[The tension in Ozu's films] derives from confrontations between men and women who are in different sections of the pattern, between, for example, parents who have returned to Japaneseness and children who are on their way out.

There is never any doubt where Ozu's essential sympathies lie in these confrontations, though as a moralist he is scrupulously fair, and for this reason some young Japanese have disliked his work, calling him old-fashioned, bourgeois, reactionary. And so he would appear, since he so continually celebrates those very qualities, the traditional virtues of their country, against which young Japanese must revolt….

Ozu's films are among the most restrained, the most limited, controlled, and restricted. From early in his career, for example, Ozu used only one kind of shot: a shot taken from the level of a person seated in traditional fashion on the tatami….

This traditional view is the view in repose, commanding a very limited field of vision. It is the attitude for listening, for watching. It is the same as the position from which one watches the Noh or the rising moon, from which one par-takes of the tea ceremony or a cup of hot sake. It is the aesthetic attitude; it is the passive attitude. Less poetically, it also represents the viewpoint of a then-majority of Japanese. (p. xii)

Ozu's method, like all poetic methods, is oblique. He does not confront emotion, he surprises it. Precisely, he restricts his vision in order to see more; he limits his world in order to transcend these limitations. His cinema is formal and the formality is that of poetry, the creation of an ordered context that destroys habit and familiarity, returning to each word, to each image, its original freshness and urgency….

The unique art of Ozu is very evident, but so is his common humanity. The Ozu character is among the most lifelike in cinema. Since character for its own sake is always a major subject in the Ozu film and since it is but rarely that a character must work to forward the ends of the story the director is determined to tell us, we are often given that rare spectacle of a character existing for himself alone. This we observe with the delight that precise verisimilitude always brings, and with a heightened awareness of the beauty and fragility of human beings. (p. xiii)

A similar duality occurs with respect to the sense of time in the Ozu film. His pictures are longer than most and at the same time have less "story" than most. What story there is, moreover, often seems more anecdote (which is why a précis of an Ozu film fails even more completely than usual to convey what the picture is like as an experience). Since the story is presented over a long period of time, and since there is little overt action to sustain the time values, unsympathetic critics complain about a pace that to them seems slow. They would have real grounds for complaint if this pace existed by and for itself. Yet Ozu's films are not slow. They create their own time and for the audience, drawn into Ozu's world, into a realm of purely psychological time, clock time ceases to exist. And what at first seems a world of stillness, of total inaction, is revealed as appearance. (p. xiv)

[Just] as technique restricted comes to make us see more, so tempo slowed comes to make us feel more. The effect of both is the same: characters come alive in a manner rare in film. And both means are the same: the spectator is led into the film, is invited to infer and to deduce. He gives of himself and of his time, and in so doing he learns to appreciate. What remains after an Ozu film is the feeling that, if only for an hour or two, you have seen the goodness and beauty of everyday things and everyday people; you have had experiences you cannot describe because only film, not words, can describe them; you have seen a few small, unforgettable actions, beautiful because real. You are left with a feeling of sadness, too, because you will see them no more. They are already gone. In the feeling of transience, of the mutability and beauty of all life, Ozu joins the greatest Japanese artists. It is here that we taste, undiluted and authentic, the Japanese flavor. (pp. xiv-xv)

Though the majority of all Ozu's films are about the dissolution of the family (as are a large number of Japanese novels and of Western novels too, for that matter) his emphasis changed during his nearly forty years of film-making. In his first important films the director emphasized the external social conditions impinging upon his characters: the strain in a family occasioned by the father's joblessness in difficult times, the children's inability to understand that their father must be subservient to his employer to keep his job, etc. It was only in later films that the director found more important the constraints on the human condition imposed from within. (p. 5)

