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This chapter resituates the question of modernity in Ozu’s shoshimin eiga within the cultural and political context of proletarian-film movement in the 1930s. This chapter first focuses on the writings by leftist film critics. While, as is today, the term “shoshimin” designated the subject depicted in films, the same term was further used to underline the political attitude of the director. Consequently, “shoshimin eiga” acquired an implication quite opposite to that of today: the politically weak films taken from the shoshimin standpoint. The chapter further develops this other implication of shoshimin eiga, analyzing the film-within-film scene of I Was Born, But . . . with reference to Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera. By foregrounding the fact that Man with a Movie Camera was released in Japan in March 1932 when Ozu took I Was Born, But . . . , this chapter makes explicit the lack of the cinema politics of revolutionary awaking in Ozu’s films.

Considering Ozu Yasujiro in Asia involves asking the role of discursive definitions of “Ozu” in the establishment of a transnational Ozu. This will be done with regard to Hasumi Shigehiko, whose Director Ozu Yasujiro (1983) is arguably the most influential book on Ozu in Japan. The chapter considers how Hasumi has helped create a transnational “Ozu” within Japan, in part by promoting another director, Hou Hsiao-hsien. The chapter sketches a triangulation in which a Taiwanese director becomes prominent in Japan via a critic looking at him through Ozu. It then explores Hasumi’s potential objections to this project. Not only has he disagreed with terming Hou “Ozuesque,” but his Ozu book begins with an argument against the very concept of “Ozuesque.” The relationships between Ozu and Hou that Hasumi enables are ultimately shaped by the theoretical and discursive context of imagining a border-crossing Ozu in 1980s and 1990s Japan.

The introduction shifts the focus of the existing scholarly debates on Ozu’s film style from his Japaneseness to his everydayness. As acknowledged by many scholars, such as Donald Richie, Hasumi Shigehiko, Yoshida Kiju, and Gilles Deleuze, Ozu’s everydayness is historical as well as aesthetic—a space that registers social changes through familial changes. The dense texture of Ozu’s everydayness further provides a useful framework for a cross-cultural analysis of domestic space manifest in global art cinema. The introduction also interrogates a thorny notion of influence. Instead of pigeonholing the methodological frameworks employed in delineating Ozu’s aesthetic into the humanist, the culturalist, and the neoformalist, the introduction detects ambivalences in the ways that leading scholars on Ozu have delineated the origins of and influences on Ozu’s film style. A conceptual distinction between formative versus constitutive influence in tracing Ozu’s influence on his successors is proposed.

In Ozu Yasujirō’s silent film A Story of Floating Weeds (1934), Kihachi, the aging leader of an itinerant kabuki troupe, repeatedly scratches his behind. This gesture appears to be directed at the viewer’s face because of Ozu’s famously low camera position, the so-called tatami shot—produced by fixing the camera at the eye level of a person kneeling in seiza on the tatami floor. The shot is used as evidence for another cliché about Ozu, that he is the “most Japanese” and “most traditional” of Japanese directors. Ozu seems “traditional” when associated with the practice of kneeling in kabuki but seems “experimental” when compared to the European modernist directors who also rejected Hollywood conventions. Ozu’s cinema undermines the common binaries between traditional/modernist and “East/West.” A Story of Floating Weeds drifts behind the times, pauses to scratch at the new constructions of Japanese traditions, and then turns its back on them along with some versions of European modernism.

Modernist noh, including Pound’s mis-translations and Ito’s translation of Hawk’s Well, influenced scholarship and performance in Japan. Tracing this circular cultural exchange demonstrates the inadequacy of most accounts of Japanese modernism and its opposition to the traditional arts.

Across his entire career, from the early nansensu films to the late family dramas, Ozu consistently used gags and humor to alleviate the tension of dramatic situations, further enriching their significance. This chapter explores how such Ozuesque gags combine irony and nostalgia in order to balance the overall tone of the narrative, relying on formal strategies such as modularity and repetition. By discussing Wayne C. Booth’s concept of stable irony and other critical sources, the chapter argues that Ozu’s aging (not just running) gags are capable of bringing characters and audiences together because they counterbalance the difficulties of everyday family life and the weight of time. In an attempt to grant a wider comparative analysis, the chapter studies his own gags as well as their influence on contemporary filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Aki Kaurismäki, who readapt Ozu’s mixture of playfulness and solitude in their explorations of the contemporary world.

