“Tokyo Story” - Yasujiro Ozu (1953)

Yasujiro Ozu, the much-admired and revered Japanese filmmaker who flourished from the end of World War II until his death in 1963, was renowned both for his characteristic focus on Japanese middle-class family culture and his distinctive mise-en-scene.  Accordingly, he is often ranked, with Kenji Mizoguchi and Akira Kurosawa, at the top of the list of great Japanese filmmakers. However, it took some time before Ozu’s greatness was generally recognized in the West.  His work was thought to be too “Japanese” for export overseas.  It was not until 1972, when what is often considered to be his masterwork, Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953), was reopened in New York and Paul Schrader’s influential treatise Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer [1] was published, that Ozu’s work began to receive the attention in the West that it deserved.

Since then Ozu’s reputation among cineastes has only increased, and Tokyo Story has played a major role in this advancement [2,3,4].  In support of this assessment, we note that every ten years the British Film Institute conducts two separate polls – one of international film directors and one of international film critics – to rank the greatest film’s of all time.  And in the most recent BFI polling (2012), Tokyo Story was ranked as the greatest film of all time on the director’s poll [5] and as the third greatest film of all time on the critic’s poll [6]. 

As mentioned, what immediately distinguishes Ozu’s filmmaking is his unique style of presentation.  I discussed his distinctive cinematic style in my review of his film Early Spring (1956) [7]:

Ozu’s Cinematography

Ozu’s mise-en-scene was famously different from most other filmmakers across the globe, although his style has directly influenced some filmmakers, such as Hou Hsiao-Hsien.  His camera is almost invariably set at a low angle, as if from a low sitting position and looking up at the characters.  The image compositions are static, and there is almost no camera movement.  Even when the camera tracks horizontally, it maintains a fixed composition on the principal characters of the shot.  Thus the camera seems to be rooted to the environment, and pays little attention to the eye-line axes of the characters.  Nevertheless, there is quite a bit of cutting on action, which evokes the idea of the camera representing the “invisible” witness whose focus of attention changes naturally with an action cut.  Sometimes, at dramatically significant moments in the story, there is a straight-on camera shot, with the principal character speaking directly to the camera, which places the invisible witness directly in the middle of the interaction, empathetically assuming the role of the recipient of the speaker’s words.

For scene transitions, Ozu often shows static cityscape images that are empty of human content.  Sometimes these scene transitions elliptically pass over a significant piece of action that must be inferred by the viewer.  Altogether these effects create their own special cinematic atmosphere  that seems to place the viewer in an intimate position to witness the scene, and yet not always privy to everything that is going on.

Thus we often see shot transitions that “cross the axis” and also jump cuts in Ozu’s work that violate customary filmmaking standards, but this can partly be accounted for by Ozu’s different take on focalization.  Rather than focalize on a particular character in a scene, whereby the viewer sees things from that character’s perspective, Ozu often focalizes on a static setting, which orients things around the external contexts of what is happening.  These static settings are returned to again and again, and they become “familiar images” with respect to the narrative evolution of the story.  (Further, more detailed, discussion of Ozu’s distinctive mise-en-scene has been given by David Bordwell [8]).

Tokyo Story offers a good example of Ozu’s often said to be “Zen-like” stylistics, even though the film’s story was inspired by an older American film.  Co-screenwriter (along with Ozu) Kogo Noda had seen Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) and suggested to Ozu that they fashion a film together based on its plot elements, which concern an older couple making a journey in order to deal with family issues concerning their grownup children.  The film Ozu and Noda constructed does feature a journey (several, actually), and that always interesting narrative metaphor may partly account for Tokyo Story’s special appeal. But the journey aspect is not emphasized in Ozu’s film, and Tokyo Story’s attractiveness comes from other quarters – its themes concerning mainly life’s bittersweet nature and the unstoppable passage of time.

In fact we can identify a number of overlapping themes in Tokyo Story.  Many of these themes are universal and apply across all social stripes worldwide:

• Resignation concerning the inescapable effects of the passage of time.  There is nothing we can do to ward off the inevitability of ultimate decline and death, and we must face our fates with resignation.
   
• Social protocols.  The various social protocols in family life and social life, in general, are intended to regulate social interactions smoothly, but they can be seen as burdensome and insincere, especially if they are rigidly imposed.  In this context the oriental custom of always smiling during conversations may play a special role.
   
• Men vs. women.  The different roles that men and women have in family life, and the different expectations to which they are held was always a fascination of Ozu’s, and they are an important consideration in this film.  Japan was undergoing rapid social change at this time, in the wake of catastrophic wars and forced westernization, and the roles of women, in particular, were in a state of flux.
   
• Parents separation from children.  It is inevitable that as children grow up, they change and become engrossed in their own affairs.  Gradually they (usually) lose touch with and interest in their parents, whom they have left behind. How both parents and their children deal with this inevitable progression is a focus in this film.

Tokyo Story’s narrative concerns an elderly couple, Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama, who have raised five children and who make the long, several hundred mile, train trip from their home in Onomichi in southwest Japan to visit some of them in Tokyo.  The role of the old father, Shukichi, is played by Ozu favorite Chishu Ryu, who played in 52 of Ozu’s 54 films, including all of his postwar films.  Ryu usually plays the role of a thoughtful, contemplative person, and as such, he is a person with whom the audience can empathize, even when he is not saying  much.  In this film Ryu, who was 49-years-old at the time, very effectively plays the role of a man  who is 72-years-old.

Shukichi and Tomi (played by Chieko Higashiyama) are very much interested in catching up with their children, whom they haven’t seen for a number of years.  They also want to visit the widow of their deceased son on their trip.  Their five children, four of whom are still living, are

• Koichi (So Yamamura), a doctor running a pediatric clinic out of his own home in a Tokyo suburb, is married and has two children.  He is sober, unemotional, and dedicated to his professional work.  He, somewhat guiltily, sees his parents’ visit as an unwanted intrusion into his busy life.
   
• Shige Kaneko (Haruko Sugimura) is married and runs a beauty parlor connected with her home in Tokyo.  Although she wears traditional (non-Western) dress, Shige is not a traditional graciously self-deprecating lady; she is an aggressive and assertive woman.  And in fact she is shown to be bossy, manipulative, and selfish.  She, too, finds her parents’ visit to be an imposition.  Her husband Kurazo is more mild and takes a back seat in their social interactions.
   
