The films of this period were all made under more or less strict censorship, first by the Japanese government, later by the U.S. Occupation authorities (S.C.A.P.). The Japanese government encouraged "national polity" pictures that eulogized "essential Japaneseness," in these years found in the patriarchal family system and in the code of loyalty. Also sacrifice for the state and the greater well of society was an important theme. Decadent "Western" feelings such as love were frowned upon. The Americans, on the other hand, forbade these "feudal" ideas in 1945 and instead encouraged the production of films propagating democracy and individualism - and containing kissing scenes. By outlawing the theme of revenge and swordplay in film, the Occupation authorities also de facto forbade period drama, which only came back (with a vengeance) after the San Francisco Treaty had been concluded in 1951.
Due the adverse circumstances and the lack of film stock and equipment, considerably fewer films were made in these years. This decade was also rather poor in great films, due to the war and various forms of censorship - a huge difference compared to the golden decades before and after the 1940s. Also the early postwar period produced no great films, we have to wait until 1948 and 1949 for new talent to ripen (Kurosawa), or older talent to find a new groove (Ozu). Many films reflect the harsh realities of postwar life, and although this was an independent phenomenon, it is the same type of transformation that occurred in Italy where neo-realism was born.
1940
The war in China continues. In September, Japanese invasion in French Indo-China.
Throughout the year: Celebration of the Year 2600 in the mythical Japanese imperial counting system.
Despite the war, the cinema remains popular. There are more than 2,300 theaters which sell more than 400 million tickets this year.
Toyoda Shiro, the director of literary films, evades the war as subject and makes "Spring on Leper's Island" (Kojima no haru), about a woman doctor's devotion to her leper patients on an isolated island. A cry for humanism in an age marching to the tune of militarism. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
That was not true of Yoshimura Kozaburo, who made "The Story of Tank Commander Nishizumi" (Nishizumi Senshacho-den), although it must be said that also this film contains some dim humanistic elements. Heart-throb Uehara Ken played the tank commander.
"Fighting Soldiers" (Tatakau Heitai) by Kamei Fumio, a documentary maker, was a film depicting the tragic side of the war. When the censors belatedly noticed its antiwar ideas, Kamei was arrested and forbidden to make any more films.
"The Woman of Osaka" (Naniwa Onna) by Mizoguchi Kenji depicts rivalries in the Osaka Bunraku puppet theater world, a safe topic.
Gosho Heinosuke protested in another way to the war, by turning all military scripts submitted to him into simple love stories. An example from this year is "Wooden Head" (Mokuseki), a psychological study of an unmarried woman doctor who adopts an illegitimate child to keep the father's name clear.
Japanese cinema also expanded to the occupied territories in Asia. One example is the Manchurian Motion Picture Association, which had been set up in 1938 under sponsorship of the army. This year it made its most popular film, "China Night" (Shina no Yoru), about the love between a Chinese war orphan (played by Yamaguchi Yoshiko, also known at that time as Ri Koran, as she had adopted a Chinese name for propaganda reasons) and a Japanese naval officer (Hasegawa Kazuo).
[Genroku Chushingura]
1941
The war in China continues.
December: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
All American and European films (except German ones) are banned.
Ozu Yasujiro makes "Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family" (Todake no Kyodai), about a widow and her youngest daughter who have lost their home and move in with successive family members, causing many tensions. The spirit of the times can be seen obliquely in the idea that it is the death of the patriarch (and his authority), occurring at the beginning of the film, that is the origin of all these problems. For the rest the film is filled with small daily activities, like all Ozu films. It was also made with an almost silent-film technique. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
Yamamoto Kajiro makes "Horse" (Uma), a portrayal of country life, part of it directed by his assistant, Kurosawa Akira. A colt raised by a poor farm girl in the end becomes an army horse, but the tacked on message (necessary to get permission to make the film) does not destroy this poetical work, which is almost a documentary about horse breeding.
