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The Problem of 'Japanese-ness' in Ozu
Ozu has long been regarded by countrymen and foreigners alike to be the most 'Japanese' of Japanese directors, and much criticism surrounding his work has proceeded along this line. Critics have seized upon a uniquely 'Japanese character' to explain and reconcile the strangeness of Ozu's style, defining in Ozu's work a stylistic rigor that sets it apart from classical filmmaking. From the outset, this presents three distinct problems: 1) it presumes the desire to graft a national identity on an invention that is distinctly Western (one has to keep in mind that when cinema was first introduced in the Meiji era, it was regarded as another exotic foreign invention like the streetcar, or the radio), an undertaking that would place cinema in the realm of hermeneutics; 2) it presupposes a national identity which, if it in fact exists, can only be traced to the surviving arts (Japanese theater, literature, music etc.; their class connotations should also be duly noted) that can only draw a tenuous, if not completely irrelevant, parallel to the different nature of cinema; 3) it accepts Ozu as an auteur, an individual responsible for artistic decisions in a body of work that can be, for that reason, homogenized and arranged. Without addressing these contentions, any criticism regarding the work of Ozu is unfounded.
Before challenging these contentions, one must take a brief detour through the history of cinema. Cinema arrived as the solution for the representational/presentational problem which was the nexus of visual art since French Impressionism. It can be seen as the logical continuation of a continuous drive toward greater realism in the visual arts which, according to André Bazin, "delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy." As such, it evolved along very specific lines of Western art, eventually codifying itself (with D.W. Griffith in Hollywood) to represent a totality of illusion that draws near to reality. Découpage such as the close-up, dissolve, fade out and transition grew to acquire a very specific set of meanings, developing alongside a complex system of rules and behavior (such as the 180° line) that served to carefully preserve this illusion.
The age-old Western dichotomy of the physical and metaphysical presents a similar dualism in cinema, just as in any Western art - the split between form and content. Just as Italian Renaissance artists constructed a total illusion of reality through specific geometric functions, the pioneers of cinema constructed their own sets of rules to create a cinematic reality. This makes the function of cinema, to express a story or idea, fundamentally Western; the divorce between form and content (especially of note is cinema's heavy emphasis on the latter, due no doubt to the need for entertainment demanded by the class it was appealing to - the majority of early cinema-goers were those who previously attended the vaudeville theater) undeniably shaped the form of cinema.
Film critic Noël Burch, whose own title of his study on Japanese cinema, To the Distant Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema, reflects this form/content distance, proposes that class differences were inextricably linked to the development of cinema, a popular mass media. Drawing a parallel between the coming of talkies and the rise of attendance among the bourgeoisie class, Burch delineates a clear line between the interests of the proletariat (of whom silent cinema previously appealed to) and the bourgeoisie (who was interested in cinema as a continuation of theater, a more accepted art form). Arguing that popular theater forms, such as kabuki and bunraku, were well attended by the bourgeois class that came into dominance, he draws a similarity between silent Japanese cinema and these traditions.
Indeed, it is interesting to note the ways in which Japan adapted this Western invention. The benshi, a person who commentated on the film with its projection, was a uniquely Japanese feature and significant figure in the silent film era, sometimes attracting more audiences than a movie star would. These audiences would, at the beginning of the performance, call out his name in a manner that recalls a kabuki performance. Because of his presence, Burch argues, "a fragmentation of the representational gesture could not help but be produced." Heavily influenced by Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs, Burch sees in Japanese theater a transparent textuality that fragments the simultaneous 'texts' that, in the West, would constitute a cogent narrative diegesis. The benshi's commentary thus becomes "a reading of the diegesis which was thereby designated as such and which thereby ceased to function as diegesis and became what it had in fact never ceased to be, a field of signs. The most 'transparently' representational film, whether Western or Japanese, could not be read as transparent by Japanese spectators, because it was already being read as such before them, and had irrevocably lost its pristine transparency." The implication behind this is obvious - Burch has seen Japanese cinema (especially from the silent era) as a direct continuation of a long lineage of Japanese theatrical traditions.