• Shoji, the second son, was a Japanese soldier who went missing in 1945 and is presumed dead.  His widow, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), is a gracious and caring woman who goes out of her way to accommodate her parents-in-law.  Setsuko Hara, who played the role of Noriko, was, like Chishu Ryu, a favorite of Ozu’s, and she appeared in six of Ozu’s best films.  In the first three of her Ozu films (Late Spring, 1949; Early Summer, 1951; and Tokyo Story1953), Setsuko Hara played a significant character named Noriko.  Even though the plots of these three films have no connection with each other, the three films are sometimes referred to as Ozu’s “Noriko Trilogy”, thanks to the glowing presence of   Setsuko Hara.
   
• Keizo (Shiro Osaka) is the unmarried third son who works for a trading company in Osaka.  He is well-meaning but preoccupied with his own affairs.
   
• Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa), the youngest child, is their unmarried daughter.  She still lives with her parents in Onomichi and works as a schoolteacher.

The story of Tokyo Story passes through four approximate stages.

1.  Visiting Koichi and Shige

The elderly couple, Shukichi and Tomi, first visit the home of their eldest child, Koichi, for a few  days.  But Koichi is so occupied with his own pediatrics affairs (he doesn’t even appear to have much time to discipline his own obstreperous son) that he has no time to entertain his guests.  So Shukichi and Tomi shift over to their daughter Shige’s residence. 

But Shige is even more too selfishly preoccupied to have the time to entertain her parents.  So she asks her sister-in-law Noriko to take up the task.  Though of much more modest means than her siblings-in-law, Noriko graciously takes a day off from her job to take Shukichi and Tomi  out on the town and show them the wonders of Tokyo.

2.  Atami Hot Springs

After a week or so, Shige and Dr. Koichi finally hit on a plan to relieve them of their social obligations to their parents: send the neglected couple off alone for awhile to the Atami Hot Springs resort on the coast.  However, when  Shukichi and Tomi arrive at the resort, they find little of interest for them to do, and the noisy atmosphere of the pleasure-seeking vacationers in attendance there merely keeps the elderly couple up at night.  So they decide to return early to their kids in Tokyo.  Before they depart from Atami, though, Tomi experience a dizzy spell that reveals that her health is frail.

3.  Return to Tokyo
Upon returning to Tokyo, Shukichi and Tomi discover that because they had come back earlier than expected, their room in Shige’s apartment was already “booked” by Shige for a social event for her beautician colleagues.  So Shukichi and Tomi obligingly decide to find their own sleeping quarters for the night.  Tomi decides to spend the night with Noriko in her cramped apartment, while Shukichi choose to spend the night with an old friend from Onomichi who now lives in Tokyo.

That evening Shukichi goes out drinking with old friends from Onomichi, and he and his friends get thoroughly plastered, in one of the more interesting sequences of the film.  With the effects   of alcohol lowering the veil of customary Japanese courteousness, the men lament to each other how disappointed they are with how their children have turned out.  In particular, they are sad that they cannot take more pride in what their children have become.  We later learn that Shukichi had once been a heavy drinker, which put a severe strain on his relationship with his wife; but he had sworn off alcohol when his daughter Kyoko had been born.

At the same time Tomi is with Noriko, and the old woman urges her daughter-in-law not to abide by old-fashioned social protocols and to find another man so that she can remarry and start a family.

Now with nothing more to do and not wishing to wear out their dubious welcome, Shukichi and Tomi decide to return to Onomichi.  On the way home, though, during a stopover in Osaka to see Keizo, Tomi suffers a stroke and is taken back to Onomichi critically ill and in a coma.

4.  Onomichi Nightfall

More mindful than ever of social protocols, the children and Noriko rush to Onomichi to be at Tomi’s side.  And always attending to her practical concerns, Shige reminds the others to bring their funeral garments.  But when Shige hears the ever-analytical Dr. Koichi’s grim assessment that Tomi will not survive the night, she bursts into tears.  Thus we see that underneath Shige’s personal traits of selfish social manipulation, there is a substratum of genuine feminine feeling that is usually covered up.  Later, though, we see Shige returning to her usual intemperance when she complains about Keizo’s late arrival just after Tomi’s death.  Although Tomi was unconscious and unaware of any of the children when they arrived, Keizo’s late arrival was an unforgivable violation of protocol in Shige’s eyes.

After the funeral when the family has lunch together, Shige again makes self-centered remarks, for example eagerly asking Kyoko to give her some of Tomi’s old dresses. Then Shige, Koichi, and Keizo immediately head back to Tokyo, while Noriko chooses to stay another day with Shukichi. 

The next morning Noriko and Kyoko talk, and the young daughter tearfully criticizes her older siblings for their relentless selfishness.  But the ever-compassionate Noriko defends the others to Noriko.  She says that all children inevitably get involved in their own narratives and can’t help from drifting away from their parents.  Kyoko responds to this wisdom by saying, “Isn’t life disappointing!”  And Noriko can only smile and say, “Yes, it is.”

Later Shukichi and Noriko talk, and he repeats Tomi’s urgings that she should forget about his dead son and start a new life by remarrying.  Then he gives her as a departing gift Tomi’s old wristwatch that she had worn all her life.

The final shots show Noriko, on the train gazing at the keepsake watch she has been given, and Shukichi, sitting alone at home, both separately contemplating life’s lonely, existential mysteries.


Tokyo Story ends on a note of sadness and resignation concerning the inevitability of time passing and things coming to an end.  It also dwells on the limitations of social protocols if the participants don’t engage in them with sincerity.  This is not to suggest that social protocols don’t have their value.  They can encourage and provide the scaffolding for positive social interactions if one’s participation in them is genuine.  Thus Noriko’s habitually smiling demeanor was a customary posture that may well have assisted and triggered her perpetually compassionate nature. 

Overall, we could say that the principal characters of Tokyo Story offer somewhat different responses to the quizzical nature of time passing and the inevitability of decay.  Shukichi represents benign resignation to life’s mysteries, but he also embodies a generally positive posture of engagement.  Koichi, Shige, Keizo represent common character type responses that we can all recognize, both in the people we meet and in ourselves, too.  They are not really bad people.  They are basically well-meaning people who are distracted by their everyday narrative circumstances and lose sight of more important interpersonal considerations.