Mizoguchi Kenji makes "The Loyal 47 Ronin" (Genroku Chushingura), a two-part version of the popular kabuki classic glorifying feudal loyalty and self-sacrifice. The film shows its wartime origin in its sober and grave dignity - the final vendetta in the snow is left out. The military had demanded this film from Shochiku because the studio had failed to make a sufficient number of national policy films. Mizoguchi volunteered to save Shochiku. This film was made in what Darcell William Davis in Picturing Japaneseness calls "the monumental style," "an aspiration to reclaim the cinema for Japan and transform Japanese tradition from a cultural legacy into a sacrament."
"Ornamental Hairpin" (Kanzashi) by Shimizu Hiroshi depicts several holidaymakers in a hot spring hotel, including a wounded soldier and a geisha. The poetic film seems like a holiday from the war and is more about delineation of character than plot. It is a bittersweet tale with great performances by Tanaka Kinuyo and Ryu Chishu, sensitively suggesting unspoken emotions.
At Toho, Naruse Mikio makes "Hideko, The Bus Conductor" (Hideko no Shasho-san), based on a short story by Ibuse Masuji, and starring the young Takamine Hideko. Hideko works as conductor for a company in the countryside (Yamanashi), where the number of passengers is dwindling. She asks a visiting author to write commentaries on local sites so that she can recite these to the passengers during the trip through the countryside. Not only a wonderfully peaceful and pleasant film made in the war years, but also a remarkable story about a young woman coming out as a professional. And, as in some films from the 1930s, for example Arigato-san, great location shots through the windows of the bus.
1942
January – Japan declares war on the Dutch.
February – Japan demands the surrender of Singapore.
April – Doolittle Raid, the first bombing raid on the Japanese home islands
June – Battle of Midway - just 6 months after Pearl Harbor, this is the turning point in the Pacific War, giving the advantage to the U.S.
November – Naval Battle of Guadalcanal results in a strategic victory for the U.S.
The ten film companies then operating are reorganized under government control. The original idea was to form two companies (by merging all the others into Shochiku and Toho), but Nagata Masaichi, then an executive of Shinko Kinema, pushed hard for three companies, the third one consisting of Shinko Kinema, Daito Eiga and the production arm of Nikkatsu (the Nikkatsu theaters prefer to remain independent and will in 1951 make a fresh start with film production under the Nikkatsu name). This third company - in fact a new one - is called Daiei and the first president is the novelist and playwright Kikuchi Kan; Nagata becomes one of its executives. The new company's studios were located in Chofu (Tokyo) and Uzumasa (Kyoto).
"The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya" (Hawai-Marei Oki Kaisen) was a popular war film, which also netted the Kinema Junpo Award. In this Toho production, director Yamamoto Kajiro makes heroes of the pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor in a film released on the first anniversary of the attack. Responsible for the special effects with miniatures was Tsuburaya Eiji, of later Godzilla fame. They were so realistic that the Occupation authorities later thought the film contained parts of actual newsreels. By the way, the enemy in this and most other war films remains vague and is never clearly shown (here he is only represented by planes and warships): while other countries at war used the cinema as a tool to arouse hostility and hatred by depicting the enemy as cruel and inhuman, in Japan the enemy was elided and the emphasis is wholly on the Japanese effort itself. That does not absolve The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya from being a false piece of propaganda. Film critic Sato Tadao relates how he was inspired by this film to join a training school for air cadets, but found daily life very different from the warm comradeship depicted in the film: the recruits were continually subjected to brutal beatings and other forms of cruelty, just for the personal gratification of the NCOs.
But not all was war, even in this year. Ozu Yasujiro makes "There Was a Father" (Chichi Ariki), one of the best films to come out of these dark years. It is about the deep relation between a school teacher and his son. When the boy grows up, he is drafted, but the teacher has the pleasure of seeing him married to the daughter of his best friend. A perfect film with a superb performance by Ryu Chishu as the father. Although the emphasis was on obligations to family and society, the tone was far removed from the usual wartime propaganda.
[Sugata Sanshiro]
1943
The Pacific War continues.
