Character, Viewer Sympathy, and Social Acquiescence in the Films of Yasujiro Ozu

By Zach Campbell. Written for Fall 2003 Cinema Studies course, 'Ozu.'

Critical discussions of Ozu don’t normally concentrate on how his films work to generate viewer sympathy with characters. There is often a conception—a misconception, I would say—that Ozu’s work is deeply moving and evocative despite ‘opaque’ or ‘prototypical’ characters. Yet it seems quite clear that many of Ozu’s films work very hard to achieve subtle, nuanced characterizations that bring viewers into the world-space of the films themselves. I do not wish to advocate a humanist-based critique of Ozu, or to suggest that his films are “character-driven” in the sense we usually use the term. I do think that Ozu’s formal rigor and ingenuity extend to and envelop, sometimes overwhelmingly so, the realm of characterization. Ozu, in much the same spirit he guided spatial and graphic relationships and pacing, generally slides a viewer into identification and sympathy with characters who push against social constraints (gender, class, tradition). The fact that these characters often lose the battle against convention creates a powerful emotional and intellectual energy.

When Ozu’s films were exhibited in America early on, reviewers approached the films as both inscrutably mystical (it must be Japanese Zen!) and ultimately universal. But one toehold many found was ‘the human element,’ for lack of a better term. Archer Winsten of the New York Post called Late Spring “human” and lauded the characters as “wonderfully individual.” Charles Michener of Newsweek wrote, “Above all, Late Spring binds us to its characters as few movies do.” Why would people feel drawn to Ozu in this way if his films were ultimately about time and space? It seems reasonable that Ozu dedicated as much thought and talent to the creation of subtle, nuanced characterization as he did to pictorial and temporal patterns. In other words, characterization is not incidental.

In a great many Ozu films, the plot (such as it is) derives from characters’ dilemmas, which in turn are usually conflicts related to socially prescribed roles. Often, directly or indirectly, these socially prescribed roles are ones of gender. Ozu often deals with the culturally-imposed necessity of a family-approved marriage to a respectable spouse. For a man, the role also entails being an employed breadwinner for the family, able to show off to friends and family the money one’s disposable income. One can see issues of shame related to (un)employment in many of Ozu’s early films especially— see Tokyo Chorus; I Was Born, But…; The Only Son. A man is also expected to arrange good marriages for his own children when they come of age. For a woman, prescribed gender roles entail a degree of domesticity (e.g., picking up the husband’s clothing, keeping the sake warm). A woman who enters into marriage will often lose the happier status she enjoyed at home, as Ozu suggests ‘before marriage’ in Late Spring and indicates ‘after the fact’ in Tokyo Twilight, two films that structurally could be read as part of the same story.

Because of the way Ozu devotes special attention to his characters are largely divisible into two categories: sympathetic characters and unsympathetic characters. These are shorthand labels that one should not take on face value. For the purpose of this paper, sympathetic will refer to characters who are not in a privileged social position and/or do not endorse or perpetuate this system. Hence, both Noriko and her father Shukichi in Late Spring are sympathetic characters even though one is in a privileged position (that of a father) and the other is not. They are sympathetic by virtue of their desire to remain together as family in opposition to the cultural tradition of (arranged) marriage. By contrast, the meddlesome aunt in Late Spring is an example of an unsympathetic character. She readily endorses marriage traditions and does not question them: not only does she fail to show regret at the dissolution of this happy father-and-daughter family, she does not seem to understand their own hesitance.

In Late Spring, both the father and daughter begin the film hesitant (perhaps even unwilling) to perform ‘proper’ roles as father and daughter. Their relationship, living together alone in the father’s home, was perfectly respectable but now Noriko, who is happy in her place, is not far from spinster status, and is urged to marry by her Aunt, Shukichi’s sister. The Aunt, a voice of social custom and propriety, is sure that no happiness can come if Noriko stays with her father too long. This convinces Shukichi enough to have him lie to Noriko: he tells her that he will remarry and will no longer depend on her care. This lie prompts Noriko, reluctantly and perhaps a little bitterly, to accept a marriage proposal.

By investing viewer sympathy in the characters who are in some way opposed to society, Ozu is efficiently exploiting the viewer’s “selfish” impulses—that is, those impulses that rightly or wrongly resist the constraints of a given person’s larger social environment. And his films often depict these characters—such as Shukichi and eventually even Noriko—giving in to convention because they have rationalized that their acquiescence is for the better good. Shukichi rationalizes his own agreement to marry off Noriko, and to lie about his own fictitious remarriage, as a way of ensuring his daughter’s ultimate happiness. Noriko agrees to marry when she believes that her father no longer needs her. Perhaps Noriko will not be happier in her own marriage, and perhaps Shukichi will be lonely and helpless when he lives by himself. But the characters nevertheless act upon these socially-sanctioned convictions, and Ozu constantly depicts the triumph of tradition and the suppression of the selfish impulse. The mistake made by many observers is to presume that Ozu celebrates tradition. But if this were true, his films would never be viewed as sad or troubling: no conflict would exist to inspire such a reaction.

We can see that Late Spring gains some complexity by positioning these sympathetic individuals ‘against’ one another, so that Shukichi is persuaded into exercising his authority (i.e., fulfilling his gender role as a father) and persuading his unwilling daughter to marry (i.e., fulfilling her gender role as a marriageable woman as well as a daughter who practices filial piety). It’s possible to view Ozu’s films as documents of the way that social institutions, customs, and structures shape individuals who wish to exist outside these very institutions, customs, and structures.

