4 - Postwar Ozu: Ozu's Occupation-era Film and Tokyo Regained

Summary

In the preceding chapters, I discussed Ozu's prewar and wartime films from the perspective of modern everyday life in Japan. After suggesting three different subjects of the modern everyday – the middle-class salaryman, the lower-middle classes in Shitamachi, and the modern girl – which can also correspond to the three major genres – the shōshimin films, the Shitamachi films, and the woman's films – I traced their development during the war into two contrasting styles as well as subject matters – family melodrama with shinpa's influence or light comedy based on modern life, each of which represents Ozu's way of personalising diff erent tendencies in production pursued by Shochiku.

In this chapter, I will continue to examine the issue of modernity and the everyday in Ozu's films after the war. I have emphasised the way his wartime works suggest the prototypic styles and subject matters of his later films, but can the connection between the two periods be proven from the postwar's viewpoint as well? In order to answer this question, it is first necessary to examine how the war and the postwar as a historical concept can be interrelated wiTheach other, which will be the main goal of the first part of this chapter. I will discuss the two significant concepts that have defined postwar Japanese history, sensō (war) and sengo (postwar), under the single framework of modernity, and re-examine the controversy over the continuity/discontinuity of modernisation during the chronological process of the prewar – war – postwar. This leads into an investigation of the changing nature of everyday life in postwar society, which was not only greatly influenced by political democracy and economic development, but at the same time balanced by an unchanging aspect of continuity with the past. A retrospective sentiment had already been appearing in Ozu's previous works (as exemplified by the wartime films as well as the Kihachi films), but postwar, it became to reflect a more pervasive social symptom due to the additional context of the recent war.