Two more excellent films were made in the next year. Kurosawa Akira directs his debut film, Sugata Sanshiro, about a Meiji-period judo champion (Fujita Susumu) who learns from his sensei (Okochi Denjiro) that spiritual discipline is more important than simple prowess. Story based on a novel that in turn borrowed the idea from Yoshikawa Eiji's novel Miyamoto Musashi. The authorities liked it, because it showed Japan's valorous ways - but the film in fact strongly emphasized the individuality of its hero. Superbly made film, especially considering the wartime conditions and the fact that this was Kurosawa's first. Kurosawa worked at Toho, where he would remain until the mid-sixties.
Another fine and moving film was "The Life of Matsu the Untamed" (Muhomatsu no Issho) by Inagaki Hiroshi, a humanistic film about the relations of a rickshaw driver with a widow and her young son, also set in the Meiji-period. It will be remade by Inagaki in 1958, but this version is generally thought to be superior, especially as period drama star Bando Tsumasaburo gave the best performance of his career - as a tateyaku actor, he played the rickshaw man with a pride not inferior to that of a samurai.
Kinoshita Keisuke (1912-1998) directs his first film, "The Blossoming Port" (Hanasaku Minato), a film in a light satiric vein about the virtues of islanders who make honest men of swindlers. Kinoshita would become one of the most popular and prolific of post-war directors, known for his devotion to a sentimental ideal of purity and beauty, a director also who was not bound by genre.
1944
The Pacific War continues with loss after loss for Japan.
In this dark year, the subject matter of all films is the war effort. A good example is "The Most Beautiful" (Ichiban Utsukushiku) by Kurosawa Akira, a semi-documentary on women working in a vital war industry, optical instruments. Shows the fanatical dedication of one young women who strives to make as many instruments as the male workers. Interestingly, the film strongly resembles Communist propaganda from the S.U. or the P.R.C., showing that propaganda is propaganda, wherever it comes from. Kurosawa had fond memories of the making of this film, perhaps he met his wife on the set in the person of the main actress, Yaguchi Yoko.
Kinoshita Keisuke makes "Army" (Rikugun), about a family with a strong military tradition; the son is initially weak but grows stronger when he is in adolescence and the film concludes with his joining the army: the last, long shot shows his tearful mother following the parade as he goes off to the front. Not surprisingly, the film was decried by the military censor as being insufficiently ideological.
[Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi]
1945
March - Major bombings of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka
March - U.S. forces win the Battle of Iwo Jima.
April - The Japanese battleship Yamato is sunk.
May - Second major bombing of Tokyo; bombing of Yokohama.
July - Allies issue Potsdam Declaration; Japan refuses to agree to its terms.
August 6 - Atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
August 8 - Soviet Union declares war on Japan.
August 9 - Atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
August 15 - Emperor Hirohito declares Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration.
August 30 - Douglas MacArthur arrives in Japan.
September 2 - Japanese officials sign instrument of surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri.
October - Office of the Supreme Commander Allied Powers is established at the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building in Tokyo.
Lack of equipment results in the film industry becoming forced inactive - in this last war year only 26 feature films are made. Two of these were by Kurosawa Akira: Sugata Sanshiro II, a rather jingoistic and worthless sequel to his excellent 1943 movie, and the much better "The Men Who Tread on the Tiger's Tail" (Tora no O wo Fumu Otokotachi), a free film adaptation of the Kabuki play Kanjincho, which in turn was based on the Noh play Ataka (Kurosawa disliked the Kabuki but was fond of the Noh theater and incorporated several Noh elements in this and other films). The famous story is about a loyal retainer who does the unthinkable: at a checkpoint he beats his lord in order to hide their identities. Kurosawa added a character not in the original: a porter, played by the popular comedian Enoken. His total misunderstanding of the principles motivating the behavior of the samurai slyly undermines the feudal ideology of the play. In other words, this is a rather strongly anti-feudal film - something the Occupation authorities didn't get, for they banned it. It was only shown in 1953.
After Japan's defeat, motion picture companies are placed under the Occupation forces, which prohibit films with themes of revenge (including all chanbara films) or antidemocratic principles - so censorship continues, albeit of a different kind. Film makers were pushed to create works in which democracy and individual freedom are promoted.
Many prewar and wartime films were deliberately destroyed by the Occupation authorities, further reducing an archive already meager due to natural disasters, inflammable nitrate stock and indifference.