Now this line of argument would not be salient, if not for the fact that there are many traits in Japanese cinema that seem to corroborate this (the negligence of the aforementioned Hollywood 'codes' could be seen as disregarding the need to construct a total reality). But assuming such a relation is immediately foregoing the hermeneutics that stand behind it. Assuming the collective aim of Japanese film directors was to continue their own Japanese tradition, - and whether or not this is true remains highly debatable - they would have to find cinematic equivalents for traditions such as the kabuki's hanamichi, the haiku and tanka's strict metric structure, and the renga's complex intertextuality and its unique linguistic features such as the kakekotoba (pivot word) and the makurakotoba (pillow word). Viewed in this perspective, it is then easy to see how Ozu's strict style could fall prey to these theoretical interpretations.
Albeit, it must be said that an ethnological reading of Japanese cinema is inevitable by nature of the medium. The photographic lens gives its images an un-challengeable objectivity that makes it fall prey to such easy readings. It plasters them to their surroundings (Japan); the language of the intertitles (Japanese) and their skin color and costumes betray the film by speaking for them even before they have spoken. To put it in another way, had there been no notion of Ozu being Japanese, had he been a writer and was writing in English about England instead, we would not look at his work with the a priori notion that there is something intrinsically Japanese about it. Takamura Kōtarō says, interestingly, that "Something made by a Japanese is in the end Japanese. It ends up being Japanese. It does, even if you don't mean to make it that way." This level of being 'Japanese', however, as David Bordwell argues, is so basic that "it must also have affected every Japanese filmmaker, every artist, indeed every individual in the culture." How then, can Ozu be more Japanese than other Japanese film directors?
The fundamental problem of such a statement is that a 'Japanese-ness,' a shared national identity for which Ozu is seen as the spokesman, is extremely hard to locate and define. In trying to explain away the exoticism of 'the other,' Western critics (and indeed, some Japanese critics) have turned to Japanese cultural traditions for the answer. Critics such as Donald Richie and Marvin Zeman have imposed (and here I must stress this term, as the evidence they present for it is slim at best) rhetoric forms used in Japanese poetry and literature such as mono no aware, yugen, wabi, and sabi, inadvertently contributing to the conception of Ozu as a very 'Japanese' filmmaker. Yet these terms themselves contain major problems that are ignored when conveniently employed.
The notion of these terms as aesthetic categories only arose during the Meiji era when Japan was confronted with a long-standing Western philosophy; it is through coming to terms with a foreign 'other' that Japan had to define its culture. Its methods are thus invariably linked to the West, either using Western aesthetic methods (the Japanese language has previously been insufficient for conceptual and theoretical thinking), or reacting to it (the notion of metaphysics is gradually rejected for a pre-Socratic model of non-dualism, creating the popular notion of Japanese culture as a Buddhist unity of the transcendental and the ephemeral). It is thus worth noting that Japanese aesthetic categories developed in relation to the West, and are not innocent products of a long-standing cultural tradition.
Promoting rhetoric forms in poetry and literature to the realm of aesthetic categories creates a major problem: rhetoric forms are native, but aesthetic categories are universal. Japanese aestheticians such as Ōnishi Yoshimori thus had to explain these in terms of an understandable ideology to the West. Okakura Kakuzo, with his influential work The Book of Tea, is another pertinent attempt at explaining Japanese culture to the West. But these thinkers, regardless of how close they come to universalizing the particular, inevitably leave out many other aspects and nuances that a universal principle cannot contain. In trying to unravel these myths to the West, they might have created and sold new myths that contribute to the West's (mis?) conception of Japan. Ōnishi, in particular, defines the new aesthetic category of aware as a 'world-weariness' that has since been picked up by many other Japanese writers and sold to Donald Richie as a simple notion (Donald Richie defines it as “a slightly sweet and sad quality as appreciated by an observer sensitive to the ephemeral nature of the existence; 'the pity of things'," somewhat conflating it with mujō.). Yet, we find in Motoori Norinaga's original text, an extremely complex and paradoxical meaning that is difficult to define. It is then, perhaps, the act of defining that shortens a concept's virility.
Applying such concepts to Ozu's films presents another major problem: these conventions, used in different art forms such as poetry and painting, can only serve as metaphors as best and should never be used literally. In explaining Ozu's films, critics often rely on such easy interpretations, in part because Ozu never comments on the meaning behind his eccentric stylistic choices. His direction of actors brings to mind the ceremonial quality of both nō and the tea ceremony; his empty still-life's seem to be as devoid as meaning as the post-modernist readings of the Japanese haiku (see Roland Barthes and Nishitani Keiji), or the mu in Japanese painting. Even Burch's use of the term 'pillow-shots' to describe Ozu's still-life's imply that Ozu borrowed directly from Japanese poetic techniques found in renga.