It is Noriko, though, who is the special one.  She at first seems simply reflexively ingratiating in an automatic sort of way, but gradually the depth of her character is revealed.  Eventually we discern that she is the real star of this tale.  She knows that she is not perfect and all-knowing, but she continually strives to be understanding and all-loving.
★★★★

Notes:

1. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, University of California Press (1972). 
2. David Bordwell, “Tokyo Story: Compassionate Detachment”, The Criterion Collection, (18 November 2013).    
3. Roger Ebert, “Tokyo Story”, Great Movie, RogerEbert.com, (9 November 2003).    
4. “Conversations About Great Films: Yasujiro Ozu, TOKYO STORY (1953) 136 mins”, Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXXVI:4), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (6 October 2009).    
5. “Directors’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012).  
6. “Critics’ Top 100", Analysis: The Greatest Films of All Time 2012, Sight and Sound, British Film Institute, (2012). 
7. The Film Sufi, “‘Early Spring’ - Yasujiro Ozu (1956)”, The Film Sufi, (23 July 2014).   
8. David Bordwell, “Ozu”, The St. James World Film Directors Encyclopedia, Andrew Sarris (ed.), Visible Ink, Detroit (1998), quoted in “Conversations About Great Films: Yasujiro Ozu, TOKYO STORY (1953) 136 mins”, Diane Christian and Bruce Jackson (eds.), Goldenrod Handouts, Buffalo Film Seminars, (XXXVI:4), The Center for Studies in American Culture, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY (6 October 2009).    

“The End of Summer” - Yasujiro Ozu (1961)

Yasujiro Ozu’s penultimate film, The End of Summer (Kohayagawa-ke No Aki, 1961),  had several similarities with his previous work, Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960).  We would naturally expect similarities in connection with Ozu’s unique style of visual expression, but the commonalities between these two films also extended to characters, themes, and even the leading actresses. 

Ozu’s visual style is, of course, what stands out when we encounter one of his films.  In this respect there are two main aspects: (a) narrative presentation and (b) visual expression.

• Narrative Presentation.
  Ozu usually tells his entire story by presenting a series of short conversations between the main participants, which, because of their being situated in the layered social context of Japanese cordiality, consist mostly of polite small talk. The pace is leisurely, with many connecting shots showing (a) people simply looking idly into the mirror as they dress, (b) putting on clothes, or (c) walking down a hallway to answer a phone, etc.  This is all part of Ozu’s use of the “slow disclosure” narrative technique, whereby the viewer only gradually discerns the background context of a given situation.  On top of this, Ozu often omits presenting key action events of the story; the viewer only learns about these events when they are discussed later in one of the film’s short conversations.  This at first may sound like intentional obfuscation on Ozu’s part, but it has the effect of drawing the viewer into the important social context that is a key aspect of the story.
   
• Visual Expression.
  Ozu relies heavily on static, low-angle medium shots that cumulatively can have a hypnotic effect on the viewer.  In some of these conversations, the speaking character is shown to be looking straight into the camera, which has the psychological effect of engaging the viewer (who is normally the “invisible witness” to what is happening), directly with the character speaking.  In addition there are almost no moving-camera shots, although there is some cutting on action. Sometimes specific conversational contexts are punctuated by interspersed static cityscape shots that are devoid of people.  These cityscape moments break up the flow and often serve to mark the passage of a bit of time. 

In the following I will use abbreviations to indicate two of the key Ozu technique when they occur in the narrative.  MA means that some “missing action” has taken place off-camera, and the viewer must infer what has happened.  SIC means that a particular character is looking “straight into the camera” when he or she is speaking, which suggest moments when particular sincerity is being expressed. (In this film it seems to me that there is an unusually high percentage of SIC shots – even for Ozu.)

Thematically, Ozu’s films often covered various issues associated with the Japanese family as it was affected by the entire society undergoing significant postwar social upheaval.  These issues included

• Cross-generational issues,
• Tradition versus modernity,
• Individual authenticity versus social role-playing,
• Selfish opportunism versus empathy for others,
• Fatalism versus determined ambition.

What makes The End of Summer rather complicated compared to the rest of Ozu’s oeuvre is that all of these issues are touched on in this film. 

There are nine principal characters in the story, and they each represent a position in this multidimensional social issue context.  So the viewer has a lot to keep track of.  In fact, although the English title for the film is "The End of Summer”, the Japanese title, “Kohayagawa-ke No Aki”, means in English, “Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family”, and what this film presents is a rather wide-spectrum view of how this complicated extended family is dissolving.  The nine key characters are

• Kohayagawa Manbei (played by Ganjiro Nakamura) is the elderly patriarch of the Kohayagawa family and is the owner of a sake brewery.
• Akiko (Setsuko Hara) is Manbei's widowed daughter-in-law. (Setsuko Hara had important roles in many Ozu films.)
• Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa) is Manbei's youngest daughter.  In this film Yoko Tsukasa and Setsuko Hara almost reprise their respective roles and their relationship they had in Ozu’s immediately preceding Late Autumn, as the “younger (modern) woman” and the “older (traditional) woman” both searching for meaningful relationships in marriage.
• Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) is Manbei's older daughter and is married to Hisao.
• Hisao (Keiju Kobayashi) is Fumiko's husband and works in the family-owned sake brewery office.
• Sasaki Tsune (Chieko Naniwa) is the former mistress of Manbei.
• Yuriko (Reiko Dan) is the Ms. Sasaki’s daughter.
• Kitagawa Yanosuke (Daisuke Kato) is referred to as the “uncle," and Manbei's brother-in-law.  (Daisuke Kato had memorable roles in Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954), , and Yojimbo (1961).)
• Isomura Eiichirou (Hisaya Morishige) is a man interested in marrying Akiko.

The wearing apparel of these characters is revealing in connection with their association with modernity.  Manbei, Ms. Sasaki, Akiko, and Fumiko wear traditional Japanese gowns and kimonos, while the rest of the men and women wear modern Western clothing. 

Although the film comprises a sequence of small conversations, we can group them into four phases of narrative development.

1.  Akiko and Noriko

The first part of the film revolves around attempts of the Kohayagawa family in Osaka to find suitable husbands for the thirty-something Akiko and the much younger Noriko.  In fact the film opens with Kitagawa Yanosuke at a cocktail lounge describing Akiko’s virtues as a marriage partner to Isomura Eiichirou.  Akiko is invited to join them for dinner for an “interview”, but her self-effacing politeness conceals whatever true feelings she may have about the proposed match-up.   It is only later that we learn that she declined the dinner invitation (MA).