This chapter looks at the influence of Yasujiro Ozu on the contemporary British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. Providing close readings of Hogg’s first three films, Unrelated (2007), Archipelago (2010), and Exhibition (2013), the chapter investigates the way in which traces of Ozu’s work can be found in Hogg’s slow cutting rate, her static camera, and her spare stories of middle-class family life. In particular, the chapter looks at how Hogg’s work ties in with the contemporary “slow cinema” movement, suggesting that while influenced by Ozu, Hogg’s slow cinema also marks a break from the Japanese master’s work, which can be characterized less as slow and more accurately as “sparse.” The distinction between Hogg and Ozu is also made clear by the way in which the latter’s “humanism” has been adapted toward the former’s more “posthumanist” project.

The sixth chapter of Style in Narrative in part parallels the second chapter, but shifts from the story (what happens) to plot (the representation of what happens—its selection, emphasis, and construal). Specifically, Ozu is notorious for the elliptical quality of his plots, which sometimes entirely skip culminating events. He is also well known for certain sorts of “excess” (e.g., lingering on empty rooms). Hogan argues that these features have not been adequately explained or even adequately described. They can be understood only by relating them to their emotional function—modulating the arousal component of emotion. The chapter also considers what is valid and what is invalid in connecting Ozu’s stylistic practices with Japanese culture and aesthetic tradition.

This chapter considers “Ozuesque” as an individual sensibility that could be rooted in and extrapolated from the thematic and stylistic traditions of both Japan and Hollywood. Ozu’s austere yet ludic constitution comprises his distinctive sensibility that is rarely emulated by any other director. In order to delineate Ozu’s aesthetic sensibility, the chapter turns to the conception of sensibility advanced by art historian Roger Fry, who argues for a need to distinguish between sensibility in design and the sensibility in texture, the latter of which he calls “surface sensibility.” Such a distinction not only helps identify Ozu’s sensibility, but further explains the uneasiness in loosely employing the term “Ozuesque” in the discussion of directors who are influenced by, or pay homage to, Ozu. The latter half of the chapter examines Kore-eda Hirokazu, who is often compared to Ozu, not through formal terms, but instead via their shared, muted sensibility.

This chapter explores the intertextual place and presence of Ozu Yasujiro in the 2004 comedy drama Dogs and Cats by the first-time female director Iguchi Nami. It considers how Ozu as well as the genre, the shomingeki (middle-class home drama) has frequently figured as a marker or signpost of a particular era of cinema, a sociopolitical juncture and/or an attitude to gender in Japan. Taking this intertextuality as a point of departure, the chapter explores how such a presence animates meaning in Iguchi’s film; it analyzes style and structure as a means of elucidating how this young filmmaker distinguishes both herself and the world of her characters through implicit comparison with Ozu. Moreover, it examines how its narrative—about two young women living together under fractious conditions—contributes to discourse on Japanese models of feminisuto filmmaking, the country’s specific sociocultural model of feminism.

This article traces some ways in which contemporary filmmakers have borrowed from and referred to the work of Ozu Yasujiro. In particular, the works of Wayne Wang, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Suo Masayuki, and Abbas Kiarostami are discussed as adopting stylistic or thematic materials from Ozu’s films. Far from simply copying Ozu’s work, these filmmakers have freely transformed his techniques for their own specific ends. The chapter briefly describes the cultivation of the “Ozu brand” by the Schochiku studio. It also situates Ozu’s development as a director in the context of the influence of Hollywood on Japanese cinema, explaining how Ozu responded to American movie techniques in cultivating his own filmic style.

This chapter explores the influence Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003) takes from the cinema of Ozu, theorizing the nature of the dedication in the subtitle: 5 Long Takes—Dedicated to Yasujiro Ozu. Such questions will be approached through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his two books on film, Cinema 1—The Movement-Image and Cinema 2—The Time-Image. Ozu is pivotal to Deleuze for being the first filmmaker to create “pure optical and sound situations,” to disrupt the codes of classical cinema (movement-image) and open a way to the modernist cinema (time-image). Such disruption and creation will be analyzed in one of Ozu’s most famous movies, Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1959). Deleuze believes later modernist filmmakers return to Ozu not by way of imitation but for inspiration, and using “their own methods.” Five may be a very different type of film, yet after Deleuze, Kiarostami’s method reveals its commitment to the Ozuesque.

