Bo Qiao
Monday, April 28, 1952.
Yasujiro Ozu habitually wrote his diary:
Sunny. Planes fly by frequently. Japan Independence Day. Go to the factory. Send a script to Mr. Shiga. After changing into a suit, he and Yamamoto traveled to Tokyo to Higashiheien. (Omitted below)
The diary of this day is of medium length among all Ozu's diaries. Most of the content is no different from the journal of other days, it is nothing more than a record of where you went, who you saw, what you ate... Mixed with another complaint or two. The only difference is the third sentence: "Japan Independence Day." ”
Nearly seven years had passed since the broadcast of The Tamaki, which was announced by Emperor Showa on August 15, 1945. Just over half a year earlier, on September 8, 1951, the Allied powers, led by the United States, signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan, the main thrust of which was to declare the end of the United Nations occupation of Japan and restore its normal status as a state, and the treaty entered into force on April 28 of the following year — Ozu's "Japan Independence Day" refers to the day when the San Francisco Peace Treaty came into force. In March 2013, the Shinzo Abe administration decided to designate the day as "Day of Restoration of Sovereignty": whether it was a conjuring sign of militarism or a commemoration of the rebirth of postwar Japan, all parties were interpreting it in their own interpretation space. But there is no doubt that even a Japanese like Ozu, who keeps a certain distance from politics, may understand the "independent" nature of this day, which is both real and hypocritical.
Similar to Ozu's films, the political brushstrokes in Ozu's diary seem to be mostly hidden, and even if they are occasionally mentioned, they are only superficially revealed. Political texts such as "Japan Independence Day" are even more scaly and half-clawed.
But if you don't put Ozu back in the context of the Showa era, it seems that you can't fully understand Ozu. In 2011, Associate Professor of the Faculty of Japanese Culture at Aichi Prefectural University and Jun Naha published the book "The Remnants of the Empire: The Showa History of Soldier Yasujiro Ozu", which attempts to comprehensively redefine Ozu's heritage from the perspective of Showa history. In Yonaba's view, Ozu, whether as a soldier, director, or Japanese, has a constant and chaotic connection with the militaristic Japan that surrounded the war of aggression. In addition to being conscripted into invading China as an army infantry commander and then participating in the poison gas war against China, under the "Ozu tune" of those seemingly gentle folk dramas, there was also the ambush line of the "Fifteen Years' War" (1931-1945).
With Naha Run, "The Remnants of the Empire: The Showa History of the Soldier Yasujiro Ozu"
Ozu (left)
This may sound very counterintuitive. Yoshinori Takeuchi pointedly pointed out: "However, it cannot be said that because (in Yasunari Kawabata's novel and Yasujiro Ozu's film) has not changed, [they] have not experienced war." Rather than that, we can say that the shadow of war can be felt more deeply in the decadence of Kawabata literature and Ozu films. "In the post-war Ozu films, war has always been a lingering existence: "The Taste of Tea and Rice" was originally called "He Went to Nanjing", and the male protagonist was originally going to enlist in the army; in "Tokyo Story", the widowed daughter-in-law played by Setsuko Hara was also forced to be widowed because of the war; in "Taste of Autumn Saury", Yamadaira, played by Kasa Chi-jin, happened to meet his subordinates in the tavern, and when he heard the march military music, he was full of nostalgia for the past...
The tokyo story was filmed on location, with Ozu on the far right and Setsuko Hara in front of it on the left, 1953.
In Japan during the OCCUPATION OF THE UNITED STATES, the film was subject to heavy censorship from the Allied Supreme Command (GHQ) when it was released, and whether it was left or right, the Japanese film and painting circles maintained a silent and even stoic attitude in the discussion of war issues. But any tendency to "glorify the world of friendship" is immediately accused by critics of being "nostalgic and low-hanging." After 1952, with the outbreak of the Korean War and the signing of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, the various types of U.S. control over Japan were nominally reduced, but Ozu's footage was still rarely "critical." In 1953, after Keisuke Kinoshita finished filming the highly critical "Tragedy of Japan", Ozu quietly left the scene after hearing a wave of praise from his peers at the test screening, saying that he did not agree with this excessively fierce and sharp critical posture. Although Ozu and Keisuke Kinoshita are both masters of shochiku, after that, they do not watch each other's new films for test screenings. The most famous holder of the Double Palm of Imamura, Imamura Changping, the most famous of Ozu's disciples, is even more at odds with the "Ozu tune" for middle-class families with his "maggot-like" (Ozu) bottom-level perspective.
But Ozu is not ignoring the realities of Japanese society. On the contrary, the theme of "marrying a daughter" in Ozu's later works is precisely the entry point of social observation that has attracted the most attention in Japanese society after the arrival of the baby boom of the clump generation. According to statistics, the proportion of marriages married by blind dates in Japan after the war has declined year by year, from nearly 70 percent in the 1940s to less than 50 percent in 1965; in stark contrast, the number of people who are in love and marry has risen from less than 14 percent to 47 percent. Ozu's "marrying daughter" reflects Japanese society under the great changes in this marriage and love pattern.