There are three main theaters of action for the conversations here. 

1. Akiko, her teenage son, and Noriko live together in an apartment.  Whenever Akiko and Noriko speak to each other, they are always shown in SIC shots.
2. There is the sake brewery where Hisao works and Manbei visits occasionally (we soon learn that the sake brewery is not doing well financially). 
3. And there is the household of Hisao and Fumiko (they have a small son), where Manbei also lives. 

Later at the Fumiko home, Yanosuke comes to discuss Akiko’s marriage prospects with Isomura.  It is evident that the Kohayagawa family sees it as their obligation to find a suitable mate for the widow in their family, as well as finding a mate for Noriko. 

Then Noriko is shown at work in a modern office, where she is invited to a good-bye party for a male friend, Mr. Teramoto, who is not the man who has been selected by the “family” (Fumiko, Hisao, and Manbei), but to whom Noriko is romantically attracted.  To Noriko’s further dismay, Mr. Teramoto is about to leave Osaka, because he has accepted a faculty position in far-away Sapporo.  At the party, the assembled friends curiously sing a farewell song that has Japanese words, but to the tune of “Oh, My Darling Clementine”. Perhaps this was a further signal of the encroaching Western influence on Japanese life.

So far, the story interest has developed around Akiko and Noriko and how they will respond to the well-intentioned but coercive family pressure to find them marriage partners.  But at this point the narrative focus shifts to a new concern.

2.  Focus on Manbei
Manbei has been frequently away from the sake brewery running errands, and the brewery’s chief clerk wants to know why.  They soon learn that Manbei has been secretly seeing his old flame, Sasaki Tsune, with whom he had an adulterous affair that began some twenty years earlier.  Although, with Manbei now being a widower, his renewed relationship would seem innocent enough, he keeps it secret, because he knows that others around him will object.  In particular, his daughter Fumiko is highly suspicious of Manbei’s secretive behaviour and feels that he is not acting  appropriately for a man of his age.

When Manbei and Ms. Sasaki are shown alone together, they seem innocently cordial, with plenty of SIC shots when they converse.  Ms. Sasaki has a 21-year-old daughter, Yuriko, who shows up and appears to be Westernized and selfish.  When she sees Manbei, she calls him “Father” and nags him as to when he will give her a mink stole.  Later though, after Manbei leaves, Yuriko asks her mother if Manbei really is her father.  Her mother seems not to be sure, herself, and says it really doesn’t matter, anyway.

3.  Crisis in Arashiyama

Now they all go to attend a memorial service for “Mother’s” (Manbei’s deceased wife's) death to take place in Arashiyama, which is close to Kyoto and about fifty kilometers from Osaka.  We see Akiko and Noriko in conversation and learn that Akiko has already been presented with Isomura’s wedding proposal (MA), but is hesitant about it.  The rest of the family (Hisao, Fumiko, and Manbei) separately sit around a tea table and discuss the merits of the proposal, too.  At the same time Fumiko rudely taunts Manbei about the likelihood of his visiting someone in Kyoto (a veiled reference fo Ms. Sasaki).  Manbei is upset, leaves the room and soon reportedly has a heart attack (MA). 

A doctor is summoned, and various members of the extended Kohayagawa clan arrive from out of town, assuming that  Manbei’s death is imminent.  But miraculously, Manbei quickly makes a full recovery (MA) and seems as cheerful and robust as ever.

Meanwhile Akiko and Noriko privately discuss their further thoughts about marriage and whether they should accept the mates that have been selected for them.  Akiko advises that a girl should marry a man with “character” – “you can alter behaviour, but you can’t alter character.”

4 Kohayagawa Family Coming to a Close
In the film’s final phase, a climactic event initiates change.  This is marked by four conversations that each elliptically refer to offscreen action (MA).

• Manbei has sneaked away from his family again and taken Ms. Sasaki to a velodrome for bicycle racing where they can place wagers on the outcomes.
• Yanosuke and Isomura are waiting again at the same old cocktail lounge for Akiko to show up, and it is clear that Isomura has given up on the hesitant woman.
• Hisao and Fumiko are at home discussing why Manbei has sneaked away again.  Their conversation is interrupted by a phone call from Yuriko that Manbei has had another heart attack.
• Sasaki Tsune and her daughter Yuriko are shown sitting respectfully next to Manbei’s protrate body.  It takes some moments to discern that he is dead. While Ms. Sasaki appears devastated, Yuriko looks bored and attends to grooming her nails.  When her American boyfriend shows up to take her out on a date, Yuriko takes her leave of the corpse by crossing herself before, thereby suggesting that she has become a Christian.

The extended family members arrive again, and a funeral is held.  But it is all surface ceremony, and the inner family members are now more worried about what will happen to the sake brewery. Akiko and Noriko, walking alone in the cemetery, finally come to their decisions. Noriko vows to go to Sapporo and pursue her true love, while Akiko says she prefers to remain unmarried and attend to her teenage son by herself.

The overall message of The End of Summer  is not clear cut, and the roles the characters play with respect to Ozu’s traditional issues are mixed.  Reviewing those issues again, we see some unexpected positions:

• Cross-generational Issues and Tradition vs. Modernity. 
  Youth is normally identified with modernity, but in this film, the oldest person, Manbei, had a more free-wheeling outlook.  His daughter Fumiko, meanwhile, was steadfast in asserting traditional mores.
   
• Selfish Role-playing vs. Empathic Authenticity. 
  In some of Ozu’s other films the men are opportunists, taking advantage of traditional authority when it suits their purposes and embracing modernity when that proves to be the convenient option.  In this film, though, things are a little more complicated. Some of the women, particularly Yuriko, are self-absorbed, while Manbei seems attentive to others. Authentic interactions showing empathy and sincerity are signaled in the film by SIC shots, and these are most consistently associated with Akiko, Noriko, and Manbei.  But we know that Manbei is also selfish – he gambles away family money at the bicycle races and has had at least one adulterous affair.
   
• Fatalism vs. Ambition. 
  When Manbei’s body is cremated, two farmers are shown watching the smoke rising from the cremation smoke stack and reflecting on the transience of existence and the inevitability of change.  This is presumably the traditional Oriental fatalistic perspective, and it is sometimes seen as a virtue.  But Ozu’s perspective doesn’t seem to be so clear-cut on this point.  For the men in Ozu’s stories, a deep concern was the looming horrors of the faceless salaryman’s suffocating existence in modern business life – so movingly evoked in Early Spring (1956).  The salarymen are little more than robots attending to the dictates of what we now term “big data”.  This contrasted with the heroic self-image that most men (in every society) have been traditionally schooled to embrace and embody.  At the end of the film, the workers at the Kohayagawa sake brewery are faced with the likelihood of the brewery being bought out by a larger firm.  They would all then become the eviscerated salary men of their nightmares.

