Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the way how film director Ozu Yasujiro is being discussed in the contemporary critical discourses in Japan, in relation to his involvement with war and its representation in his films, which helps better understand the changing context of Japanese criticism on the director.

Paper long abstract:

60 years since his death, Ozu Yasujiro is still regarded as the Japanese film director whose oeuvre represents Japanese national cinema as well as the national sensitivity. In fact, studies and writings on the director in Japan are ever increasing in recent years, reflecting his on-going popularity and symbolic status as a cultural figure. This paper will investigate this phenomenon through the lens of critical discourses recently published in Japan. As the scope of the discourses is very wide, I will narrow my main focus on the discussion of Ozu’s relation with war.

Ozu is often referred to as having made no war films during his career, and there was a critical tendency to articulate his noncombat involvement to direct a propaganda film in Singapore. This began to change in the 2000s when new primary materials such as Ozu’s diaries, notes and photographs were published, notably by Tanaka Masasumi. A critical turn, however, came in 2011 with a book A Trace of Empire: Showa History of a Soldier, Ozu Yasujiro (帝国の残影―兵士・小津安二郎の昭和史) by Yonaha Jun, who, based on the director’s experience in Chinese front, re-interpreted his wartime and postwar films. This was followed by an increasing number of critical studies, using more unknown resources and detailed analyses.

This paper will examine how these recent publications are viewing and evaluating the relation of Ozu and war. The focus will be paid to new materials and arguments these writings illustrate to suggest a discursive formation being shaped around the contemporary Japanese critical field. Some of the examples include Henmi Yo’s IKUMINA/1937, which exceptionally interrogates Japan’s war responsibility problem and Katayama Morihide’s Japan Unfulfilled (見果てぬ日本), which, in contrast, places Ozu in a nationalistic context.

The results can not only help draw a current discursive map about Ozu and war in Japanese criticism, but also more exactly understand its meaning in historical context, which has always been changing since the early works by Sato Tadao and Hasumi Shigehiko. I also expect the conflicting points in the discourse can suggest new ways of interpreting war related representations in Ozu’s films.