Was Ozu really just talking about "marrying a daughter" after the war? Why did he, who had never married or had no heirs, persist in "marrying a daughter" in the last fifteen years of his life?
Careful analysis shows that what is wrapped up in the theme of "marrying a daughter" is actually Ozu's reflection on the mentality of the old and new generations of Japanese: the older generation of Japanese is eager to find some residual identity in the devastated traditional values after the defeat of the war; while the new generation of Japanese people have the intention of finding a new place to stand, but still cannot completely let go of the burden of the old generation. Ozu repeatedly used this theme to test, examine, and reflect on the transfer and inheritance of the concepts of the two generations of Japanese before and after the war - the conflict of this concept is not limited to marriage or family, Ozu only uses the "storm in the teacup" to observe the social rupture and Showa remnants that Japan faced after the war, and the new and old Japanese who took the fifteen-year war as the turning point are by no means diametrically opposed, on the contrary, they rely on each other, sometimes look at each other, and finally compromise...
Yasujiro Ozu (1903.12.12-1963.12.12)
Ozu's "marrying daughter" constitutes a metaphor for a contradictory and self-consistent postwar Japanese transition. On the one hand, Japan's post-war exit from Asia and entry into Europe showed more resolute and thorough, even if Japan achieved nominal "independence" after the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but with the baby boom of the clump generation, the cry of "it is no longer post-war", and the economic recovery of the Shenwu boom (1955-1957), the younger generation of Japan gradually became full of wings and inevitably bid farewell to showa before the war. But on the other hand, the older generation, who were once brilliant, proud, and even into the abyss of militarism, have been tormented by the cocoon of war and the long-term hypocrisy of the United States after the war, and they have lost their vigor and self-confidence, and the national values they are proud of have become sad self-deception after the fifteen years of war, and they still desperately want to retain the last bit of dignity and past glory, but in the end they have become a luxury.
The theme of "marrying a daughter" unfolds within this framework. However, in Ozu's shot, the daughter always has no stinginess in her father, and although the father is reluctant, he firmly and even full of self-sacrifice to push his daughter to "happiness". Ozu replaces the cruel, cold reality of generational changes with a fantasy of light and shadow full of pulse and warmth—"marrying a daughter" is nothing more than a turn of the times when he imagined that old and new Japan were concerned about each other and cherished each other, and it represented the last hope and self-projection of the showa people before the war when they gradually faded out of the historical stage. However, externally constrained by the United States, the internal old Japanese Taoist unity was lost, and the new generation began to "embrace defeat" with little nostalgia, and turned to the new life of "100 million general middle streams" in the middle and late Showa periods--all of which are completely absent in Ozu's works. Even the surging security movement, which represents the climax of anti-American sentiment, has been lost in Ozu's films and diaries. In this sense, Ozu in the diary and Ozu behind the camera lens present a kind of "mirror image of the anti-supergram".
In July 1942, the Japanese intellectual circles held a seminar on "Modern Chaoke", which included thirteen participants from the philosophical circles of the Kyoto School, the Japanese Romantic School, and the art and culture circles. At that time, Japan had been invading China for eleven years, and in December of the previous year, the Japanese army had raided Pearl Harbor in the United States, triggering the entire Pacific War. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor injected a stimulant into the Japanese intellectual circles, and Japanese scholars and cultural people such as Suzuki Noriko, Hoda and Shigero were excited for a while. These cultural circles are critical of the unified development path represented by Western civilization represented by the modernization of Europe and the United States, and they are dissatisfied with the total Westernization brought about by the "separation from Asia and into Europe" since the Meiji Restoration, and they are even more afraid of the decline of Japan's Taoist system and value order. The "success" of the attack on Pearl Harbor gave them the possibility of breaking away from the narrative of European and American modernity, returning to the belief in god and Buddha, recreating the Japanese spirit, and rebuilding the Yamato Taoist system. Even left-wing intellectuals like Takeuchi were thrilled by Japan's daring to directly challenge the authority of US imperialism between 1941 and 1942 ("The Great East Asian War and the Determination of My Generation (Declaration)"), but the intention of the "modern Chaoke" to criticize European and American modernization, regain the Japanese spirit, open up for aggression, and seek a basis for legitimacy for the war is still clear. Takeuchi opposed the war of aggression against China, but had also been conscripted into the army, and he still had great sympathy for the "modern chaoke" after the war, and tried to strip it from the historical context of the Fifteen Years' War, and in a new context (on the eve of the signing of the New Security Treaty between Japan and the United States) gave new vitality to the idea of criticizing the path of modernity in Europe and the United States and returning to the traditional value order of Japan. This is the meaning of the so-called "transcendence, overcoming".
