Part II Ozu Yasujiro in wartime and post-war period At the age of 20, Ozu Yasujiro joined the Imperial Guards in Aoyama, Tokyo as a one-year volunteer from December 1924 to November of the following year. After being called up many times f…

Nostalgic dialect I would like to point out another interesting reason that is closely related to the heavy use of Kansai dialect in Ozu movies. That is what Ozu himself used to speak a dialect with a Kansai accent in the past. Some people…

What Did the Lady Forget? “What Did the Lady Forget?” was filmed in 1937, when Ozu was deepening his relationships with filmmakers living in Kansai. This is Ozu's second talkie feature film, after “The Only Son”, apart from his documentary…

Ozu meets Yamanaka Sadao On October 6th of that year(1934), Ozu met Yamanaka Sadao through Inoue Kintaro. After Ozu finished his military training at Tsu, Mie Prefecture, where he had joined in the middle of the previous month, he visited …

Chapter 5 People from the Kansai region Ozu meets Inoue Kintaro Hazumi Tsuneo, a critic, writes the following in the article “My View of Ozu Yasujiro”. The people who appear in Ozu movies have always been unusually attached to their lives …

Being poor and pure I mentioned earlier that Yuasa-ya, which Toranosuke served as the branch manager, was a wholesaler that handled seafood and fertilizers. However, due to the store being damaged by the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, the…

There Was a Father Ozu wrote the following in his diary on April 1, 1937. In the spring of 1923, I returned to Tokyo for the first time in 10 years. At that time, my father was still alive. I once had yellow roses arranged on the second fl…

A Story of Floating Weeds On April 2, 1934, his father Toranosuke suddenly passed away. Ozu's diary from that time records Toranosuke's ever-changing state before and after his sudden death. At night, when I started writing continuity, my …

Chapter 4 Father Sensitive and lonely Many documents say that from 1913 to 1923, when Ozu lived in Matsusaka with his family ,mother, younger sister, and younger brother, only his father, Toranosuke, remained in Tokyo as the branch manager…