Lonely Tofu: Yasujirō Ozu
By Kelsey Ronan
Before Yasujiro Ozu embarked on a film career that would span from silents to talkies and include some of the most celebrated films in history, he was a substitute teacher in a village school. In honor of this minor line on Ozu’s C.V., permit me this personal anecdote from my own teaching career. Recently, as my juniors and seniors discussed Carson McCullers’s short story “Sucker,” about two boys sharing a bedroom and the insecurities and fears they whisper to each other in the dark, one student declared, “I hate lonely people.” I felt his words like a swift kick. While I’m marking comma splices and shaping up thesis statements, I also hope literature fosters in my students a greater empathy. Before I could pursue this thought, another student said, “I think you mean you don’t like reading about lonely people.”
Oh yeah, the loneliness-hater agreed. That was what he meant. No disrespect to lonely people, but loneliness is boring.
I imagine Ozu a century ago presented with such a comment. I imagine a wry smile. And maybe a cigarette and a nip of sake after school (Ozu and longtime co-writer Kogo Noda measured the progress of their scripts by how many bottles they had drunk.)
If you, like my student, prefer high-octane chase scenes and explosions, the films of Yasujiro Ozu may not be for you. He is known for his shomin-geki or “modern family drama:” meditative, heartfelt stories of ordinary people. These films explore the generational strains between aging parents and their grown children, the quiet disappointments of life, the inevitability of grief, and yes, loneliness. Characters often speak facing the camera, whether remembering husbands lost in the horrors of war or remarking on the cost of spinach. Interior scenes are punctuated by long meditative shots of flowers and clotheslines and rain on empty streets.
Ozu was keenly aware that his slow, gentle approach to movie-making was not for everyone. In an oft-quoted interview, he likened himself to a maker of tofu:
“I have always said that I only make tofu because I am a tofu maker. One person cannot make so many different kinds of films. It is possible to eat many different types from around the world at a restaurant in a Japanese department store, but as a result of this overly abundant selection the quality of the food and its taste suffers. Filmmaking is the same way. Even if my films appear to all be the same, I am always trying to express something new, and I have a new interest in each film. I am like a painter who keeps painting the same rose over and over again.”
There are, of course, plenty who appreciate Ozu’s lonely tofu. He averaged a film a year in a career that ranged from the now lost silent Sword of Penitence (1927) to An Autumn Afternoon (1962). Throughout this prolific career, he created films now regarded as classics, including Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951), and Good Morning (1959). Tokyo Story (1953) has been hailed as one of the greatest films ever made by Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Kinema Junpo. On November 22, the Senate will be showing one of the early films Ozu wrote and directed and one of his last silent films: A Story of Floating Weeds (1934). One of Ozu’s last silent films, it follows a kabuki theater troupe and its playwright, who’s harboring a secret.
Born in Tokyo in 1903, Ozu grew up an avid movie-goer who collected Hollywood memorabilia and wrote fan letters to benshi (the in-house actors who read out the intertitles of silent films and provided cultural context to Western films). After his brief teaching career, Ozu took a job at Shochiku Film Studio as a 19 year old assistant cameraman. For a director whose career is characterized by the delicate beauty of the ephemeral, his move up the studio ladder was anything but. According to the Harvard Film Archive, “[Ozu] quickly became a director, and in an unconventional way: by swinging at a coworker in line at the Shochiku canteen and impressing a studio executive who witnessed the incident. Scuffles had gotten Ozu into serious trouble as a schoolboy, but at Shochiku his impudence was rewarded with a promotion by studio head Kido Shiro.” Ozu would remain at Shochiku for the rest of his life. After being promoted to director in the jidaigeki (period movie) department in 1927, he then moved to critical and commercial success in comedy (he was a big fan of Harold Lloyd) that allowed him to write his own films. Ozu collaborated with screenwriter Kogo Noda on 27 of his films.
Ozu’s career was interrupted twice by war. He was first conscripted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1937, serving two years in China in the second Sino-Japanese War, and in 1943, Ozu was again drafted. During his posting as a propaganda filmmaker in Singapore, he spent much of his time watching and rewatching prints of confiscated American films, including Gone with the Wind (1939), Rebecca (1940), Fantasia (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941) and Citizen Kane (1941)—his favorite. At the end of the war, Ozu destroyed all traces of his propaganda film.
After the war, Ozu devoted himself to shomin-geki. He worked with the same actors, such as Saito Tatsuo, Tanaka Kinuyo, Haruko Sugimura, Ryu Chishu and Hara Setsuko. He refined his visual signature, including tatami shots and pillow shots, and an unorthodox approach to shooting dialogue.
In the "tatami shot," the camera is placed at the eye level of the character kneeling on the floor of their home (tatami, a straw mat, is traditionally used in Japan as a flooring.) Tatami shots are also often static, as if the moviegoer is sitting with the character. To accomplish this, Ozu positioned his camera on low tripods, sometimes just inches from the floor, or used raised sets. The low angle of Ozu’s shots enhances the intimacy, immersing viewers in the homes of the characters as if they too are sitting on the tatami.
To further emphasize the intimacy Ozu eschewed the conventional framing of conversations between characters. Since the silent era, filmmakers would traditionally cut from one shot of a person facing the right end of the frame to a shot of another person facing the left. These shots would be taken from only one side of the axis of action—an imaginary straight line connecting and extending beyond the two characters—so that the two people, without appearing in the same frame, would look as if they were speaking to each other within the same physical space. Ozu instead took direct shots of his characters speaking and gazing slightly off to the side of the camera. He would cut from a frontal take of a person speaking to another compositionally identical take of another person responding. The effect is of the characters speaking out on the audience directly, creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy.
The term “pillow shot” was coined by American film theorist Noel Burch in his book To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in the Japanese Cinema. The term is analogous with the Japanese poetic form of the “Makurakotoba, or pillow-word: a conventional epithet or attribute for a word; it usually occupies a short, five-syllable line and modifies a word, usually the first. Some pillow-words are unclear in meaning; those whose meanings are known function rhetorically to raise the tone and to some degree also function as images.” Between Ozu’s carefully composed scenes are seemingly disconnected shots of everyday life: of flowers and mountains, rooftops and empty rooms, clotheslines and tea settings. These brief scenes enhance the slow, contemplative pace of Ozu’s films by offering the moviegoer a moment to meditate and process.
Ozu, who never married or had children, lived with his mother until she died in 1961. A smoker, Ozu died on his sixtieth birthday two years later of throat cancer. The grave he shares with his mother at Engaku-ji bears no name—just the character mu, meaning "nothingness.” Ozu’s epitaph like his films conveys a sense of Mono no aware, or the ephemeral nature of beauty. Mono no aware refers both to the sadness at their transience as well as a more profound, gentle sadness about this transience being the reality of life. Time weathers love into grief. Children grow older and start families of their own. Flowers wither. Though loneliness and the ache of mortality might not make for edge-of-your-seat thrillers, as my teenage students will tell you, these are pains we all come to know. If we pay attention, Ozu’s films suggest, we can find something more profound in their depths. There’s a beauty in impermanence and change. It’s a tofu you acquire a taste for.