Ozu's patterns are reflected in his stories. A character moves from security to insecurity; he moves from being with many to being alone; or, a group shifts, loses members, accommodates; or, conversely, a younger character moves into a new sphere with mixed emotions; or a person moves from his accustomed sphere and then returns with a new understanding. These patterns are stacked, as it were, one upon the other; it is the rare Ozu film that has only one pattern and one story. Through the similarities and differences of the patterns and stories with their parallels and perpendiculars, Ozu constructs his film, the sum of his thoughts on the world and the people living in it. (p. 9)

Not only did Ozu often use the same actor in the same kind of role, playing, generally, the same kind of character (Setsuko Hara and Chishu Ryu are notable examples), he also used the same story line in various films. A Story of Floating Weeds is the same as Floating Weeds, Late Spring is very similar to Late Autumn, which in turn resembles An Autumn Afternoon. (p. 10)

Character, too, is recurrent. The daughters in Late Spring, Early Summer, Equinox Flower, Late Autumn, and An Autumn Afternoon are, though played by different actresses, essentially the same character involved with the same problem—whether or not to get married and leave home. (p. 11)

Ozu's most potent device for nostalgia … is the photograph. Even though family pictures, class pictures, company pictures, remain in Japan something of the institution they once were in the West, there is a surprising amount of formal portrait-taking going on in Ozu's films. There is the group picture, of students and teacher, for example, in front of the Kamakura Buddha in There Was a Father; there is the wedding portrait, as in Late Autumn; there is the family portrait, as in The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Early Summer, The Record of a Tenement Gentleman. Except in the first example cited above, we do not see the finished picture. No one drags out the portrait of his dead mother and gazes fondly at it. Rather, we see the family gathered (invariably for the last time), smiling bravely into an uncertain future. Nostalgia lies not in later reflections, but in the very effort to preserve the image itself. (p. 15)

[Similarities] are many, and differences few in the extraordinarily limited world of the Ozu film. It is a small world, closed, governed by rules apparently inflexible, controlled by laws that are only to be deduced. Yet, unlike Naruse's narrow family-centered world, Ozu's does not provoke claustrophobia, nor do its apparently inflexible governing rules give rise to the romantic idea of destiny seen in the apparently wider world of Mizoguchi. What keeps Ozu's films from these extremes are Ozu's characters, the kind of people they are and the way they react to their life. (p. 16)

Human nature in all its diversity and variation—this is what the Ozu film is essentially about. It must be added, however, that as a traditional and conservative Asian, Ozu did not believe in any such essence as the term "human nature" may suggest to us. Each of his characters is unique and individual, based on known types though they all may be; one never finds "representative types" in his films…. By so restricting our view and confining our interest, Ozu allows us to comprehend the greatest single aesthetic paradox: less always means more. (p. 17)

As with most of his countrymen, Ozu's originality lay not in the material itself—it was always of the most mundane—but in the angle from which the material was viewed, the personal, even idiosyncratic way it was reassembled on film. Like most Japanese artists, Ozu was in this sense a formalist, and the pattern of events in a film was as important to him as the events themselves. (p. 18)

The conventionality of the events in the Ozu film is even by Japanese standards extreme. Marriage and death are the only conclusions permitted in many of the later pictures, and the appreciations or misunderstandings that mark the progress toward the conclusion are usually unexceptional. Truisms abound, as do both coincidence and the obvious, and Ozu's manner and method match his material. He never attempts to unsettle. (p. 19)

One of the key differences between Ozu and other film directors is the autonomy of the single scene in Ozu's films, and the enormous importance assigned to character-revealing dialogue. The conventional film-maker often decides first on location and plot, has a specific place for the scene within the film in mind, and only then tries to think of something for the characters to say that will forward the plot a bit. Ozu's method more closely resembled that of directors of animated films or musical comedies who construct their film around a finished sound track. One result of this method was the creation of characters that in no way depended upon the convolutions of plot or story…. These characters grew—or, rather, the dialogue through which they came to life grew—according to the personality that Ozu and his fellow writer discovered in them. The character became real with no reference to story or plot; he became real because all the words he spoke gave expression to those principles of his character which it was the writers' duty to discover.