Many theaters have been destroyed during the war and a rebuilding boom starts, bringing the number from 845 operating theaters in October of this year to more than 1,130 at the beginning of 1946. Still, that is less than half of the number of theaters of 1940. Due to the occupation, foreign (American) films become more dominant than they had ever been before, but they are still decades from being greater in numbers or receipts than Japanese films.
[Waga Seishun ni Kui Nashi]
1946
January 1: Emperor Showa renounces his divinity.
May: International Military Tribunal for the Far East convenes.
August: Serial killer Kodaira Yoshio, who murdered at least 8 people in the Tokyo and Tochigi areas between 1932 and 1946, is arrested.
November 3: Constitution of Japan promulgated.
December 21: The Nankai earthquake strikes Wakayama Prefecture, killing 1,443.
Sword fighting scenes are banned, so the stars of period drama are forced to don modern garb and appear as gangsters with pistols instead of brandishing swords. The Occupation does, however, encourage kissing scenes. The first kiss ever in Japanese cinema was shown on June 23, 1946 simultaneously in two otherwise unremarkable films; Daiei and Shochiku shared the honors. One of these kisses took place behind an umbrella because the Japanese were still shy about it.
Another banned theme is the suffering inflicted by the atomic bomb explosions.
Half the theaters in the major cities have been destroyed, but the studios are intact so production can start again.
Due to the strong leftist atmosphere in the early postwar years, labor disputes occur in almost every motion picture company. The strongest (Communist-inspired) union exists at Toho - it even obtains the right to participate in film planning and almost gets the studio under its management.
Ten star actors and actresses at Toho (including Okochi Denjiro, Hasegawa Kazuo, Fujita Susumu, Irie Takako and Hara Setsuko) oppose this state of affairs and break away to form a new company, Shintoho ("New Toho"). Shintoho officially starts in 1948 and would remain in existence until 1961. In its initial period, it focused on artistic films (it produced for example Kurosawa's Stray Dog in 1949, The Life of Oharu by Mizoguchi in 1952, Mother by Naruse in 1952 and Growing Up by Gosho in 1955, before degrading into exploitation cinema). There existed no animosity between the old and the new Toho, as Toho theaters distributed Shintoho films, and later several of those who had left returned to the Toho fold.
This exit of stars from Toho did give a chance to young talent, of whom the major one was Mifune Toshiro (1920-1997), who would play the main character in Kurosawa's Drunken Angel and Stray Dog.
"No Regrets for Our Youth" (Waga Seishun ni Kui Nashi) is a sharp examination of academic freedom by Kurosawa Akira. A university professor (Okochi Denjiro) is suspected of liberal views and one of his students (Fujita Susumu) - who is married to the professor's daughter (Hara Setsuko) - is arrested as a spy and executed. The daughter then makes a strongly individual choice by going to work on the farm of her husband's parents and enduring the worst of wartime suspicion (the villagers hate her as the wife of a traitor). After the war, she stays on in the village as she has learned to love the rural life and "has no regrets for her youth." This is one of Kurosawa's best films and the only one that features a woman as protagonist. It is a strong feminist statement, something pushed by the Occupation authorities as at this time Japanese women for the first time received the right to vote. In the following year, also Mizoguchi and Kinugasa made feminist films.
"Utamaro and his Five Women" (Utamaro wo Meguru Gonin no Onna) was the first postwar film of Mizoguchi Kenji, based on the life of the famous woodcut artist. Mizoguchi himself pleaded the case of this film with the Occupation censorship, presenting Utamaro as a sort of "pre-Occupation democrat" and the film as a plea for female emancipation. In reality, the film is more a meditation on the role of the artist in society.
"Morning for the Osone Family" (Osone-ke no ashita) by Kinoshita Keisuke shows a Japanese family examining itself on the morning after the great defeat in the war. Peace brings new hope to the family whose sons were involved both in war and anti-war efforts. Prominent is also a militarist uncle who is involved in shady deals. Sometimes a mouthpiece for political ideas, but deeply felt and beautifully acted. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
1947
February: Hachiko Line derailment causes 184 fatalities.
