Part I: Ozu Yasujiro in his youth
Ozu Yasujiro was born in Fukagawa Ward, Tokyo on December 12, 1903, and moved to Matsusaka-Town in Mie Prefecture, where his father Toranosuke was from, in March 1913. He was nine years old. As soon as Ozu moved, he was transferred to the fourth grade at No. 2 Elementary School of Matsusaka. According to the testimony of his homeroom teacher, Ozu was an honor student with excellent grades, and was a harmonious and honest pupil who never got into fights.
Three years have passed since then. In the spring of 1916, Ozu entered Mie Prefectural No. 4 Junior High School in Ujiyamada-City (present-day Ise-City), located east of Matsusaka, and began living in a boarding house in the school away from his parents' home. According to testimonies from his classmates and underclassmen at the time, Ozu completely changed from an honor pupil in elementary school, and while he was funny and kind at heart, he had become a problem student who often broke school rules and was punished for them.
After graduating from junior high school in March 1921, Ozu attempted to enter the Kobe High School of Commerce (present-day Kobe University's Faculty of Economics), where his elder brother Shinichi was enrolled, but failed. Ozu, being a Ronin (a graduate preparing to take an entrance examination next year), spends a year in agony at his home in Matsusaka. The following spring, Ozu failed the entrance exam again and took a job as a substitute teacher at an elementary school in a mountain village, where he would spend a year.
For a boy who was born in the downtown area of Tokyo and grew up comfortably in a wealthy merchant family, what did it mean to him to live in the countryside where everything he saw and heard, including the scenery, culture, and language, was novel?
In Part I of this essay, I will trace the early days of Ozu by deciphering the diary he wrote when he was a junior high school student, the testimonies of his relatives, classmates, and underclassmen, and the letters he wrote to them. And then, I would like to discuss how these experiences and emotions became the source of many expressions and depictions for Ozu, who later became a film director and screenwriter.
Chapter 1 Boy
Fukagawa
Film director and screenwriter Ozu Yasujiro was born on December 12, 1903 in Kamezumi-town, Fukagawa Ward, Tokyo . His father was Toranosuke, his mother was Asaye, and he was a family of seven, including an elder brother Shinichi, younger sisters Toki and Toku, and a younger brother Nobuzo who was later born in Matsusaka.
Toranosuke was the manager of the Tokyo branch of the Ozu Yoemon Family, a merchant family that ran Yuasa-ya, the seafood and fertilizer wholesaler in Fukagawa at the time, and Asaye was also the daughter of a prestigious merchant family whose main residence was in Tsu City, near Matsusaka.
The Ozu family is one of the prestigious merchant families representing the so-called Ise merchants, such as the Mitsui family and the Hasegawa family, wealthy merchants who migrated from Matsusaka to Edo (present-day Tokyo) during the Edo period (17th to 19th century) and made a fortune. Toranosuke himself was not from the Ozu head family (Yoemon Family), but as the 6th generation of a branch family called the Ozu Shinshichi Family, he took over the family headship from his father, the 5th generation Shinshichi, and moved to Tokyo in his young age.
One of Ozu's representative works is “Passing Fancy” (1933), in which the main character named Kihachi is a widowed craftsman living in the downtown area of Koto Ward, eastern Tokyo. Therefore, the audience may get the impression that Ozu himself, who was born and raised in the same downtown area of Fukagawa in Koto Ward, is from a commoner class living in such a downtown area, and that the tenement house where Kihachi lives is his own world. But the reality is completely different. According to testimonies from Ozu himself and his brother Nobuzo, Kihachi's model was a boatman who frequented Ozu's home, and that he was a very easy-going and nice guy. Ozu collaborated with screenwriter Ikeda Tadao, who also lived in downtown Okachimachi, to create the character Kihachi based on the boatman.
As mentioned earlier, Ozu's family was one of the most prestigious among Ise merchants. Because he came from such a family background, Ozu was able to attend Meiji Kindergarten attached to Meiji Elementary School in 1909, when it was still rare for families to enroll their children in kindergarten. In other words, he was, at least until a certain point, a descendant of a wealthy family who grew up in a financially privileged family environment. If you want to understand the upper class atmosphere unique to Ozu's films, which is sometimes critically discussed, it is necessary and important to know that he was born and raised in a wealthy merchant family.
A glimpse of the relatively wealthy life of the Ozu family at the time can be seen in an essay Ozu wrote when he was in the third grade of elementary school. This essay shows aspects of the lifestyle that only relatively large residences would have, such as the fact that the Ozu family had two female servants and that they had a variety of plants in the garden. The following essay is reminiscent of Yasujiro, the second son of a merchant family, who grew up to be a healthy but somewhat mischievous boy in this family environment.
Essay
3rd grade elementary school class 1
Ozu Yasujiro
My home .
My home is located at No. 7, Kamezumi-town, Fukagawa Ward.
I have a father, a mother, a brother and two sisters.
In addition, there are two maids at home.
There are various trees planted in the garden.
Two of the physalis that my sister, who will be 6 years old this year, cherishes, have turned red.
There are nine goldfish that my brother cherishes.
I sometimes get scolded for sticking my hand in the fishbowl.