What kept these men from being salary men earlier?   It was Manbei, a spirited individual who took a direct interest in the people with whom he interacted. So with Manbei gone, a vital flame of the Kohayagawa family has gone out. At the end of the film, it is not the men, but two women, Akiko and Noriko, who decide to take control of their destinies. They are authentic and empathic, like Manbei (but hopefully a little more responsible).

Manbei’s reported last words were, “Is this it?  Is this really it?”  These are not the words of a man who is satisfied with his ending.  He is  asking, “is that all there is to it?”  He wants more.  So does Ozu, and so do we.

★★★

“Late Autumn” - Yasujiro Ozu (1960)

Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Autumn (Akibiyori, 1960), like his two preceding films, Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959) and Good Morning (Ohayo, 1960), was a rehash of one of his earlier black-and-white films. In this case the earlier film, Late Spring (Banshun, 1949), was one of Ozu’s personal favorites. But Late Autumn was also a critical success and won the Golden Lion award at the 1960 Venice Film Festival. Interestingly, long-time Ozu favorite Setsuko Hara starred in both Late Spring and in Late Autumn but in different roles.

As was customary with Ozu films, the story of Late Autumn concerns cross-generational cultural issues – in this case about a widowed parent’s efforts to marry off an only-daughter.  But there is a light-hearted air to the entire proceedings, and we could justifiably call this film a comedy, even though there are some moments of melancholy.

The key to understanding the meaning behind the film is that the marriageable daughter, Ayako Miwa, is subject to the opinions and maneuverings of three distinct cultural spheres or attitudes.  The resulting interactions and misunderstandings across these three spheres constitute the heart of the film.  Before describing these spheres, let me list the principal characters:

• Three Ladies
• Akiko Miwa (played by Setsuko Hara) is the widow with an only child, Ayako
• Ayako Miwa (Yoko Tsukasa) is Akiko’s daughter
• Yuriko Sasaki (Mariko Okada) is Ayako’s office colleague and friend
• Three Middle-aged men who are of similar age, temperaments, and opinions and who were longtime friends of Miwa, Akiko’s deceased husband.
• Shuzo Taguchi (Nobuo Nakamura) is a business manager. Of the three middle-aged men, he is the energetic source of new ideas, which he often fails to bring to successful closure.
• Soichi Mamiya (Shin Saburi) is also business manager. Of the three men, he is the decisive, get-things-done person who seeks closure, but his crude acts are also often ineffective in this story.
• Seiichiro Hirayama (Ryuji Kita) is a mild-mannered college professor who tends to go along with the more highly opinionated Taguchi and Mamiya

These characters constitute the three cultural spheres:

• Traditional values – embodied by Akiko
• Modernism – represented by Yuriko
• Opportunism – this invokes traditional values and modernism as suits the occasion (in the minds of the three middle-aged businessmen)

How these cultural spheres interact and affect Ayako is told through a series of conversations which on the surface seem to be mostly just courteous small talk.  There is almost no real action in the film, and even some of the key personal interactions are not shown but merely talked about after the fact (this omission of key moments is a characteristic of Ozu’s mise-en-scene).  A further beclouding aspect of the storytelling is the cultural practice among the Japanese middle class to suppress overt emotional reactions and to merely display a smiling countenance.

Offsetting these obfuscating aspects of the narrative, however, is Ozu’s characteristic cinematography, which features low-angle closeups and medium shots, with many of the conversation participants looking straight into the camera when they speak. This makes the viewer seemingly directly involved in the conversation and more sensitive to the nuances that are being conveyed. Over the course of this sequence of conversations, the viewer watches the story pass through four stages.

1.  Ayako is Available
After attending the temple ceremony commemorating the seventh anniversary of the death of their friend, Mr. Miwa, the three men (Taguchi, Mamiya, and Hirayama) talk together about the two surviving members of the Miwa family – Akiko and her 24-year-old daughter Ayako.  It is clear that all three men lustfully regard Akiko as a great beauty, even though she is in her forties, and they feel that they missed out by not marrying her.  They also feel that it is their comradely/familial duty now to find a suitable husband for Akiko's daughter, Ayako.  Taguchi suggests a candidate, but that person is already taken, so Mamiya suggests a person from his office, Mr. Goto.

But Ayako is a modern girl and uncomfortable with these kinds of arranged marriages. She also feels guilty about leaving her mother all alone if she gets married. So she tells Akiko to decline the offer. But Akiko tells her that it would be a sacrifice that she would be willing to make.

“I’d miss you, but it can’t be helped.  I’d have to make do.”

There are no scenes showing Akiko being presented with the Goto offer, nor of her ultimate response that the offer is declined.  We only learn about these events from subsequent conversations.

2.  A New Candidate is Found
On a hiking trip with some coworkers, one of her colleagues offers to introduce Ayako to Mr. Goto, anyway.  Ayako agrees and begins seeing the man, but she is still not interested in getting married.  Accidentally running into Mamiya at a restaurant, she informs him

“For me, love and marriage don’t necessarily go hand in hand.”

Meanwhile Taguchi, Mamiya, and Hirayama try to come up with a “plan B” to get Ayako a husband.  Since Ayako is evidently worried about Akiko being left alone, Taguchi asserts that they must find a husband for Akiko, too.  And the one they come up with is Hirayama, who has been widowed for four years.  Hirayama at first feels that marrying Akiko would be disrespectful of his old friend, but after talking it over with his son, he gives in to his personal desires.  He tells his other two friends that they can inform Akiko that he would like to marry her.

3. Resistance to the Proposal
Again, a key interaction with Akiko is omitted – in this case it is the one where Taguchi goes to ask her about the possibility of her remarrying. We only hear Taguchi later telling Mamiya that Akiko told him she wouldn’t remarry.

But Ayako has learned of the proposed union anyway and mistakenly thinks that her mother has accepted. Before Akiko can correct her misunderstanding, Ayako quarrels vehemently with her mother for being unfaithful to her deceased father and runs off to visit her coworker friend Yuriko.  At this point Yuriko becomes a major figure in the story. 

