family's fertilizer business in Nihonbashi.[3] Asae came from the Nakajō merchant family.[2][3] Ozu had five brothers and sisters. When he was three, he developed meningitis, and was in a coma for a couple of days. Asae devoted herself to nursing him, and Ozu made a recovery.[2] He attended Meiji nursery school and primary school.[4] In March 1913, at the age of nine, he and his siblings were sent by his father to live in his father's home town of Matsusaka in Mie Prefecture, where he remained until 1924.[4][5] In March 1916, at the age of 12, he entered what is now Ujiyamada High School.[n 1] He was a boarder at the school and did judo.[4] He frequently skipped classes to watch films such as Quo Vadis or The Last Days of Pompeii. In 1917, he saw the film Civilization and decided that he wanted to be a film director.[6]

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.[6]

In March 1921, Ozu graduated from the high school. He attempted the exam for entrance into what is now Kobe University's economics department,[n 2] but failed. In 1922, he took the exam for a teacher training college,[n 3] but failed it too. On 31 March 1922, he began working as a substitute teacher at a school in the Mie prefecture. He is said to have traveled the long journey from the school in the mountains to watch films on 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 1923, when his sister graduated, he also returned to live in Tokyo.

Yasujiro Ozu in Dragnet Girl 1933

With his uncle acting as intermediary, Ozu was hired by the Shochiku Film Company, as an assistant in the cinematography department, on 1 August 1923, against the wishes of his father.[6] 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.[6][n 4] He finished his military service on 30 November 1925, leaving as a corporal.

In 1926, he became a third assistant director at Shochiku.[7] 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, used it as an opportunity to present a film script he had written.[7] In September 1927, he was promoted to director in the jidaigeki (period film) department, and directed his first film, Sword of Penitence, which has since been lost. Sword of Penitence was written by Ozu, with a screenplay by Kogo Noda, who would become his co-writer for the rest of his career. On September 25, he was called up for service in the military reserves until November, which meant that the film had to be partly finished by another director.[7]

In 1928, Shiro Kido, the head of the Shochiku studio, decided that the company would concentrate on making short comedy films without star actors. Ozu made many of these films. The film Body Beautiful, released on 1 December 1928, was the first Ozu film to use a low camera position, which would become his trademark.[7] After a series of the "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 Ozu on a trip to a hot spring. In his early works, Ozu used the pseudonym "James Maki"[n 5] for his screenwriting credit.[8] His film Young Miss, with an all-star cast, was the first time he used the pen name James Maki, and was also his first film to appear in film magazine Kinema Jumpo's "Best Ten" at third position.[9]

In 1932, his I Was Born, But..., a comedy about childhood with serious overtones, was received by movie critics as the first notable work of social criticism in Japanese cinema, winning Ozu wide acclaim.[10] In 1935 Ozu made a short documentary with soundtrack: Kagami Jishi, in which Kikugoro VI performed a Kabuki dance of the same title. This was made by request of the Ministry of Education.[11]^{: p. 221} 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 The Only Son in 1936, five years after Japan's first talking film, Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine.

On 9 September 1937, at a time when Shochiku was unhappy about Ozu's lack of box-office success, despite the praise 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 arrived in Shanghai on 27 September 1937 as part of an infantry regiment which handled chemical weapons.[12] He started as a corporal but was promoted to sergeant on 1 June 1938.[12] From January until September 1938 he was stationed in Nanjing, where he met Sadao Yamanaka, who was stationed nearby. In September, Yamanaka died of illness.[12] 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.[12]

Some of Ozu’s published diaries cover his wartime experiences between December 20, 1938, to June 5, 1939.[13] Another diary from his wartime years (陣中日記) he expressly forbade from publication. In the published diaries, reference to his group's participation in chemical warfare (in violation of the Geneva Protocol, though Japan had withdrawn from the League of Nations in 1933) can be found, for example, in various entries from March 1939. In other entries, he describes Chinese soldiers in disparaging terms, likening them in one passage to insects.[14] Although operating as a military squad leader, Ozu retains his directorial perspective, once commenting that the initial shock and subsequent agony of a man as he is hacked to death is very much like its depiction in period films.[15]

Ozu's writings also offers a glimpse into the Japanese military's use of comfort women. In a letter sent to friends in Japan on April 11, 1938, from Dingyuan County in China's Anhui Province, Ozu writes about the comfort station protocol in lightly coded terms.[16] In a January 13, 1939, diary entry, Ozu writes more openly about his group's upcoming turn for use of a comfort station near Yingcheng. He mentions that two tickets, ointment, and prophylatics are provided and that three Korean and 12 Chinese women were being held at the comfort station for their use. Comfort station rates and schedules are also given by Ozu.[17]

In 1939, he wrote the first draft of the script for The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice but shelved it due to extensive changes insisted on by military censors.[12] 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 There Was a Father (Chichi Ariki, 1942), which explored the strong bonds of affection between a father and son despite years of separation.

In 1943, Ozu was again drafted into the army for the purpose of making a propaganda film in Burma. However, he was sent to Singapore instead, to make a documentary Derii e, Derii e ("To Delhi, to Delhi") about Chandra Bose.[18] 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 with Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.[19] He occupied a fifth-floor room facing the sea in the Cathay Building where he entertained guests, drew pictures, and collected rugs. At the end of the Second World War in August 1945, Ozu destroyed the script, and all footage, of the film.[18] 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.[18][19]

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 Record of a Tenement Gentleman in 1947. Around this time, the Chigasakikan[n 6] Ryokan became Ozu's favoured location for scriptwriting.

Ozu's grave at Engaku-ji, Kamakura in 2018

Tokyo Story was the last script that Ozu wrote at Chigasakikan. In later years, Ozu and Noda used a small house in the mountains at Tateshina in Nagano Prefecture called Unkosō[n 7] to write scripts, with Ozu staying in a nearby house called Mugeisō.[n 8][20]

Ozu's films from the late 1940s onward were favourably received, and the entries in the so-called "Noriko trilogy" (starring Setsuko Hara) of Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Tokyo Story (1953) are among his most acclaimed works, with Tokyo Story widely considered his masterpiece.[21] Late Spring, the first of these films, was the beginning of Ozu's commercial success and the development of his cinematography and storytelling style. These three films were followed by his first colour film, Equinox Flower, in 1958, Floating Weeds in 1959, and Late Autumn in 1960. In addition to Noda, other regular collaborators included cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta, along with the actors Chishū Ryū, Setsuko Hara, and Haruko Sugimura.

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

He served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan from 1955 to his death in 1963.[22]

Ozu was known for his drinking. He and Noda measured the progression of their scripts by how many bottles of sake they had drunk. Ozu never married.[23][24] He lived with his mother until she died in 1961.

A heavy smoker, Ozu died of throat cancer in 1963, on his sixtieth birthday. The grave he shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name—just the character mu ("nothingness").[25]