The result was the invariable rightness of the Ozu character, a rightness based upon his being given an amount of freedom almost unknown to cinema characters. Since he had no work to do, no story to act out, no plot to advance, he could be contradictory, illogical—and always faithful to himself. (pp. 22-3)

Ozu's mode is one of heightened realism. The characters say just what they would say, yet the dialogue continually surprises because it is always unfolding facets of the character that we were hitherto unaware of. This is like life, but the tempo of the Ozu dialogue (as opposed to the tempo of the Ozu film) is so swift that we learn in seconds what in life takes months. Yet we are taught nothing, we merely observe, with a heightened awareness. As will later become evident, much is demanded of us when we watch an Ozu picture. We are presented with the evidence, as it were, but must put it together for ourselves. To be sure, the skill with which the film is made usually precludes our putting it together in any way but the one Ozu intended. (p. 24)

[Logical] incongruities form the basis of Ozu's humor. They are not only amusing in themselves, they contribute directly to the revelation of character. The people involved are rarely aware that what they have said or done is funny. They have simply been what seems to them logical and what seems to us funny. Their error was either in method or in the degree of application. From this rises irony, and also our own sudden interest in a character capable of such incongruities. Ozu uses such devices because in suggesting the complexity of the human character, he is unwilling to tell us anything. Rather, he would show us everything, and the success of this method depends upon our willingness to be shown. Ozu's invitation, when tendered through humor, is commonly amusing, logical, and questioning of our assumed values. (p. 30)

Good Morning, in some ways Ozu's most schematic film, certainly one of his least complicated formally, is an example of a film constructed around motifs. There are a number of motifs in the film, all easily recognized because they are underlined, as it were, in a manner one associates with the earlier rather than the later Ozu. We will examine two of them: the first is the breaking wind or farting motif, the second the one that gives the film its title.

It should surprise no one that farting has a place in Ozu's "world of stillness." Characters run off to the toilet on many occasions, children finger themselves, ladies pick their teeth and express themselves with occasional earthy vulgarity, sex is openly acknowledged. His reason for such earthy touches is always the same: it is at these moments that a person is often most human. A man who farts, a man having sex, is—among other things—acknowledging his similarity to all other men. Etiquette, a concept which suggests that we are more than merely human, obscures what is common to all human beings. (pp. 35-6)

[The] fart motif is experienced only in conjunction with the film's second principal motif.

The boys in this picture have decided to go on a hunger strike. The ostensible reason is that their father refuses to buy a television set. The real reason, however, is that they are at an age to be bored with themselves and those around them. Particularly they resent the sameness of their daily existence. As a focus for their discontent they pick on those meaningless phrases, such as "Good morning," that adults habitually use. One reason the boys are so taken with breaking wind, then, is that a fart is a spontaneous utterance pleasantly devoid of just that kind of predictable meaninglessness found in the everyday phrases they have decided to dislike. Specifically, they call such phrases unnecessary.

The adults understand their feeling. A teacher, talking to their aunt, says: "Well, what they say is true enough. But then everyone has to use words like that. And perhaps they aren't really so unnecessary after all. The world would be rather dreary otherwise."… The teacher's voice is Ozu's. He does not share youth's fierce criticism of the world; he accepts the world as it is, imperfections, unnecessary things, and all. (pp. 37-8)

Just as a character is never all bad or all good in an Ozu film, so never is an idea all right or all wrong. There are no absolutes in these films, only immutables. One is born, but … the rest of life is not certain in the slightest. Ozu's characters all have to make their own sense out of their lives. So, in Good Morning neither the boys nor the adults are wholly right. In the Ozu film we rarely if ever experience the fierce joy of certainty. The world of the Ozu film is a flowing world, in which little is ordained. The life we see in these films nonetheless makes more sense because one event visibly leads to another, parallels another, or presages another. (p. 38)