Yuriko is a modern girl and scolds Ayako for not letting her mother live her own life.  After visiting Akiko to comfort her, Yuriko tries to fix things.  She goes to meet Mamiya, Taguchi, and Hirayama and forcibly lambasts the men for being meddlesome and clumsy in the way they have handled things.  After getting Hirayama’s assurances that he truly loves Akiko, Yuriko is sure that all the problems and misunderstandings can be resolved.

4. A Wedding
But Yuriko’s modernism cannot budge Akiko’s traditionalism. Akiko tells Ayako that she will remain a widow, but urges her daughter to go ahead and marry Goto.  The traditional wedding ceremony is duly held, after which Akiko is left alone in contemplation.

Although the general tenor of Late Autumn is that of a comedy, with the three middle-aged men continually joking their way through their marriage-making antics, the ending, for me, is not a happy one.  There isn’t much love depicted in this story.  And the one person who believes in love, the modernist Yuriko, appears to have been stymied in her efforts to encourage its flowering.

• Ayako’s marriage to Goto appears to be merely a practical decision. Goto seems to have been chosen from a utilitarian perspective. At the wedding, Ayako looks trapped and almost smothered in a traditional bridal gown.
• Akiko’s dedication to traditional values forces her to part permanently from Ayako and deny the possibility of a new life with Hirayama. She is abandoned by everyone, and ultimately by the story, itself.
• Taguchi and Mamiya appear to be living in cold marriages.  They almost openly admit to their wives that they would have preferred to marry Akiko.  In fact Taguchi at one point tells his wife, “marriage is really tedious when you think about it.”  When Hirayama complains at the end that he was just used by his other two friends and got nothing out of all their shenanigans, Taguchi tells him that he did get something precious – dreams.  Taguchi’s own dreams are evidently dead.

In fact many of the misunderstandings in the film were caused by the crude, “businesslike” manner in which Mamiya informed people about his plans for Ayako.  The three middle-aged men are opportunists, because they support traditional values where and when convenient. But if the opportunity would come up to be with Akiko, they would jump at the chance. In the end, they seem moderately happy that they have arranged what appears to me to be like a “business” deal – the marriage of Ayako. They toast themselves in celebration. But the real person who was capable of authentically expressing herself and of seizing the moment was Yuriko. She seems to be the only one in the film who could spontaneously express genuine anger, loving compassion, and joy.
★★★

“Equinox Flower” - Yasujiro Ozu (1958)

Yasujiro Ozu’s first color film, Equinox Flower (Higanbana, 1958) did not represent a radical break from his famously rigorous visual style. He merely extended that style by including colored objects as another formally manipulable stylistic element. The Japanese title for the film, “Higanbana”, refers to a “red spider lily” that blooms around the time of the autumnal equinox (hence the English title), and so red-colored objects are prominently on display throughout the film. In particular, there is a brightly red-colored tea kettle that is prominently shown in the main domestic setting.  It is frequently repositioned so that it occupies a significant position in the frame in various situations.  Because of its continued visual prominence, I wonder if it has some special symbolic significance in the Japanese cultural context.

The subject matter of Equinox Flower is in accord with Ozu’s usual themes concerning how cross-generational Japanese family life tries to find harmony between the old and the new. In this case, though, the film features more light-hearted comedic content than usual, to the extent that many people have classified this film as a comedy.  I wouldn’t go that far, though, and in fact the film’s ultimate message seems, like many of Ozu’s films, almost elegiacal about the passing on of a generation.

The story concerns a middle-aged businessman, Wataru Hirayama (played by Shin Saburi), who finds himself confronted with the eternal parental problem of how to shepherd a daughter to a successful marriage. Hirayama is a senior manager accustomed in the Japanese tradition of wielding complete power and receiving deferential treatment by all those around him. Though he is mild-mannered, he expects absolute obedience.  But it turns out in this story that many of the people around him are women with their own ideas of how things should be done with respect to choosing a marriage partner.  The narrative tension in the story concerns how Hirayama adjusts himself to these unsettling circumstances.

The film starts right off on the subject of marriage, with Hirayama and his wife Kiyoko (Kinuyo Tanaka) attending the wedding of a business friend.  Given his authoritative status at the company, Hirayama is asked to say a few words at the reception, and he remarks (somewhat belittlingly in the face of his wife sitting next to him) that while his own marriage was pragmatically arranged by the parents and was not a love match, the present bride and groom are to be admired and envied for their evident love for each other.  This points to the primary issue in the film: should a bride be able to choose her mate, or should the parents arrange a suitable match for her?  There are three separate young women featured in the film who struggle with their parents about this question:

• Setsuko Hirayama (Ineko Arima), is the Hirayama’s elder daughter.  She wants to marry a young coworker with whom she has fallen in love, but her father wants her to marry a man from a more prosperous and esteemed family.
• Fumiko Mikami (Yoshiko Kuga) is the daughter of Hirayama’s old school friend, Shukichi Mikami (Chishû Ryû), who is a widower.  She wants to marry a musician she has met, but her father doesn’t approve.
• Yukiko Sasaki (Fujiko Yamamoto) is the daughter of Hatsu Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa), a woman who operates an inn in Kyoto. Yukiko doesn’t have a boyfriend, but she resists her mother’s incessant attempts to find a match with anyone who comes along who looks well-to-do.

There are two other women in the background who give significant support to their “sisters” in these struggles:

• Kiyoko Hirayama (Kinuyo Tanaka) is Wataru’s wife and, though lovingly obedient to her husband, she devotes herself to overall familial harmony. Throughout the film she behaves like a saint and radiates the warmth that is lacking from her husband.
• Hisako Hirayama (Miyuki Kuwano), Setsuko’s younger teenage sister, is fully modernized and a cheerfully staunch supporter of a woman’s right to choose.

The narrative passes through three stages of development.  In the first stage, the various characters are introduced and given the opportunity to express their views on marriage. Hirayama discusses with his wife the idea of their daughter Setsuko having a marriage arranged with a man from a prominent and wealthy family. Hearing this, younger daughter Hisako avows that she would never accept an arranged marriage.  Later Hirayama’s old friend Mikami visits Hirayama and tells him about his parental problems with his wayward daughter, Fumiko, who has run away from home and gone off to live with her musician boyfriend. Fumiko is now working at a cocktail lounge and is not in communication with her family, so Mikami asks Hirayama if he would go over there and “check up on her”.