However, the assumption that Japanese film directors were naturally inspired by a heavy cultural tradition does not find much grounding in history. Although it has been mentioned that film directors formed communities like white-collar salary-men in the different film companies, there is little evidence to support the claim that they had consciously drawn on these conventions (though Mizoguchi later declared that he wanted to recreate the Japanese picture scroll format through cinematic terms). If considered through the lens of class differences, as Burch proposed, such Japanese cultural traditions might seem a little high-brow for an emerging medium whose popularity parallels that of the comic strip and serialized fiction more than the quiet refinement of nō and the tea ceremony. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that Ozu started making films in a milieu that was undergoing a sweep of modernization after the devastating Kantō earthquake of 1923. Hollywood films and new 'Western ways' were flooding Japan in a second wave of capitalism. Shochiku's studios, which were being rebuilt at the time, took as its model Hollywood modes of production to ensure a steady stream of films. Ozu's borrowing of Hollywood films as models for his early movies might thus be placed within the 'modernizing' urge of the milieu at the time, although this reason can only be partial and not completely satisfactory.
It is then, to Ozu’s later style that the critics turn to locate this ‘Japanese-ness.’ Often seen as essays on nostalgia and an acknowledgment on the mutability of the world, it is interesting to note the contradiction inherent in this equation. The world that his characters feel nostalgic for – the lost era of the 30s pre-war Japan – has never been portrayed favorably in Ozu's films of that period. Critics have then presumed a shift in Ozu’s style toward a more ‘Japanese’ outlook, dividing Ozu's work into 'periods,' where his style naturally came into ‘maturity.’
Yet, dealing with a notion as loose as 'Ozu's style' presents intrinsic problems. By tackling Ozu's body of work as a single entity, one is implying a coherency within an individual's output, an authorial responsibility that is consistent throughout. This theory in film, the auteur theory, is not without its challengers, especially considering the fact that Ozu was operating within a medium that is susceptible to many influences. Defining a single style that extends throughout is yet another act of metaphysics, pushing the particular (each film) toward a universal (a corpus of films), in the process eliminating (or, less drastically, dimming) the incongruencies that do not contribute to a 'theory.' This blind spot is often either taken as a granted or, in Noël Burch's book, explained away using value judgments (he dismisses the late films of Ozu as 'frozen academicism').
Ozu himself is no help in this matter. At times implying that his films are self-expression ("I hope to make films which clearly show my own self."), he also admits to submitting to commercialism (as, after Yoshida Kiju accuses him of pandering to young audiences in End of Summer (1961), Ozu muses, "After all, film directors are like prostitutes under a bridge, hiding their faces and calling customers."). Ozu himself is an unreliable 'text.' Preferring to talk through metaphors and riddles, he often sounds like a Zen master answering a student's question with a paradox. Indeed, his witty responses and Buddhist background has led many a scholar to draw easy interpretations between his biography and his work. But just as we can find many instances in Ozu's words to corroborate a conception of mu and mono no aware in his work, so too can we find many instances to contradict this. Ozu's words and lifestyle do not contribute in creating a uniform authorial personality strong enough to withstand a comparison between author and work. In any case, to devote more space to the auteur theory is perhaps both irrelevant and beyond the scope of this paper - David Bordwell has dealt with this at length in the context of Ozu.
The question of 'Japanese-ness' and a 'Japanese identity' becomes even more muddled here, when considering the extra-diegetic world created by Ozu's interviews and habits. If scholars are too quick to point out a 'Japanese-ness' in Ozu's films, Ozu too definitely corroborated in creating this illusion. Even without any knowledge of Ozu's Zen-like aphorisms ("I am like a tofu maker."), the similar seasonal titles of his later films - which may evoke a comparison with Japanese poetry conventions - and the number of films named after "Tokyo" definitely betray a certain self-awareness. The camera lens inevitably placed the films in a specifically Japanese milieu, but it is through this style of naming that Ozu emphasizes this milieu and brings this to the forefront. Whether or not there was a 'Japanese-ness' to be found, Ozu certainly wanted people to look for it. The titular similarities (not to mention the similarities in plot) construct an intertextuality that extends beyond a single film - according to Noda Kōgo, Ozu's frequent collaborator, the scriptwriting duo would go through previous screenplays for inspiration. It might have been Ozu's way of forcing the viewer to look at his work as a singular 'corpus.'