Kathe Geist is on the right track in her discussion of Ozu’s treatment of marriage. She points out similarities in Japanese culture between weddings and funerals: “The symbolism [of the pure white kimono similar to the dress of newborns and corpses] indicates that [the bride] dies to her natal family” (45). Ozu’s films are in many ways about the gradual conformity of individuals to society, travelling into the unknown before the ultimate equalizer, death. Late Spring— like Equinox Flower, End of Summer, and other late Ozu films about marriage—present a fascination with characters’ unwilling journeys into an unknown future, that is, an unknown and uncertain time and space. This is especially troubling for the characters, as well as the viewer, because Ozu’s sense of visual and temporal repetition instills a sense of security and continuation early on. Scenes that document the daily life of a family, as told from the same angles, with the same colors and props, end up disrupted by marriage (for instance) when it pulls a character out of this very site of space and time. Clearly, this is a case in which Ozu’s formal rigor interacts with his interest in character.

As an aside, to indicate the flexibility of Ozu’s artistry, I would like to point out that he could sometimes draw sympathy out of an unsympathetic character reacting to a ‘sympathetic’ (i.e., non-traditional) worldview. In Equinox Flower, with the dually comedic and terrifying final scene, the very traditional father (Shin Saburi) sings army songs to comfort himself as he rides on a train—into an unknown and uncertain future—to visit his daughter and the unapproved man she married.

With Late Spring, I commented on how Ozu’s complex handling of sympathy, identification, and characterization works within a film. Now it would be profitable to examine how it works between films. I will examine two of the so-called ‘Kihachi’ films, Passing Fancy and An Inn in Tokyo, which are named after their title character Kihachi, played as a lower-class everyman by Takeshi Sakamoto. These films are interesting because, using similar characters and settings, they illustrate two sides of the same coin about social roles and viewer identification. Kihachi can be seen as a good twin/evil twin in An Inn in Tokyo and Passing Fancy, respectively. The formalist Bordwell himself, in fact, says of Passing Fancy that characterization “is the film’s ‘dominant,’ the component that structures and defines others” (249).

Passing Fancy sees Kihachi as an uneducated, lazy man who works in a brewery (though he’s not exactly industrious). What’s interesting is that Kihachi is meeting certain expecations about masculinity in this film: for one thing, he has a home and is able to keep his intelligent son (reasonably) well-fed and educated. Proving his desire for women and his virility, he makes passes at the beautiful serving woman who works nearby (though he’s admittedly unsuccessful). In an effort to show off a bit, he even gives his son a coin— the son, predictably, ends up spending it on enough candy to make himself sick. Until this point deep into the film, when we see the character of Kihachi in a vulnerable state, he is not presented as a sympathetic character. He is a likable one in a comedic sense, perhaps, but he largely flows with the conventions around him and has few reservations or thoughts about much of anything.

On the other hand, An Inn in Tokyo presents a different uneducated, lower-class portrait of Kihachi, who again is a single father (this time he has two boys instead of one as in Passing Fancy), and he is more immediately sympathetic in that he does not have the swagger of Passing Fancy’s main character. Bordwell refers to Kihachi in this film as “sobered and smarter” (262). In this film, the father is unemployed and humbly looks for work (while relying on his sons for money); he is unable to act as ‘breadwinner,’ and he and his sons at one point must choose between a meal and a roof over their heads. Kihachi in this film also makes no effort to prove his virility: there is a woman in the film with a small daughter, and Kihachi likes this women but treats her with respect and some detachment. In essence, Kihachi is equated as a “mere equal” to the penniless mother, economically and morally, in the eyes of society. And, interestingly, though he likes the mother, he does not fawn over her or try to win her affections in the same way that the Kihachi character in Passing Fancy does. He is sympathetic figure, I think, largely because he is not able to fill the shoes of a successful, respectable male, and as a result he comes across as fairly humble and honest. So I think these two ‘Kihachi’ films illustrate how Ozu structures viewer sympathy in terms of how they fit certain prescribed roles of gender or class or age.

Another important point: near the end of An Inn in Tokyo, in order to pay for the hospital bills of the sick little girl, Kihachi ends up stealing the money (because he has no other way to collect enough cash) . At first, Kihachi does not give in to social convention but rather transgresses them through theft. This sets the stage for another final conflict in one of Ozu’s many deeply touching endings. For Kihachi, knowing that he has committed a crime, chooses to turn himself into the police. The film ends as he searches the streets for the nearest police station, and the viewer is left in turmoil when Kihachi’s sympathetic decency itself is what prompts him to give himself up for arrest. Social convention doubles in on itself and suggests that a good man (and a sympathetic character) will be penalized for his crime. An Inn in Tokyo would be far less complex if Ozu’s sophisticated ambivalence towards individuality and society, impulse and tradition, was not present.

Ultimately Ozu was a supremely gifted storyteller who did not aim to “tell stories,” at least not in a conventional sense. But in focusing on Ozu’s extremely rich techniques for handling time, space, and two-dimensional graphics, it seems that critics and theorists have overlooked his equally sophisticated deployment of characterization techniques. His films are as moving as they are because of his guileless but shrewd decisions in creating characters who exist in a given society. Ozu played off of viewers’ likely identifications with characters’ ‘individualities’ and their resistance to the characters who eschewed individuality in favor of total adherence to social convention and tradition.

Works Cited

Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton: UP, 1998.

Geist, Kathe. "The Role of Marriage in the Films of Yasujiro Ozu." East-West Film Journal. IV 1. Dec. 1989. 45-52.

Michener, Charles. "Father and Daughter." Newsweek. 31 July 1972.

Winsten, Archer. "The New Movie." New York Post. 22 July 1972.