Also during this first stage Hirayama is visited by a woman friend who operates an inn in Kyoto, Mrs. Sasaki, who is visiting Tokyo with her daughter, Yukiko.  Mrs. Sasaki is a nonstop chatterbox, and her presence is apparently supposed to inject humor into the story.  On a subsequent private visit to Hirayama’s residence, Yukiko confidingly complains to Hirayama about her garrulous mother’s repeated efforts to find a husband for her.  She is just not interested in her mother’s candidates. Hirayama, in line with the sentiments he recently expressed at the wedding, advises her not to marry just anyone and warns her, “you may think marriage is golden, but it can end up being brass.”  But Yukiko is rather cheeky and can fend for herself.  When she talks to Setsuko (they are old friends), they make a secret pact to help each other fend off their parents match-making impositions.  Anyway, up to this point things have been going pretty smoothly.

But in the film’s second stage, conflict arises.  Hirayama is shocked to be approached by a young man, Mr. Taniguchi, who asks for his daughter Setsuko’s hand.  Although it turns out that this is the man Setsuko really wants to marry, Hirayama is angry that he has not had a chance to conduct the requisite family background checks, and so he rejects the proposal outright. This sets off a family storm, and Hirayama dictatorially orders that Setsuko be confined at home, telling her 

“Bad things happen when young girls go out. Stay home for a few days and think it over.”  

Hirayama is not outwardly aggressive, but he is used to operating within a system where authority is obeyed without question.

In an effort to assist his old friend , Hirayama goes over to the cocktail lounge and tries to talk to Fumiko Mikami, but he sees that the girl is happily and seriously committed to her new life.  Now he is beginning to see the other side of things.  When Yukiko comes to visit him and confides that she wants to merry someone for love, against her mother’s choice, Hirayama encourages her to follow her heart.  But this turns out to be a ruse on Yukiko’s part, in keeping with the secret pact she had made with Setsuko  – Yukiko informs HIrayama that she will now tell Setsuko that her father accepts a girl's right to choose her own mate.  The logic of Hirayama’s original position has now been exposed as flawed.

The third stage of the story, and roughly the last one-third of the film’s running time, concerns the growing acceptance and resignation on the part of Hirayama that the whole system of doing things that he is accustomed to is passing away.  To his credit, Hirayama gradually accepts the modern way.  When his wife Kiyoko tells him that he has been inconsistent, he sadly acknowledges that “as a scholar said: ‘the sum total of inconsistencies is life’”.

He and Mikami then go to an old school reunion, where the men in attendance all reflect on their passing glory. These men, who are all mild-mannered white-collar businessmen, have been working within a system that glorifies leaders as noble warriors and heroes. The others all invite Mikami to recite a poem said to be by the ancient hero, Kusunoki Masatsura, who died in battle at the age of 22 some six centuries earlier [1]. In sonorous tones, Mikami sings to them

"My father's precepts are engraved in my heart.
I will faithfully follow the emperor's edict.
10 years of patience, and finally the time has come.
Strike a powerful blow
For the emperor's cause we are struggling now.
To fight and die as men, we make an oath.
We, 143 companions of war, united as one,
Determined to fight until victory, yes, we are.
By dying, heroes earn an immortal glory,
The cowards suffer an eternal shame.
With the edges of our arrows, we engrave our story,
The blades of our swords shine in the evening.
Against the approaching enemy, let's walk with the same step,
At their general, let's give the final blow."

To their credit, Mikami and Hirayama have come to accept the new form of familial autonomy that they have hitherto resisted. Ozu seems to be telling us that you can teach old dogs new tricks. This is the modern way, and they will just have to become accommodated to it. 

Setsuko’s wedding to Taniguchi goes ahead on schedule. With one last act of cheekiness, Yukiko convinces Hirayama that he should go visit the newly married couple in Hiroshima and assure them of his warm paternal endorsement. The final shots of Equinox Flower show him headed away on the train to pay his penance.
★★★

Notes:
1.    "Kusunoki Masatsura", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation (accessed 20 August 2014).

“Tokyo Twilight” - Yasujiro Ozu (1957)

Yasujiro Ozu’s last black-and-white film, Tokyo Twilight (Tokyo Boshoku, 1957), was one of his darkest works – even more downbeat than his preceding effort, Early Spring (1956). This was the case despite the fact that, unlike his usual examinations of family life from a multi-generational perspective, these two films focused mainly on young people, who we might expect to be more enthusiastic and upbeat than their elders.  In Tokyo Twilight, though, the viewer is presented with the story of two adult daughters of a middle-aged banker who are very unsatisfied with their respective circumstances.  How this story is told is what makes it interesting.

As with most all of Ozu’s films, the pace is leisurely, tracking the everyday life of ordinary middle-class people going through their mundane activities.  Scenes are entered into without much framing or contextual setup, and slow disclosure is used concerning the relationships that exist among the characters.  It can take a few minutes to discover the existing relationships among the characters in a given scene.

The four principal players in the film are

• Shukichi Sugiyama (played by Chishû Ryû) is the middle-aged banker and father of two daughters. The always sympathetic Chishû Ryû was a longtime Ozu favorite and appeared in 52 of Ozu’s 54 films.
• Takako Numata (Setsuko Hara), the older daughter of Shukichi, is married to a professor and has a two-year-old daughter.
• Akiko Sugiyama (Ineko Arima) is the younger and unmarried daughter of Shukichi.
• Kisako Soma (Isuzu Yamada), a middle-aged woman, is introduced as the proprietor of a Tokyo mahjong gambling parlor.

The story of Tokyo Twilight unfolds as essentially a series of short conversations – more than 26 scenes, none more than six minutes in length. But the psychological atmosphere surrounding these conversations has a cumulative, almost noirish, effect that sustains interest throughout the drama.  These episodic, usually gloomy, conversations are woven together into a narrative that gradually moves through roughly four phases.

1.  Shukichi and his daughters
In the early scenes, the viewer is introduced to a middle-aged banker, Shukichi Sugiyama, and it seems possible that the film will be about him.  But in fact this tale turns out be entirely about women and the difficulties they were faced with in contemporary Japanese family life.  Shukichi has two adult daughters: Akiko, college-aged and still single, and her older sister Takako, who is married.  The absence of their mother is not explained at this point, but she will appear later.