However, Ozu's work does not make such a reading easy at all; despite accusations of making the same film over and over again, a general survey of Ozu's films reveal many variations. Critics who compare his films to a Japanese aesthetics, including Donald Richie, often choose to ignore his early films, which borrowed heavily from Hollywood. Days of Youth (1929), Ozu's earliest surviving film, recalls both Harold Lloyd (Girl Shy [1924], A Sailor Made Man [1921]) and Ernst Lubitsch (The Marriage Circle [1924]); the Japanese New Wave film directors who accused Ozu of being conservative and feudalistic could not have been referring to his Hollywood-style gangster films Walk Cheerfully (1930) and Dragnet Girl (1933), which featured Japanese versions of 'hoods and dames.' A viewer used to the bourgeois families Ozu is famous for would be surprised by a late work like A Hen in the Wind (1948) with its uninhibited depiction of post-war squalor. Critics often deal with this problem by employing value judgments, considering only his work from Late Spring (1949), his 'mature style.' Even then, Ozu's early work is stylistically similar enough to be mistaken for anything other than an Ozu film - the framing that Burch wrongly calls 'flat' has already been present from Ozu's silent films onward; a device that Ozu uses to depict huge changes in emotion through cutaways such as the famous vase scene in Late Spring was already in place from The Lady and the Beard (1931). It is clear that Ozu did not significantly change his style of filmmaking, but merely approached different subject matter; this argument is insufficient as it chooses the aspects of Ozu's work it needs for its theoretical argument, and throws the rest away.
However, it is indeed undeniable that Ozu's films have changed from his early years to the later period of his life, but whether or not they have become more adept at portraying a 'Japanese' outlook on life is highly debatable. Even the films defined within Ozu's 'mature style' do not thrive as a homogeneous whole, defying such easy generalizations. Ozu is famous for his depiction of the dissolution of family in Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), but he also tackles themes like adultery in Early Spring (1956), marital issues in both Early Spring and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (1952), unwanted pregnancies and suicide in Tokyo Twilight (1957). Saying his films are all about a 'philosophy of acceptance' as Donald Richie has done is a gross simplification of his diverse style. In an extensive study done on the variations of Ozu's film style, Bordwell points out that both formally and thematically, Ozu often subverts the style he is famous for by setting up a set of intrinsic norms, only to undermine and contradict them to emphasize the dissonance. "Ozu's parametric play valorizes nuance...by posing problems, by asking that we search for principle that order such finesse." Yet, the overriding meaning that consists of these norms and their subversion remains elusive. "Not the least of Ozu's playfulness is to tease us with the possibility of a still broader unity that might enclose the entire dialectic; but it is a unity without closure, one that cannot be foreseen, one which we can only glimpse."
Ozu's style presents such a variety of incongruencies that defining his work as one singular style and figuring a philosophy behind it (such as what Burch, Richie, and Yoshida has done) falls into the danger of imposing one's own philosophy on a work. The 'meaning' of any one scene or shot is always equivocal and ambiguous; yet it does not foreclose the fact that Ozu intended the search for meaning to continue nonetheless. Ozu tries to construct a single body of work, but this body is fractured, irregular, and impossible to read.
Bordwell finds in Ozu's films documents about “everyday life,” an aspect which critics like Richie, Sato, Schrader almost unanimously agree on. If, indeed, Ozu sought to create reflections that faithfully reflected contemporary life, it is inevitable that we see a change in style and tone of his films. A hint of this could be found in a comment made earlier in his career, in 1933: “The Japanese life-styles are not appropriate for motion pictures at all. For example, when characters open a sliding door and enter a house, they have to sit down and take off their shoes. there are many interruptions and delays in their motions. therefore in Japanese films, such life-styles filled with interrupted actions, have to be modified to be suitable for the motion pictures. the actual Japanese lifestyle should become more cinematic." Instead of incorporating an abstract idea of 'Japanese-ness,' Ozu seemed more interested in creating a cinematic form that could suit the rhythm of Japanese life. Perhaps it is in such a statement, that one can begin to search for an answer to his idiosyncratic style.
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