The residence in Fukagawa where the Ozu family lived was damaged and destroyed by the Great Kanto Earthquake on September 1, 1923, but after being evacuated to Nogata, Nakano Ward, it was rebuilt at No. 2 Kamezumi-town, next door to the original residence the following year in November 1924. It will be mentioned in a later chapter that Ozu's head family owned vast tracts of land in the surrounding area, but even so, it would take a considerable amount of financial resources to rebuild a residence of considerable size just one year after the earthquake. Therefore, it seems better that the actual lifestyle of the Ozu family was completely different from that of Kihachi, but rather closer to that of the professor in “What Did the Lady Forget?”(1937) or that of family in “The Moon Rises”(1947 version screenplay). In fact, it may have been rather comparable to that of the businessman family in “The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family” (1941), or that of couple in “Flavor of Green Tea over Rice” (1940 version screenplay).
Ozu, who had joined the Shochiku Kamata studio one month before the Great Kanto Earthquake, rented a house near the studio and lived with his senior assistant director Saito Torajiro and others for a period of time around 1926. However, at other times, he commuted to the Kamata studio from this rebuilt residence in Fukagawa. According to testimonies from several of his film studio colleagues who have visited his residence, it was quite an elegant and magnificent one.
Ozu's residence was surrounded by rivers on all sides, and he had to cross several bridges to go anywhere. The bridge closest to his residence was Maruta Bridge, and along the riverbank there were long warehouses for miso brewing shops. When I opened the old front door and entered the residence, there was a small bird chirping in a cage. Then I went through a long hallway and went up to the second floor, where I found his study. (Kishi Matsuo / colleague of Kinema Junpo)
The residence in Kiba, Fukagawa where Mr. Ozu lived was a wonderful and magnificent house. The furniture was elaborate, including a vermilion-painted chest of drawers and lamps, and the table was specially made in red. There was a large counting room at the entrance of the residence, and I went through a long hallway next to it to get to Mr. Ozu's room. There were stairs going up to the second floor here and there, and it was a deep house. (Inoue Yukiko / actress)
The residence in Fukagawa is very nice. A river ran beside the residence, and in the summer, a cool breeze came in from the veranda. Ozu's room was on the second floor. There was a long hallway, and in the garden were several cages containing his father's society finches and canaries. There was a public bathhouse a little far from his residence, and the chimney of the public bathhouse had an indescribable atmosphere. (Atsuta Yuharu / director of photography)
Scriptwriter Akira Fushimi also testified to the same content. To summarize their testimonies, when they opened the old-fashioned front door of the residence, passed through a large counting room and a long hallway, and went up to the second floor, they found Ozu's study. The residence had a porch and a garden, and on the porch and in the hallway, the society finches and canaries were kept in several cages. These scenes are reminiscent of the mansion in which the businessman family lives in “The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family”. The rivers that surrounded Ozu's residence, as mentioned in Kishi's testimony, probably refer to two rivers, Aburabori River and Izumibori River, that have already been reclaimed and no longer exist. At the time, a bridge called Maruta-Bashi was built at the confluence of the two rivers, which is now covered by the Metropolitan Expressway, and Ozu's residence was built at the foot of the bridge.
Ozu's diary records that on November 9, 1935, Naruse Mikio, the film director, was filming “The Girl in the Rumor” (1935) at Maruta-Bashi. Indeed, there is a scene in “The Girl in the Rumor” in which sisters (Chiba Sachiko and Umezono Tatsuko), the daughters of a liquor wholesaler, cross a bridge over a canal. The bridge was probably a steel bridge built as part of the reconstruction efforts following the Great Kanto Earthquake. The shiny black railing is impressive.
If you look carefully at the scene, you can see a chimney towering beyond the sisters who are standing on the bridge talking. In Atsuta's testimony, the chimney of the public bathhouse that could be seen a short distance from the Ozu residence probably refers to this. Smoke must have been rising every evening from the chimney of this bathhouse, which happened to be seen in the footage of “The Girl in the Rumor”. Here is the original scenery of the chimney in the Ozu movie. For example, in “Tokyo Story” (1953), the elderly father (Ryu Chishu) who came from Onomichi to see the children in Tokyo was looking out at the chimney from a drying rack. And in “An Autumn Afternoon” (1962), Ozu's final film, a towering chimney can be seen from the window of elderly father's (Ryu Chishu) office. These were the landscapes of his hometown that Ozu must have seen every day as a boy.
In any case, “The Girl in the Rumor” may capture the scenery of Fukagawa at the time when Ozu lived, and perhaps Ozu's residence itself. There is no doubt that it is very valuable film footage now.
The canaries in the cages in Atsuta Yuharu's testimony immediately remind those accustomed to Ozu films of “Early Summer”. The opening scene of “Early Summer”, which begins with the morning routine of a family of seven people from three generations living in Kamakura, includes a shot of bird cages lined up by a second-floor window. The story of “Early Summer” begins with the family's elderly father (Sugai Ichiro) preparing food to feed the caged canaries. Ozu's younger brother Nobuzo, like Atsuta, also testified that Ozu's father, Toranosuke, had about 10 cages of canaries and society finches lined up at the entrance. Therefore, the elderly father who takes care of the canaries in “Early Summer” is at least a partial reflection of Ozu's father, Toranosuke, in his day-to-day life.
In “The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family”, the Toda family's patriarch, an elderly businessman, also keeps a small bird. When the elderly father suddenly passes away, the mansion is put up for sale, and the elderly mother (Katsuragi Fumiko) and youngest daughter (Takamine Mieko), who became the homeless and treated as nuisances, move from the eldest son's house to the eldest daughter's house. At that time, what the elderly mother and her daughter were carrying around with them with great care was the bird cage left by their elderly father. Even though the bird in the cage was not a canary but a mynah, the cage also appears in “The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family” as a prop, like a keepsake to remember Ozu's late father.