Takako has a troubled marriage and has just left her husband and taken her two-year-old daughter to come and live with Shukichi. The word is that her husband, Professor Numata, is selfish, abusive, and a borderline alcoholic. Shukichi goes to Numata’s home to talk politely about the situation, but the professor proves to be detached and evasive, and nothing comes of their meeting.

On another occasion, when Shukichi has lunch in town with his sister, he learns that his younger daughter had asked the woman, without telling her father, to loan her a substantial sum of money, 5,000 yen.  So Shukichi now has two worries: Takako’s marriage problem and why Akiko needs money. The two daughters are quite different, though, and this is reflected in their external mannerisms.  Takako is traditionally attendant to her father and wears traditional clothing, while Akiko wears Western clothing, acts nonchalant, and smokes cigarettes.

2.  Akiko’s problem
It would seem that the story will now cover these two issues with equal weight, but that turns out not to be the case.  The rest of the film really revolves around Akiko, who is movingly portrayed by one of Ozu’s most beautiful performers, Ineko Arima. 

Akiko is trying to track down her elusive boyfriend Kenji so that she can talk to him, and she visits his flat, some bars, and a mahjong parlor in search of him. At the mahjong parlor the lady proprietor, Kisako, takes a warm interest in Akiko and tells her that she knew her family years ago when they lived in another town, Ushigome. 

Eventually Akiko runs into Kenji and confronts him with the news that we already suspected: she’s pregnant. Kenji is clearly irresponsible and even suggests to her that he may not be the father.  He runs off and tells her to wait for him later on that evening, at 9:30pm, at a cocktail lounge so that they can discuss things further.  Akiko dutifully goes there and waits, but Kenji fails to show up. 

Then, in a sequence that I found curious, Akiko gets arrested by a plainclothes policeman and taken into custody.  For what crime?  The cop tells her that, “a girl shouldn’t stay out late alone for any reason.”  This incident, which seemingly has little to do with the main story, is connected with an important theme in the film: the dubious and confused roles that women were (variously) understood to have in Japanese society. 

Takako rushes to the police station to take Akiko home.  Akiko, now seriously depressed and feeling abandoned by everyone including her now frowning father, moans to Takako that she should never have been born because she wasn’t wanted.

3.  Akiko and Kisako
From Akiko’s comments and other sources, Takako figures out that the mahjong parlor woman, Kisako, is actually their long lost mother who had abandoned the family and run off with another man many years ago when they were children.  Kisako is now married to a different man and had only recently come to Tokyo.  Filled with revulsion for her errant mother, Takako goes to confront Kisako, hatefully tells her off, and orders her not to reveal her identity to Akiko.

Meanwhile Akiko, having managed to borrow money from another source, goes to a clinic and goes through the anguish of getting an abortion (Japan had legalized induced abortions in 1948, but it was probably an ongoing subject of controversy for Japanese society [1]). While Akiko is off having her abortion, Shukichi is taking time off from work to visit his favorite pachinko parlor [2].

Later when Akiko learns that Takako had gone to the mahjong parlor, she mistakenly fears that Takako had learned about her pregnancy and abortion (which was still a secret to the rest of her family), so she confronts Takako about why she had gone there.  Takako responds angrily what she had intended to keep secret: that the mahjong parlor owner is their mother.  Akiko then goes to Kisako and expresses her own hatred for having been abandoned, even questioning her mother as to who her real father might be.

4.  Separations
Akiko finally runs into the elusive and uncaring Kenji at a noodle shop, but the encounter so upsets the girl that she bursts into tears and runs distractedly out into the street. In a classic instance of Ozu’s ellipsis, the scene shifts to a hospital ward, and it is revealed that the distraught girl had been hit by a trolley.  With her father and sister at her bedside, she now swears that she doesn’t want to die; she wants to start everything over.  But it is too late, and the most important character in the film is  gone, just like that.

Takako goes to Kisako and hatefully tells her that Akiko’s death is ultimately the fault of her runaway mother.  Faced with such venomous rejection from her old relatives, Kisako agrees to go away with her husband and live in another city.  Before leaving, she gives an offering for Akiko to Takako and tells her that she is leaving on the evening train to Hokkaido.  She hopes that her only daughter will break down and see her off at the train station.  Ozu stretches out the anticipation of this possibility as if it might really happen, but Takako doesn’t budge. Kisako departs presumably never to see her daughter again.

In the final scene, Takako tells her father that she intends to return to her husband and try and make their marriage work.  She says she is doing this for her daughter, because a child should not grow up without the presence of both parents around her.

So finally, Akiko, Kisako, Shukichi, and Takako have gone off in different directions without any solace or grace.

In case you might think that the Tokyo Twilight ends on a relatively positive note, let me assure you that it does not.  Takako’s closing vow to return to her husband is not an act of love, but more an expression of anger over the fact that she and Akiko were raised without a mother’s love.  This is an implicit criticism of Shukichi, too, since it implies that his fatherly love just wasn’t enough, by itself.

Like many of Ozu’s films, Tokyo Twilight has a theme concerning Japanese family life. But the tone here is more tragic than heartwarming. The underlying problem, the true theme of the film, is the difficult position that women have trying to operate in a disrupted social structure that offers them little support. The three principal women, Takako, Kisako, and Akiko, face these circumstances in their own fashions:

• Takako, the traditional girl, often offers ingratiating smiles, but they seem forced. She remains bitter about her husband and bitter about her mother’s abandonment. 
• Kisako appears to be very benign throughout the film.  She acknowledges that she had erred in the past, and when she is condemned by her own daughters in the present, she accepts the verdicts stoically. There is something in her countenance that suggests warmth and compassion.  But still she is made to suffer.
• Akiko, the modern girl, is condemned by everyone for having fallen in love with a man and succumbed to his embraces.  Everyone she meets think that she is just a tramp, but she, too, appears to be a sincere and compassionate person.  Interestingly, she almost never smiles in the entire film – somewhat unusual in a culture where smiles are almost required by protocol.  And yet she comes across as the most open, unguarded person of them all – the one most ready to commit totally to love.

All three of these women, each faced with trying circumstances, really just want to love, but they are denied.  In fact they should not only not be condemned, but be loved in return.   That is what Ozu is showing us here.

★★★½

Notes:

1. Ozu’s previous film, Early Spring, had also alluded to the issue of abortion in one of the minor subplots.
2. The first commercial parlor for pachinko, a sort of pinball slot-machine, was opened in Japan in 1948, so they were a relatively new way to waste time.