I was born middle class, but…: Ozu Yasujiro's shōshimin eiga in the early 1930s

Abstract

ABSTRACTShōshimin eiga was a popular film genre in the early 1930s, dealing with the everyday life of the urban middle classes in Japan. Ozu Yasujiro, known as the representative director of the genre, attempted a sophisticated view of the contemporary Japanese society in his shōshimin eiga by probing the precarious life of the middle class under the threat of unemployment. Through the analysis of two shōshimin eiga, Tokyo Chorus (1931) and I Was Born But…(1932), this article explores how Ozu's depiction of the middle-class everyday life develops into a more general critique of Japanese modernity. Both films suggest the crisis of this modern system by revealing the contradiction between sararīman father's patriarchal status and economic insecurity that his middle-class family suffers from. Far from appealing to class consciousness as appearing in tendency films, Ozu instead concentrates on the possibility of deviation in the everyday, not only through unique sense of humour, but also in the form of spatial displacement and temporal reconfiguration.