Introduction ② -continued from file 1-
After the Matsusaka days, Ozu left Tokyo for a long time during the Sino-Japanese War and when he was dispatched to Singapore as an army civilian employee.
Ozu first served on the Chinese battle front as an infantry corporal from September 1937 to July 1939, and was then dispatched to Singapore as a member of the Army's press department from June 1943 to February 1946. In his prime years, between the ages of 33 and 42, when he was at his peak as a film director and screenwriter, Ozu left Tokyo for a total of four and a half years due to the irresistible power of the state, leaving the film production scene. Film history usually doesn't pay much attention to directors when they weren't making movies. However, because of the length of time and harsh and unusual experiences that Ozu had in the army as a private on the continent and as a civilian in military employ, it is naturally believed that they had an unavoidable influence on Ozu's postwar filmmaking.
Regarding his time on the Chinese battle front, there are letters written by Ozu from the battlefield to his junior high school friends (“Ozu Yasujiro's Letters”), his diary during his military service (“The Whole Diary / Ozu Yasujiro” edited by Tanaka Masasumi), and “Ozu Yasujiro and the War”(written by Tanaka). They describe Ozu's actions after a certain period in considerable detail. Although it is possible to trace the vivid scenes of battlefields and traces of Ozu's thoughts to some extent from these documents alone, since Ozu was already a famous film director, you can get some idea of his movements on the front from daily newspapers and articles in film-related magazines such as Kinema Junpo.
On the contrary, Ozu himself does not say much about the period when he was dispatched to Singapore, and the materials that remain are limited. For this reason, the testimonies of screenwriter Saito Ryosuke and cameraman Atsuta Yuharu, who accompanied Ozu and spent more than two and a half years there, will provide a major clue.
What kind of influence did Ozu's wartime experiences of serving nearly two years as a private in the Chinese battle front and being conscripted by the military to Singapore have had on him after the war? As mentioned in later chapter, Ozu was extremely sensitive and sentimental about being separated from his family, as can be seen in his diary of his junior high school days. Therefore, it can be assumed that Ozu's longing for home was quite strong after staying abroad for a long time, away from his family and Tokyo.
It is not hard to imagine that upon returning home, Ozu witnessed Tokyo reduced to ashes by the war, and it shocked him deeply and made him feel a deep sense of sadness and loss. The magnitude of the shock and the depth of the sadness may have far exceeded that of the Great Kanto Earthquake that occurred in 1923, just five months after returning to Tokyo from Matsusaka for the first time in ten years.
Therefore, in the second half of this essay (Part II), I will trace Ozu's military service period on the Chinese battle front and the period in which he was dispatched to Singapore, which are often considered to be blank periods from a film historical perspective. I will analyze how this influenced his works through specific expressions and depictions that appeared in his films. Letters sent from the battlefield to friends and his mother, military diaries, daily newspaper reports, and articles from film magazines are useful sources of literature.
The influence of wartime experiences on Ozu's films will be analyzed from three perspectives.
The first perspective takes the screenplay “The Moon Rises” (1947 version). This script was not made into a movie by Ozu himself, but after witnessing the utter destruction of Tokyo, Ozu used this script to express his strong feelings of nostalgia for a Tokyo that no longer exists only in his own inner world. At the same time, he aspires resolutely to return to Japanese everlasting tradition.
The second perspective examines the influence of Shiga Naoya's “A Dark Night's Passing” on Ozu. Ozu read this novel under the unusual circumstances of a war zone and was deeply moved. Of course, Ozu did not adapt this novel into his film. However, after returning from the battlefield, Ozu was often unable to escape from the influence of this novel, and it left many traces in his own works.
The third perspective deals with the death of Yamanaka Sadao, a film director. His death was probably the most heartbreaking experience for Ozu during the war. As with Shiga Naoya's novel, Yamanaka's death had a profound impact on postwar Ozu films. These are particularly noticeable in “The Moon Rises”,in “Early Summer”, and in “Late Autumn” (1960), so I would like to examine them through specific expressions and depictions that appear in these movies.
Through Parts I and II above, I would like to carefully analyze Ozu's three experiences of losing Tokyo, and find out how much of the expressions and depictions that repeatedly appeared in Ozu's films were rooted in those experiences of losing Tokyo. These prove that Ozu's core qualities as a film director and screenwriter are in the eyes of a cold-hearted observer who creatively dramatizes and visualizes real-life events and the trivial everyday things he sees and hears around him.
As mentioned in later chapter, immediately after Ozu returned from Singapore after the war, he evacuated to Noda, Chiba Prefecture, where his sister was married, and from 1952 he settled in Kitakamakura, his final home. After that, Ozu never lived in Tokyo for the rest of his life , so strictly speaking, the third time Ozu left Tokyo was about 20 years from the time he was dispatched to Singapore until his death. However, as is clear from the entries in his diary, after the war Ozu went to Tokyo (Tsukiji, Ginza, Denenchofu, etc.) on a daily basis for his works and to socialize with friends. Therefore, I don't interpret it as saying that Ozu was away from Tokyo during this period. Ozu observes “the present” of Tokyo from a certain spatial distance from Noda, Kitakamakura, and Chigasaki , Tateshina in Shinshu, where he wrote the script, and cuts out fragments of it. He was creating a collage of the city of Tokyo that only exists in his inner world. This was also in line with his filmmaking methodology, which is to creatively dramatize and visualize real-life facts.