September: A violent typhoon causes 1,930 fatalities in the northern Kanto area.
Toho continues under control of the labor union. Works of "democratic enlightenment" are made.
Nagata Masaichi (1906-1985) becomes president of Daiei, a position in which he remains until 1974.
This year, two films are based on the life of Japan's first modern stage actress (and one of Japan's first emancipated women) Matsui Sumako, who committed suicide in 1918 because of social pressure. She was the first major star in the Shingeki theater movement and played the role of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House. Mizoguchi Kenji makes "The Love of Sumako, the Actress" (Joyu Sumako no Koi), and Kinugasa Teinosuke "Actress" (Joyu). Kinugasa's version is generally considered better.
Ozu Yasujiro makes his first postwar film, "Social Record of a Tenement House" (Nagaya Shinshiroku), about a boy, Kohei, who has been separated from his father and is picked up by the poor inhabitants of a tenement house. He is taken care of by the widow Otane (Iida Choko), who first finds him bothersome, but gradually grows to love him. When the father finally appears and takes the boy with him, she decides to adopt a war orphan. The film shows the ninjo, the warm human feelings of the lower classes, like several of Ozu's "social realistic" prewar films did. The message is that in the difficult time after the war, when everyone only cares for himself, such feelings are all the more important.
Kurosawa Akira makes "One Wonderful Sunday" (Subarashiki Nichiyobi), a sunny, sentimental comedy about a young couple in Tokyo who have a great date together without any money to spend. In the finale the boy tries to conduct Schubert's Unfinished Symphony in an empty bandstand (in Hibiya Park) and she, at least, believes in him... One of Kurosawa's weaker films, perhaps because he was by exception not involved in the writing of the script (which was based on a 1926 film by D.W. Griffith, Isn't Life Wonderful?). Different from the headstrong characters in other Kurosawa films, here the two protagonists are rather passive and indecisive.
Yoshimura Kozaburo makes "The Ball at the Anjo House" (Anjo-ke no butaikai), about the decline of the prewar aristocracy - an intelligent analysis of social change in Japan, where masters and servants are now equal. The story was indebted to Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. The father, who has to sell the family mansion, is on the verge of suicide, but his optimistic daughter (played by Hara Setsuko) shows him how to begin again. At the end of the film, they dance the tango together. Yoshimura, who worked at Shochiku, has been compared to Mizoguchi for his sympathetic portrayal of female characters. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
[Yoidore tenshi]
1948
January: International telephone service between the United States and Japan is established.
June: 1948 Fukui earthquake causes 3,769 fatalities.
November: International Military Tribunal for the Far East hands down death sentences for 7 war criminals and imprisonment for 18 others.
The conflict at Toho continues with a strike and occupation of the studios. The police and even the U.S. army are used to disperse the strikers. The union is defeated and its leaders are driven from Toho.
Several films made this year depict the harsh realities of postwar Japan.
"Drunken Angel" (Yoidore Tenshi) by Kurosawa Akira is a drama about an alcoholic doctor (the angel of the title, played by Shimura Takashi) and a death-obsessed gangster with TB (Mifune Toshiro) he tries to save. The film is set in the ruins of Tokyo at a very symbolical swamp and is seen as a brilliant evocation of the immediate postwar years in Japan, which were chaotic, poor and full of corruption due to the black market and gangsterism. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year. The film strikes us now as rather self-conscious (with a much too overt symbolism), static and one-dimensional.
"Women of the Night" (Yoru no Onnatachi) by Mizoguchi Kenji. Story about an Osaka streetwalker (again with Tanaka Kinuyo), a realistic film, made on location, that shocked the nation. Reduced to poverty after the war, many women were forced into prostitution ("panpan girls"). Contains many superb scenes as well as a message of sympathy for the panpan girls. Helped to bring about a ban on street prostitution (although only in the late 1950s).
"Children of the Beehive" (Hachi no Su no Kodomotachi) by Shimizu Hiroshi. About gangs of homeless and parentless children who wander the streets after the war, this film has been called a masterpiece of neo-realism. Shimizu here turns the poetic films about children he made in the late 1930s on their head.