Yoshi Takeuchi, 1953.
Ironically, Ozu is at odds with Takeuchi, who has a crush on him, on the core issue of "Chaoke". Ozu, who is considered the "most Japanese", runs counter to the so-called "most Japanese" in terms of film technique, narrative meaning, and personal tastes and movie-watching preferences reflected in his diary. The patriarchal imagery of "Japanese Taoism" in Ozu's later "Marrying Daughter" films eventually gave way to the next generation of Europeans and Americans: the more Ozu's later works, the clearer and more decisive the end of this generational change (1957's "Tokyo Twilight" may be the last Ozu work to fully triumph over traditional values). "Not giving up" is just a hallucinatory psychological strategy of self-compromise that Ozu, as a father, is not willing to step down the stage of history. Whether it was the war of aggression or the authority of their fathers, the Ozu generation lost cleanly, and they only wanted to exchange "reluctance" for a little last dignity. Japan, which moved toward "Japan as No.1" (Vogel) in the Shintake and Iwado booms (and even the Izano boom behind Ozu), did not have much nostalgia for its fathers and their values except for the "Showa nostalgia" enthusiasm (similar to the "Republic of China fever" in Our country) that produced beauty. The fathers in Ozu's films are well aware of this, and behind the attempt to say that Hugh is a compromise surrender to "modernity" and a painful release of "tradition" – in this sense, Ozu is a completely mirror image of the existence of "anti-superk".
In fact, Ozu is a very pro-European and American director: Ernst Lubitsch is his most admired director; Ozu's early silent films can basically be seen as a reproduction of American silent films except for Japanese elements; in daily life, he likes whiskey and loves baseball... Although Ozu's aesthetic is not lacking in "Japan", from the perspective of post-war mentality, his films are already trying to "embrace defeat". As a mass commodity, especially Ozu films with clear box office appeals, the connotation of movies is not simply aesthetic, but also a projection of a certain social mentality. If we do not understand Ozu in the history of post-war Showa's social mentality, in other words, if we do not understand the reluctance and reluctance behind the "embrace of defeat", without understanding the ideals of a generation of Japanese cultural figures and the anti-super-gram social reality they face, we cannot understand the long and stubborn chatter in Ozu's films (especially the "marrying daughter" films).
Wu Qingyuan against Xiuya celebrities
In October 1933, in Nihonbashi, Tokyo, the Yomiuri Shimbun held a decisive game of "Japanese Go Players' Battle of Power", in which Wu Qingyuan, a nineteen-year-old young man from China, held a black battle against the fifty-nine-year-old Honinbo Hideya. Wu Qingyuan started with the challenge of Hoshi Sansan Tengen as the first celebrity in the Japanese Go world. After 109 days, a total of 44 hours and 23 minutes, thirteen matches on the fourteenth day (all proposed by Xiuya according to the rules), and the highly controversial Bai 160 hands, Xiuzha's famous talents took advantage of the advantages of the rules and the collective wisdom and wisdom of Ben infang (of course, at that time, Baiqi had no sticker advantage) and barely defeated this young man from China. At that time, Japan had brazenly invaded the northeast, Sino-Japanese relations were extremely tense, and the Yomiuri Shimbun vigorously exaggerated the background of the Sino-Japanese confrontation in order to sell. Wu Qingyuan began by banning Sansan's "ghost gate", which was seen as a challenge to the tradition of the Japanese chess world, which triggered a snowflake of protest letters sent to the newspaper. At that time, neither the Japanese chess community, which had long been on the top, nor the Japanese people who were hostile to China, could accept that Honinfang, who had been enshrined on the altar, would lose to a Chinese youth in the "national skill" that the Japanese were proud of. Mr. Wu's teacher, Kensaku Setsushi, and his friend Shigeru Kitani even fear that if Mr. Wu wins, he will not be able to gain a foothold in Japan, where nationalist sentiment is extremely high. "Fortunately", his defeat calmed the agitation of public opinion in Japan. Legend has it that many years later, Wu Qingyuan, who has become a showa chess saint, recalled the defeat and said: "It is still good to lose." ”
The Taste of Saury (1962)
Interestingly, in Ozu's last film, The Taste of Saury, Kasa chi-jin talks about the war in a small bar and laments the same: "It's better to lose." Behind this rather playful remark is not the so-called "anti-war" or the blunt "pro-American". In 1962, there was no longer a GHQ film censorship, and Ozu's Kasa Chi-jin in front of the camera, similar to Wu Qingyuan in 1933, expressed the unspeakable decadence and unwillingness of a generation. Perhaps the self-deception of "clinging to each other" in the theme of "marrying a daughter" is the resistance of the last weak people of the Ozu generation.
Editor-in-Charge: Ding Xiongfei
Proofreader: Zhang Liangliang