Sound came to the Japanese cinema in 1931 with Heinosuke Gosho's (1902–1981) Madamu to nyobo ( The Neighbor's Wife and Mine ), but other masters of the Japanese cinema continued working in silent film into the middle of the decade. But whether silent or sound, the Japanese cinema of the 1930s marks a true Golden Age where the major studios Shochiku and Nikkatsu, along with Toho, which had joined the ranks of the former two through a series of mergers, relied on contract stars and directors who generally worked within consistent and recognizable genres—much like Hollywood in its contemporaneous Golden Age. Toho relied on popular actors and actresses like Kazuo Hasegawa (1908–1984) (who would make over three hundred films over the course of his career), Takako Irie (1911–1995), Setsuko Hara (b. 1920), and child superstar Hideko Takamine (b. 1924) (whose luster would never fade as she would work well into her sixties). Matched by directors like Teinosuke Kinugasa (1896–1982), Hiroshi Inagaki (1905–1980), and Mikio Naruse (1905–1969), Toho could work in both jidai-geki and gendai-mono to full effect. Shochiku did not have quite the star power of Toho, but its directorial stable is a "who's who" of the Japanese cinema of the 1930s, led by Yasujiro Ozu (1903–1963) along with Heinosuke Gosho, Yasujiro Shimazu (1897–1945), and Hiroshi Shimizu (1903–1966). Working at the studio's Kamata branch, these directors made the world of the lower-middle classes the studio's specialty, whether through comedies like Ozu's Otona no miru ehon: Umarete wa mita keredo ( I Was Born But … , 1924), the bittersweet Naruse's Tsuma yo bara no yo ni ( Wife, Be Like a Rose , 1935), or the child-centered masterpieces of Shimizu (for example, Kaze no naka no kodomo [ Children in the Wind , 1937]).
Some directors managed to work outside of the big three of Shochiku, Toho, and Nikkatsu or to play one against the other. Naruse began at Shochiku but moved to Toho, while Sadao Yamanaka (1909–1938)—whose death in combat in China in 1938 marks the greatest directorial loss of the war years—moved to Toho as well, in his case from rival Nikkatsu. Kenji Mizoguchi (1898–1956), meanwhile, managed to carve out a nice career working for independent or semi-independent companies such as Dai-Ichi Eiga, where he made his two masterpieces of 1936— Naniwa erejî ( Osaka Elegy ) and Gion no shimai ( Sisters of the Gion ). Independent production was not unknown, either. Most famous among such films is surely Kinugasa's Kurutta Ippeji ( A Page of Madness , 1926), an avant-garde film that focuses on a man who takes a job as a janitor in a mental asylum in order to be nearer to his wife, who has been confined after attempting to drown their child, featuring subjective shots of the inmates to the expressionistic locale of the institution itself. The very range of films—anarchic jidai-geki featuring alienated ronin (unemployed samurai), raucous comedies about college youth, tearful melodramas of lost love or bitter poverty, gentle romances, moving dramas of young children, even musical comedies—speaks to the success of the Japanese cinema.
While not, in fact, a major exporter of films (until it would force its films on its occupied territories during the war), Japan's large population could sustain a self-supporting film industry. Attendance by the middle of the 1930s reached 250 million annually. As was the case with Hollywood in this same period, the major studios either owned major theaters outright or controlled most of them through various contractual and legal obligations. Though this made independent production difficult and exhibition even more so (amateur films and documentary films appear with great regularity in this period but remain firmly outside traditional production and exhibition practices and venues), for the commercial filmmaker
It is ironic that Yasujiro Ozu's films were once thought to be "too Japanese" for Western audiences to appreciate. This serious misunderstanding of either Ozu's essential universalism or the West's ability to appreciate Japanese culture made Ozu the last major Japanese director of the postwar era to have his films fully distributed in the West. But once his films became fully available (mostly by the mid-1970s), Ozu became the Japanese cinema's most respected director among film critics and scholars, as well as among a whole generation of independent filmmakers in the US and abroad. Once called "Japan's most Japanese director," Japanese critics have rejected this notion, some even claiming he is hardly very Japanese at all. It is clear that Ozu's cinema is deeply rooted in Japanese traditional culture, yet it is equally true that he has a unique approach to the cinema and an unmatched commitment to a personal worldview. His relentless examination of contemporary Japanese life as lived by ordinary people and a film style that provides endless fascination and a wry sense of humor have proven to have universal appeal and tremendous influence.
