Introduction ①
There is a scene like this at the end of film “Early Summer” (1951), directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
Noriko (Hara Setsuko), the daughter of a family of seven people from three generations living in Kamakura, decided to move to Akita Prefecture to get married, and before leaving Tokyo, she visited her office in Marunouchi, Tokyo to say goodbye to her boss, Satake (Sano Shuji). Satake looked at the view from the office window and muttered this.
Satake: “Hey, look to your heart's content.”
Noriko: “...?”
Satake: “Tokyo is pretty good too...”
Just like Noriko, who gazes deeply at the sights of Tokyo that she will likely never see again for the time being, Ozu himself must have felt the overwhelming feeling of saying goodbye to Tokyo many times over.
Ozu left Tokyo three times during the 60 years from his birth in 1903 in Fukagawa, a downtown area located in the eastern part of Tokyo, to his death in 1963, excluding short-term military service and travels.
The first was a move to Matsusaka City, Mie Prefecture, in March 1913. It was his father's hometown. Ozu was 9 years old at this time. For ten years until he returned to Tokyo in the spring of 1923 at the age of 19, Ozu was forced to leave his hometown due to circumstances unrelated to his will. This is the longest period of time away from Tokyo in Ozu's lifetime. Furthermore, since this was an experience during his youth when he was thought to be impressionable and sensitive, it is thought to have had a considerable influence on not only Ozu's personality development and outlook on life, but also on his filmmaking as a director and a screenwriter.
Let it call these 10 years Ozu's “Matsusaka days” for now. It can be easily inferred from tracing the various depictions that appear in his works that the experiences of this period left an indelible mark on Ozu's filmmaking.
For example, the main characters in the Ozu movies all have a strong admiration and attachment to Tokyo. The students in “Days of Youth” (1929), in “I Graduated, But….” (1929), in “I Flunked, But….” (1930), and in “College is a Nice Place” (1936) are all boarders who came to Tokyo from rural areas with their own dreams. In addition, the main characters in “Tokyo Chorus” (1931), in “Early Summer”, and in “Early Spring” (1956) are all disappointed when it is decided to move from Tokyo to the countryside, and strongly hope to return to Tokyo someday. Their longing for and attachment to Tokyo echoes the thoughts of Ozu himself, who was forced to move to the countryside when he was a boy.
There are fragmentary descriptions of Ozu's Matsusaka days in several documents, such as “The Art of Ozu Yasujiro” by Sato Tadao, “Chronology” included in “Ozu Yasujiro / Hito to Shigoto(His Personality and Works)” edited by Shimogawara Tomoo and Inoue Kazuo, “Aesthetics of Ozu Yasujiro/Japan in Films” by Donald Riche , “Ozu Yasujiro and the War”by Tanaka Masasumi. However, they generally only outline this period as part of Ozu's upbringing and career.
On the other hand, some studies have focused on Ozu during this period, such as “Ozu Yasujiro in his Youth” by Nakamura Hiroo, “Ozu Yasujiro the Substitute Teacher” by Fujita Akira (included in “Movie History Research” No. 14 edited by Sato Tadao), and “Personal View / Ozu Yasujiro:A Year in Miyanomae” by Yanase Saiji.
“Ozu Yasujiro in his Youth” deals with Ozu's days as a junior high school student under the old system. “Ozu Yasujiro the Substitute Teacher” and “Personal View / Ozu Yasujiro: A Year in Miyanomae” deal with his time as a substitute teacher after graduating from the junior high school under the old system. All of those documents describe the facts of each period of Ozu, based on existing documents and interviews. However, all of those documents are more focused on exploring the youth of Ozu Yasujiro, so they do not much discuss how the experiences of this period influenced Ozu's later filmmaking.
Therefore, in the first half of this essay (Part I), I would like to trace as carefully as possible the ten years of Ozu's youth when he was forced to live in the countryside, and would like to explore how the experiences of this period influenced the director Ozu and his filmmaking, and what kind of expressions and depictions appear in his films.
The following materials were mainly used as reference. They are two surviving diaries from his junior high school days (1918 and 1921) , the official documents remaining at the school, many testimonies of relatives (brothers, sister-in-law, etc.), classmates, and underclassmen, the letters written by Ozu to his classmates, and etcetera.
-to be continued-
