Yasujiro Ozu's Umarete wa mitakedo... (I Was Born, But..., 1932) is a touching comedy that is the first major film Ozu made while still in the silent era. While many of Ozu's early films are shomingeki, stories about "workers," this one treats us to a "domestic drama" view of the middle class and life as a "salaryman. It is on a par with Ozu's postwar films.
It is a movie about hierarchy. A family consisting of a father (Saito Tatsuo), a mother (Yoshikawa Mitsuko) and two sons aged eight and ten (Sugawara Hideo and Aoki Tomio) moves to a suburb of Tokyo and is shown settling down in their new neighborhood during the first five days. This was a normal move for such families in the 1930s, when the suburbs of Tokyo were being developed at a furious pace by railway conglomerates such as Tokyu, Odakyu, Keio, etc.. Today these suburbs are densely populated with houses, but in 1930 there were still many empty fields where children could play.
The only hierarchy the sons know is that of physical strength. This is shrouded in many myths, such as the idea that eating birds' eggs makes you stronger, or a strange game in which the boys give their friends the sign of the evil eye, on which they have to fall down and can only get up again if the boys make a Catholic cross. The boys have to fight their way into the hierarchy of the local boys and defeat the local bully. They finally do this with the help of the delivery boy from the sake shop. He helps them because their mother buys beer from the store, and this is the first hint that social relationships are more important than pure strength.
The other hierarchy is the normal social hierarchy, where power is based on income and position rather than on muscle or other merit. The father lives near the CEO of the company where he works and greets him every morning with a polite bow, hoping to get ahead. The boys wonder: "Isn't their father stronger than his boss?" They themselves can easily beat up the boss's empty-headed son, who is their age but walks around in a Little Lord Fauntleroy suit. Why does their father have to be so slavish? The climax comes when the boys are allowed to attend a showing of home movies at the boss's house and see their father clowning around for his pompous and bullying boss. The father even bows to the boss's son! A classic confrontation between the innocence of childhood and the hypocrisy of the world, you might say. While this film is particularly critical of the social rigidity of Japanese society, hierarchies are a thing of all societies.
The boys make a scene at home and refuse to eat. The father explains that this is the way of the world (although the father realizes that the life he leads is a pitiful one), and the next morning the boys eat rice balls with their father and peace is restored. The warmth of the family allows the boys to accept what they and their father must be. But innocence is lost. A movie about children has become a movie about adults, a bright little comedy has become darker and more serious. The defeat of the boys is as inevitable as the continuation of the social hierarchy.
A third hierarchy addressed in the film is that of the family. One might say (as Joan Mellen did in The Waves at Genji's Door, New York, 1976) that "the Japanese family functions to socialize the young into acceptance of the status quo. The boys challenge parental authority because they see little value in studying hard in school if the result of that effort will be to become, like their father, subordinate to bosses with less talent than themselves. By losing respect for their father, the boys upset the balance of the family. Although the father knows in his heart that they are right, it is his duty as a "traditional patriarch" to instruct them in the submission to authority that society expects. There is no place in Japanese society for the rebel or dissenter, especially in the 1930s.
Some observations:
- The two men helping with the move at the beginning of the movie are employees of Father's office. In Japan, it was (and in many cases still is) normal for subordinates to help with the removal of superiors, sacrificing their free Sunday. This is also a case of hierarchy. Later, we hear them remark that the father (their boss) is a very shrewd man because he moves his house close to the big boss so that he can pay more attention to him.
- Ozu clearly has a negative view of school and the office. Both are shown as boring places of group discipline, with a shot of the boys marching in military style at school, followed by one of the employees, who are similarly disciplined and regimented. In the authoritarian society of prewar Japan, everyone must behave identically
- Ozu himself was a high school dropout who never worked in an office. In both the schoolroom and the office, we see people yawning. Even the boss is not working, but playing with his personal movie camera (which must have been an expensive toy in the 1930s!). In such a rigid society, small rebellions are as natural as when the boys show their father forged school certificates.
- At the ages of 8 and 10, the boys are still indulged as young Japanese children are - in the few short years before full conformity is demanded. Therefore, they can still openly criticize their father and call him a "nobody.
- The father commutes by train - we see the small, tram-like cars traveling through the suburbs. His boss, on the other hand, is picked up at home by a car with a driver. In large Japanese companies, everyone from the director level on up has one of these shiny black chauffeur-driven cars. But although Japan is clearly hierarchical, it also knows how to be modest, so we never see the extravagances (including salary) of American corporate executives.
- Ozu, however, did not "disapprove" of hierarchy. He knew that hierarchy is part of human society, and that changing social systems only changes the people in the hierarchy, not the hierarchy itself. As in his later films, people here bow to the inevitable, which may be a very Japanese way of looking at the world. They are the victims of things as they are (and we, all of us, are similar victims), as Donald Richie puts it in his book on Ozu (Ozu, Berkeley, 1974).
Ozu liked I Was Born, But… so much that he remade it as Good Morning (Ohayo) in 1959.
Japanese Film