Ozu is best known for a series of films dealing with the trials and tribulations of the typical Japanese family and the shifts wrought by changes in postwar culture and the inevitability of time's passing. Thus, his families are not only impacted by the shift away from the multigenerational household amidst the continued urbanization of postwar Japan, but also by the simple fact that children grow up, marry, and start their own families. These elements are seen so unforgettably in Tokyo monogatari ( Tokyo Story , 1953), where the aging parents still living in rural Japan struggle with feelings of disappointment and disillusionment when they visit their seemingly distracted and unloving children in Tokyo. In three remarkable films with essentially the same plot—a daughter's reluctance to get married causes her widowed parent to resort to a veiled threat of remarriage him- or herself to convince the child to wed—Ozu finds his essential theme. Though the father in Banshun ( Late Spring , 1949) and Sanma no aji ( An Autumn Afternoon , 1962) and the mother in Akibiyori ( Late Autumn , 1960) will be all alone (and lonely), the parent must convince the daughter to wed; it is the nature of life, the life cycle in every sense of the term, that parents grow old and children marry so the cycle may begin again.
For all the seeming simplicity of his stories, the complex mechanisms of his narrative procedures and cinematic style endow Ozu's films with a modernist complexity. His use of ellipsis, for instance, tends to de-dramatize the plot. He typically leaves out many would-be important elements—especially in the "wedding" films, where he omits the actual wedding itself. He is also notable for his utilization of 360-degree space, which produces seeming mismatched action, both within the frame and across it. Though Ozu has a reputation for using long takes, it is actually a misperception. Certainly, the contemplative camera positioned just a few inches off the floor and the de-dramatized narratives lend his films a leisurely pace, but there is nothing especially lengthy in his typical shots. Rather, his films unfold at the speed of life and capture it in its essence.
Umarete wa mita keredo ( I Was Born But… , 1924), Chichi ariki ( There Was a Father , 1942), Banshun ( Late Spring , 1949), Bakushû ( Early Summer , 1951), Tokyo monogatari ( Tokyo Story , 1953), Higanbana ( Equinox Flower , 1958), Ohayô ( Good Morning , 1959), Ukigasu ( Floating Weeds , 1959), Akibiyori ( Late Autumn , 1960), Sanma no aji ( An Autumn Afternoon , 1962)
Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema . London: British Film Institute, 1988.
Desser, David, ed. Ozu's Tokyo Story . Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Richie, Donald. Ozu . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974.
Schrader, Paul. Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.
David Desser
the safety net of popular stars, clear genres, and a well-oiled distribution system provided more than a modicum of freedom to give rise to one of the most remarkable creative periods in all of world cinema history—one matched perhaps only by Hollywood and France during this period, and by the Japanese themselves later in the 1950s.
Always aware of Hollywood and a major importer of American films (a situation that still remains), the Japanese were always conscious of the style and modes of the world's premier film power. One can see, therefore, the clear influence of Hollywood on Japanese cinema of the 1930s—whether in Ozu's nansensu comedies, which interpolated Harold Lloyd into stories of contemporary Japanese youthful ambitions, or in Mizoguchi's Warner Bros.—like low-key lighting and semirealistic dramas. Yet the particularities of Japanese film culture render their cinema, along with that of dozens of other first-rate directors, the unique expression of Japanese sensibilities. An overt stylization, what David Bordwell has called "a cinema of flourishes," was allowed to exist alongside and within clearly generic, plot-driven stories. Mizoguchi's long takes and complex camera movements certainly have no derivation from Hollywood in the 1930s—moments of stylistic excess in Osaka Elegy and, especially, Zangiku monogatari ( The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums , 1939), are closer in spirit to the films of France's master Jean Renoir, but with a definite Japanese flavor. Yamanaka's Ninjo kamifusen ( Humanity and Paper Balloons , 1938) is a brilliant melding of Shingeki theater and samurai drama to tell a uniquely Japanese story of class oppression and human tragedy. So many films from the Japanese cinema have been lost—virtually everything made before World War I, but even the output of the 1930s has been devastated—by war, by nitrate film deterioration, by carelessness; but what remains bespeaks of a cinema as vibrant as any in the world, yet one that so clearly derives from a unique cultural and aesthetic tradition.
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