Centering on the work and reception of the composer John Cage, famous for his “indeteminant” works, Yoshihara Jirō and his “Circle works,” and the filmmaker Ozu Yasujirō’s Tokyo Story, this chapter examines the twining postwar rhetorical patterns of Zen influence, Zen inherence, and Zen denial as they inform interpretation of works of postwar art produced by artists in the West and Japan. Contrary to certain practitioner narratives, at times beguiled by hagiography and inclined towards grand narratives, the chapter suggests a grittier sensibility that reflects the rhetorical tussles that emerged contemporaneously and have since continued. Doing so, it points again to the multifarious nature of Zen in the postwar period, including those forms espoused by the avant-garde and its advocates, as well as the parallax effect of affirmative orientalist reception in the West of Japanese artists—praised when their work looked Zen, otherwise dismissed as derivative of New York School artists.

This chapter considers representations of the family, placing films by Koreeda Hirokazu, Toyoda Toshiaki and Yamada Yoji within the context of the Japanese genre of the shomin-geki, or stories about everyday, typically middle or lower-middle class, life. The analyses touch on intertextuality – especially the prevalence of Ozu Yasujiro as a key figure in this particular genre – as well as the respective masculine and feminine imperatives contained in the case study texts. It looks at significant successive iterations of the family film, including the subversive dramas of the 1980s, and how these are digested by recent shomin-geki, and further brings to bear both Japanese and western discourse on the family as the perceived central institution of life in Japan. This is then used as a point of departure for the case study films’ contrastive visions and representations. This chapter also considers work in the shomin-geki genre that deals with the disaster at Fukushima, and how the family as a barometer of society may be employed here in order to gauge the effect/s of this tragedy on the social fabric of Japan.

This chapter examines the Japanese film genre known as “middle-class film” (shoshimin eiga), a formative genre in the classical Japanese cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. It first considers genre criticism as a strategy for national cinema studies, as well as an elaboration of genre’s specific historical construction in Japanese cinema. It then explores how the middle-class film genre established connections with an audience of the urban middle class and how idiosyncratically the Japanese film industry employed genres apart from Hollywood in the cinematic modes of that period. It also discusses the politics of genre in Japan’s national cinema and the creation of a modern national subject in two films by Ozu Yasujiro: Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no gassho, 1931) and I Was Born, But… Finally, the chapter explains how notions of Japanese genre have been molded in cross-cultural misunderstandings within Western film scholarship, along with the culturally specific use of genre appropriation in Japan.

This chapter argues that there are at least three phases of the pachinko industry in Japan; popular media such as films and novels reflect how filmmakers and novelists saw the game differently in these three phases. The first phase commenced after the end of WWII, at that time pachinko was a family; the game was seen as idle pursuits, contrasting the work ethics expected for adults to rebuild the country. The second phase took place during the economic boom from the 1970s to the 1980s, at that time the industry became more organised but opaque. Many believe that pachinko owners are gangsters or Koreans who were sympathetic of the North Korean government. During this period, pachinko parlours serve as the glamourous backdrops of films. The third phase coincided with the post-economic bubble era, pachinko was transformed from a mechanical technology to a digital one. The players’ skills are no longer relevant, the game became one of chance. The transformation of the technology serves as a metaphor for life’s randomness; those who lose in this random game is like populations who were left behind in the post-bubble economy.

The historical development of the post-war housewife role is described, contextualizing the following analysis of Ozu Yasujirō’s tsuma-mono film A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no naka no mendori, 1948). The chapter presents a chronological account of the development of the housewife trope on-screen from the early postwar period into the 1960s. Hybrid characters composed of stereotypical ‘mother’ and ‘wife’ characteristics, which began to appear from the early 1960s, are analyzed in the last section of the chapter. Case studies include Repast (Meshi, Naruse Mikio, 1951), The Happiness of Us Alone (na mo naku mazushiku utsukushiku, Matsuyama Zenzo, 1961), and Mother (Haha, Shindō Kaneto, 1963).