The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday by Woojeong Joo Erin Schoneveld (bio) The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday. By Woojeong Joo. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2017. xii, 276 pages. £75.00, cloth; £24.99, paper; £75.00, E-book. In response to criticism that condemned his films for being fundamentally alike, Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō famously stated, "I only know how to make tofu [and nothing else]." Yet, with a career that spanned 35 years and a body of work comprising 54 feature films, Ozu's tofu was not only varied but "constantly changing and reacting to historical conditions of modern Japan throughout the prewar, war, and postwar eras" (p. 5). Indeed, as Woojeong Joo argues in his capacious and well-researched book, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday, Ozu's oft-cited quote was not merely a defense of the kind of everyday existence that he depicted in his films but a testament to his commitment to examining and reexamining the shifting realities of modern Japanese life through the cinematic form. Whose everyday existence is Ozu representing? How do we study the concept of the "everyday" in all of its inherent complexity? Joo readily admits that defining the "everyday"—particularly as an academic subject—is no easy task. Moreover, while the everyday in Ozu's work has long been acknowledged in film scholarship, it has typically played a supporting role to analyses that emphasize a formal style at odds with Hollywood norms or the aesthetic qualities associated with traditional Japanese arts. In this context, Ozu has been described as the most "Japanese" of all Japanese filmmakers, famous for his exquisite scenes that employ "a pictorial use of asymmetry, emptiness, a restricted view, and fixed subject matter."1 Joo argues that these approaches—while important to our understanding of Ozu's cinema—remain relatively detached from the social context of modern life and provide an incomplete understanding of the filmmaker's oeuvre. Thus, in order to grasp the meaning of Ozu's "everyday," as well [End Page 209] as the "Japaneseness" of his cinema, Joo utilizes a sociohistorical approach that seeks to reexamine the director and his work within the context of Japan's modern history and film industry. This "correlation between film and society" (p. 3) is at the heart of Joo's analysis and creates the foundation for his investigation into the phenomena of Ozu's "everyday realism"—a realism that "never escapes from the constrictions of the order imposed upon it by society, but deviates from it in order to exhibit alternative possibilities of modern life" (p. 8). To illustrate this point, Joo structures the book chronologically with the five chapters tracing the arc of Ozu's 35-year film career and his evolving conception of the everyday. For instance, chapter 1, "Early Ozu: Shōshimin Film and Everyday Realism," examines the years between 1927 and 1932 when Ozu began working as an assistant director at Shochiku's Kamata Studio. Joo argues that Ozu's shōshimin (petit bourgeois) film genre grew out of the Kamata-chō style, which sought to appeal to the broadest audience possible by conveying "life as it is" in the form of everyday realism (p. 27). Kamata's version of everyday realism, however, was rooted in the belief that films should offer an escape from the everyday by presenting "life from a warm, cheerful, and hopeful point of view" (p. 29). Ozu's shōshimin films departed from this model as he developed his own version of everyday realism that maintained an intermediate position between the hopeful and the pessimistic by acknowledging the social and economic hardships of attaining suburban middle-class life. For instance, in films such as Tōkyō kōrasu (Tokyo chorus, 1931) and Umarete wa mita keredo (I was born, but, 1932) Ozu critiques Japanese modernity as "represented through the ideal of the middle-class family founded on the salaryman patriarch's waged labor and pursuit of modern material life" (p. 103) by engaging with the pressures and potential pitfalls of failing to achieve this dream during the Depression era. Through satirical humor and comic gesture in...