"A Hen in the Wind" (Kaze no Naka no Mendori) by Ozu Yasujiro. Melodrama about a woman, Tokiko (Tanaka Kinuyo), waiting for her husband to come home from the war. When her child falls ill, she is forced to prostitute herself to pay the medical bill. The husband initially reacts with anger and violence to her confession, but later learns to accept her act as necessary. In fact, Tokiko's act symbolizes Japan's loss of purity due to the war, her husband's violent reaction the ingrained brutality of militarism. The film's lesson is more soberly realistic than of other postwar films: the couple decides to forget past mistakes and face the future with "impure" but realistic hope. A human-scale compromise typical of Ozu.
"Blue Mountains" (Aoi Sanmyaku) by Imai Tadashi stressed that young people should be allowed to make their own choices in this drama about young love and parental authority. The love between students in a co-educational school overcomes the conservative attitudes of the adults.
Imai Tadashi (1912-1991) was highly acclaimed by critics in Japan - in the 1950s, he won more Kinema Junpo awards for his films than Ozu and Kurosawa combined. He was a polemical film maker, who leaned strongly towards the left and who addressed social problems. His work shows some stylistic unevenness but he was always a sincere humanist. Despite his high status in Japan, he is almost unknown abroad.
[Banshun]
1949
January – Horyuji fire in Ikaruga, Nara Prefecture.
July - Shimoyama incident (disappearance and death of the first president of Japanese National Railways).
July - Mitaka incident (an unmanned train drives into Mitaka Station killing six people and injuring 20.
August - Matsukawa derailment (a Tohoku Main Line passenger train derails and overturns between Kanayagawa and Matsukawa stations in Fukushima, killing three crew members). The above 3 incidents have been called "JNR's Three Big Mysteries."
October: Yukawa Hideki becomes the first Japanese winner of a Nobel Prize.
Due to the Toho strike, director Yamamoto Kajiro sets up the Film Art Association (Eiga Geijutsu Kyokai) with Kurosawa as one of the founding members, to make it possible for Toho staff to continue making films outside the troubled studio. The Association existed for 3 years and produced 15 films, always in cooperation with other studios, such as Shochiku, Daiei and Shintoho. It produced all of Kurosawa's films in this period.
Kurosawa Akira makes "Stray Dog" (Nora Inu) about a young policeman (Mifune Toshiro) whose pistol is stolen and used to kill someone. He goes nearly crazy getting it back, running all around Tokyo. His supervisor (Shimura Takeshi) lends moral support. The film shows that in a more individualistic society, one must bear the consequences of one's actions. The last part is an almost documentary-like chase film, in which hunter and hunted (who are both ex-soldiers) more and more come to resemble each other. With its visual innovation and themes of obsession, doppelganger and postwar chaos, this is one of the greatest films Kurosawa ever made.
This year, Kurosawa also makes "The Quiet Duel" (Shizukanaru Ketto), about a doctor who gets syphilis from a scalpel cut and then decides to give up his fiancee and dedicate his life to medicine. This is lesser Kurosawa (partly also because of changes in the script enforced by the American censor, which made the moral conflict in the film too simplistic), but the first scene in the field hospital during the war is great.
Mizoguchi Kenji makes "My Love Burns" (Waga Koi wa Moenu), about a fighter for women's rights. More radical in its conclusion than any Hollywood film then and since has dared to be.
Shimizu Hiroshi makes "Mr. Shosuke Ohara" (Ohara Shosuke-san), one of his masterpieces. Okochi Denjiro plays a landowner who looses all his money through "sleeping in the morning, drinking sake in the morning and taking a bath in the morning" - plus being too good for this world as he can refuse no requests for financial help. Okochi gives a splendid tateyaku performance, in which his character never looses his composure and conceals his tragedy with rich humor.
