Wartime Ozu: Between Bourgeois Drama and National Policy Film

Abstract

This chapter deals with Ozu’s wartime works from the perspective of their continuing inquiry into the everyday as well as their relation to his postwar films so that they can be re-evaluated as a connecting bridge between the prewar and the postwar period. In the first part, Ozu’s complex stance on the war and the nationalistic ideology is examined through contextual survey of wartime history of Japan and Japanese cinema, and also analysing primary sources that has recorded Ozu’s own experience at battlefield. The second part analyses Ozu’s wartime bourgeois drama, The Flavour of Green Tea over Rice (1939), which, along with the previous work, What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), reveals gender politics of the female domestic everyday that operates antithetical to prevailing male-centric wartime collectivism. The last part of this chapter discusses Ozu’s humanistic position, by analysing two wartime films about paternity and its absence (The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and There Was a Father (1942)) along with Burma Campaign (1942), which is Ozu’s only attempt at war film genre in a complete form.