Dormitory life
When he was in elementary school, he was a well-rounded, honest son of a wealthy family with excellent grades, but what were Ozu's junior high school days like when he turned into a rough person who often received disciplines?
When Ozu visited Matsusaka after World War II, he once shared his memories with Noda Kogo, who was with him. According to Noda's recollections, when Ozu was living in a junior high school dormitory, his father would sometimes visit him and feed him curry with rice at the inn in front of the Inner Shrine of Ise. At that time, Ozu's father was drinking alcohol. It is well known that the memories of this time are recreated exactly in “There Was a Father”, but this movie also depicts another episode based on his memories from his junior high school days.
In May 1919, Ozu, a fourth-grade student, participated in a school trip. A small incident occurred in Osaka, the destination of the trip. The following is a summary of the incident as recalled by Ozu's classmates.
Three of Ozu's classmates, Yoshida Yozo, Isaka Eiichi, and Iwashita Tamejiro, went out into town after dinner. They enjoyed a night on a rented boat on the Dotonbori River. As the boat neared the Ebisu Bridge, a baggage boat approached their boat from the front. Three classmates were shocked and grabbed onto the pier all at once. The boat then tipped to one side and capsized, throwing the three classmates into the river. It would have been a terrible incident if they had drowned.
This incident at the Dotonbori River served as a hint for the drowning accident that occurred to the students on a school trip, which is depicted in the opening sequence of “There Was a Father”. The last name of the junior high school student who died in the boating accident in the movie was “Yoshida”. Yoshida, who was actually one of the classmates involved in the accident, laughed while watching “There Was a Father.” And he said, “Ozu is a bad guy. He killed me.”
Ozu's daily life as a junior high school student is detailed in his diary in 1918 and 1921. In addition to those, another major clue is the memoirs left by alumni of Ujiyamada Junior High School who lived in the same dormitory in the 1920s. There are many similarities in the alumni's recollections of their student lives written in the contributions published in the “90 Year History of Ujiyamada High School”. Therefore, these contributed texts can be said to be a powerful source of information for estimating Ozu's school days.
Taking those articles together, the student life at Ujiyamada Junior High School under former system was generally as follows.
The students who moved into the dormitory were freshmen who were from far away and had difficulty commuting. Matsusaka, where Ozu's family home was, and Ujiyamada City are only about 20 kilometers apart, but there is evidence that Ozu followed his father Toranosuke's educational policy and entered the dormitory.
The dormitory was located in the northeast corner of the school grounds. The building was connected to the school building by a corridor, and was surrounded by a cedar hedge about 2 meters high. There are two two-story wooden buildings with a courtyard in between. The first floor of the south building has a supervisor's duty room, a medical office, and a recreation room, and the second floor has a library, while the north building has about 10 rooms for boarding school students. Each room was about 21 to 22 tatami mats in size, with a large sitting desk on the tatami floor. When you see the scene in “There Was a Father” where the father visits his son, you can imagine what the room was like. When Ozu was in school, there were about 70 students living together in 10 rooms, divided into groups of about seven, with the fifth-grade students in each room serving as the room director and the fourth-grade students serving as deputy room leaders.
There was a strict hierarchical relationship between seniors and juniors at the dormitory, and there was a tradition of upperclassmen applying silent pressure and punishment to lower-class students. Upperclassmen would criticize lowerclassmen for being “impertinent”, “bad attitude”, and “bad language”, and would call them into the hallway after lights out, question them, yell at them, and sometimes punish them violently with fists. If the relationship between upperclassmen and lowerclassmen in the dormitory was like this, then even if Ozu's bullying and coercive attitude towards the lowerclassmen were true, it would not have been an exception.
The rules and discipline of the boardinghouse were strict, and the daily routine was as follows. At 6 a.m., the janitor rings the bell loudly to signal the students to wake up. Next, the supervising teacher on duty patrolled the hallways and checked the wake-up status of each room. After they all washed their faces after waking up, it was the junior students' responsibility to put away the upperclassmen's futons, clean their rooms, and dust them with rags.
After morning roll call in the courtyard, all students from the dormitory take a walk together. Breakfast was always barley and rice, and the supervising teacher was also present. Their daily routine consisted of an hour of self-study before going to school and martial arts practice after school, and for martial arts practice, all students belonged to either Kendo or Judo. After the winter vacation, there was a morning cold training session, and all students in the dormitory were required to participate.
About 20 students could take a bath at a time in the dormitory, but the first students to take a bath were always the supervising teacher and the fifth graders, and by the time the first graders took last, the amount of water had decreased and the color looked like dirty milk. At 5 p.m., students eat dinner in the cafeteria next to the bathrooms. After that, they had some free time and studied by themselves from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. The supervising teacher, who was on duty and stayed overnight, made sure to check on the students at least once during self-study time. After that, there was an evening roll call, and at 9:30 p.m., the lights were turned off and students went to bed.
On Saturdays, the curfew was 7 p.m., and some of the upperclassmen went out on the town. But, students were not usually allowed to go out or return home. Watching movies was of course forbidden, and those who broke the rules were subject to severe punishment. However, around fifth grade, some students would run to the Udon (wheat noodles) restaurant across the rice field from behind the school to satisfy hunger that could not be satisfied by the meals at the dormitory. Ozu also wrote in his diary that he often visited the Udon restaurant. Just for information, the name of this restaurant is actually “Kihachi-ya”, which is exactly the same as the main character of “A Story of Floating Weeds”. Therefore, a certain researcher points out that the name Kihachi may have come from this restaurant. This restaurant is still open, so why not try a bowl of Udon noodles once?
Ozu's early student comedies certainly bear the influence of Harold Lloyd, as many have noted. For example, there is a gag in “Days of Youth” that seems to have been borrowed directly from “Girl Shy” (1924). In “Days of Youth”, a student (Saito Tatsuo) gets fresh paint from a telephone pole on his palm. In “I Graduated, But...”, a young man is unable to get a job due to the recession, and his mother, who lives in the countryside, comes to see him with his fiancée. This episode must also be taken from “Safety Last” (1923). However, if you read Ozu's diary from his junior high school days and the memoirs of the boarding house students, you will find that the student life of Ozu himself and the classmates was even more of an inspiration for his early student comedy.
The daily life in the dormitory, stippled in Ozu's diary from his junior high school days, often contain incidents that are reminiscent of, and seem to be based on, Ozu's early student comedies.
For example, there was a janitor at the dormitory who went around ringing the bell every morning to let students know when it was time to wake up. He reminds you of the college janitor who went around signaling the start of exams in “I Flunked, But…”. Tailors also often appear in “Dreams of Youth” (1928), in “Spring Comes from the Ladies” (1932), and in “I Graduated, But…”. Some students are forced to pay monthly installments to the tailor, while others call the tailor to get new suits for job hunting. Why do tailors often appear in Ozu's early student comedies? The answer is written in Ozu's diary. Clothes shops in the city regularly visited the Ujiyamada Junior High School dormitory to make clothes for the students.
There is another thing that Ozu frequently writes in his diary. Some confectioners regularly visited the dormitory and sold sweets to the students. Boarding house meals alone are not enough to satisfy the stomachs of young men who are growing up. Ozu had a weakness for confections. In “I Flunked, But…”, there is a scene where students in a boarding house order breads for a midnight snack from a nearby bakery. This scene shows that the incidents about the confectioners that were often recorded in the diary of his junior high school days was rearranged and reproduced in the later Ozu films. In the first place, it's hard to imagine why all the students in Ozu's movies are boarders without considering that Ozu himself was a boarder.
; still open today