Kinoshita Keisuke makes three interesting films: "A Toast to the Young Miss" (Ojosan Kanpai) shows how love crosses class barriers. A refined, rich girl (Hara Setsuko) forgives a young entrepreneur who is making love to her his boorish manners by appreciating his frankness. "The Yotsuya Ghost Story," in two parts (Yotsuya Kaidan) is Kinoshita's take on a famous story of the revenge by the spirit of a scorned wife. Kinoshita concentrates on human relations and foregoes the grotesque horror effects common to other versions of this tale. In "The Broken Drum" ( Yabure-daiko) Bando Tsumasaburo plays a blustering father who tries to rule his family along authoritarian lines. He fails and has to give in to the young and modern individuals of his family.
Ozu makes "Late Spring" (Banshun), a masterpiece on the peaceful life of a middle-class family. The most ordinary things happen in a moving way in this unforgettable film, the greatest film of the whole decade. A daughter (Hara Setsuko) lives with her widowed father (Ryu Chishu). He wants her to get married and have a life of her own, she wants to stay at home and look after her father. In the end, the father pushes her into marriage by pretending he himself is getting married again. After she has married, he sits alone in the now empty house, feeling sad. Accepting life's changes as they come - to live in harmony with both the self and the world - is also a form of transcendence. Interesting is, that the wedding ceremony - which in a Hollywood film would have formed the grand finale - is entirely left out, we do not even see the face of the groom. Set in a quiet residential area of Kamakura, this film made audiences feel that peace indeed had come to Japan. The film's iconography of "Japaneseness" (Zen gardens, Noh Drama, the tea ceremony) is meant to underline that Japanese tradition can be reconciled with the liberalism of the Occupation era. The film also shows the liberal view of family relations and marriage that had been introduced - marriage is for love and happiness, not for the perpetuation of the family. The only outrageous thing for us is the old-fashioned view that Noriko must marry since she is getting in her "late spring," but that would also change in Ozu's last film. Kinema Junpo Award for Best Film of the Year.
As is well known, Ozu always worked with the same crew and often the same cast. From this film on until his last one in 1962, his staff basically stayed the same. It consisted for example of co-scriptwriter Noda Koga and cameraman Atsuta Yuharu. His actors were often Hara Setsuko, Ryu Chishu and Sugimura Haruko.
[Reference works used: Currents In Japanese Cinema by Tadao Sato (Tokyo, 1987); The Japanese Film: Art and Industry by Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie (reprint Tokyo, 1983); A Hundred Years of Japanese Film by Donald Richie (Tokyo, 2001); Japanese Film Directors by Audrie Bock (Tokyo, 1985); A Critical Handbook of Japanese Film Directors by Alexander Jacoby (Berkeley, 2008); A New History of Japanese Cinema by Isolde Standish (New York, 2005); The Japanese Period Film by S.A. Thornton (Jefferson & London, 2008); Eros plus Massacre, An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema by David Desser (Bloomington and Indianopolis, 1988); Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema by David Bordwell (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1988); Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema by Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto (Duke University Press: Durham, 2000); The Waves at Genji's Door by Joan Mellen (Pantheon Books: New York, 1976); Japanese Classical Theatre in Film by Keiko I. Macdonald (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994); From Book to Screen by Keiko I. Macdonald (M.E. Sharpe: New York and London, 2000); Reading a Japanese Film by Keiko I. Macdonald (University of Hawai'i Press: Honolulu, 2006); Behind the Pink Curtain, A Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema, by Jasper Sharp (Fab Press: Godalming, 2008); Contemporary Japanese Film by Mark Schilling (Weatherhill: New York and Tokyo, 1999); The Midnight Eye Guide to New Japanese Film by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp (Stone Bridge Press: Berkeley, 2005); Kitano Takeshi by Aaron Gerow (British Film Institute: London, 2007); Iron Man: the Cinema of Shinya Tsukamoto by Tom Mes (Fab Press: Godalming, 2005); Agitator: The Cinema of Takashi Miike by Jasper Sharp (Fab Press: Godalming, 2003); Nihon Eigashi by Sato Tadao (Iwanami Shoten: Tokyo, 2008, 4 vols.); Nihon Eigashi 110-nen by Yomota Inuhiko (Shueisha; Tokyo, 2014). All images are linked from Wikipedia.]
History of Japanese Film by Year