[A] minor motif of light romantic attachment parallels a major theme of [Late Autumn], one also concerning love and marriage: a girl's marrying and leaving her widowed mother, who allows her to think that she herself may remarry so the girl will feel free to go. Ozu, as always, resists all temptation to plot…. For his purposes it is quite enough to have two strains (and others) showing variations on a theme. The variations may be presented as contrasting with each other, e.g., romantic love versus conventional marriage. Or one variation may continue another, e.g., romantic love followed by conventional marriage. The canvas of the Ozu picture is filled with mutually supporting lines. (p. 39)

More often in an Ozu film, however, the parallels running side by side do not meet; they stretch into infinity, and if they do meet we are not shown the event. This is the position that best ensures their commenting upon each other without Ozu's having to overtly state that they do.

In I Was Born, But …, as well as many of the earlier films, there are direct visual parallels. A slow tracking shot along the desks of the sleepy pupils in the classroom is cut directly to a similar shot along the desks of the yawning businessmen, their fathers. Here the comment is only partly satiric: it is the parallel that is most important, a demonstration that the two scenes are identical. (pp. 40-1)

The most satisfying parallels in Ozu's films, and the few that are readily recognizable as parallels, are those which fit the film and amplify it but whose connection with the main theme remains elusive. They are mysterious; one recognizes a pattern but does not know what it means. Perhaps these are the most satisfying because they are the most lifelike, the most recognizable from our own experience. Perhaps they are the most beautiful because they are the most apparently useless. (p. 43)

In Ozu's films as in life itself the seemingly antithetical live happily side by side. It is inconsistency which creates irony, and which also makes the father seem so human. Perhaps then, as Ozu so often indicates, it behooves us to regard humanity with irony; perhaps that is the only way to live in the world. (p. 49)

The irony with which we must observe the father in [Equinox Flower] is extreme; perhaps no other Ozu character demands so much. The film is, in part, the study of a man deep in self-deception. Yet Ozu's irony is always one of character. There is nowhere in his work a scene of which the real, intended meaning is contrary to the one seemingly expressed. Rather, a character reveals his beliefs to be the contrary of those he expresses, or maintains a belief different from the one reality quite apparently imposes. In Ozu's work, such self-deception is, as the father in Equinox Flower plainly states, proof of humanity.

Ozu's films are filled with such proof and this, in turn, is what makes his characters so human and consequently so real. He shows us the gulf between opinion or intent and reality, and then bridges it for us. (pp. 49-50)

One of the traditional functions, or perhaps results, of irony is that one keeps one's distance, that one finds a wholesale empathy impossible. Ozu's irony, however, like that of Chekhov or Jane Austen, is there for but one purpose: our detachment reveals a design of which the characters are unaware, and this makes us want to move closer to these warm and very human people. Perhaps it is for this reason that many of the ironies in Ozu's films are neither explained nor exploited. (pp. 50-1)

The philosophy of acceptance in the films of Ozu may be called this both because it is so deeply felt and because it has antecedents both in the Buddhist religion and in Japanese aesthetics. In basic Zen texts one accepts and transcends the world, and in traditional Japanese narrative art one celebrates and relinquishes it. The aesthetic term mono no aware is often used nowadays to describe this state of mind. The term has a long history …, and though its original meaning was more restricted, from the beginning it represented feeling of a special kind: "not a powerful surge of passion, but an emotion containing a balance;… on the whole, aware tended to be used of deep impressions produced by small things." Now it is used to describe the "sympathetic sadness" (Tamako Niwa's phrase) caused by the contemplation of this world, and is also used to describe a serene acceptance of a transient world…. (pp. 51-2)

Ozu did not, of course, set out self-consciously to capture this quality. To do so would have seemed to him artificial, just as the concept itself would have seemed to him old-fashioned and bookish. Nonetheless, his films are full of it, since he was. The many examples of mono no aware in his pictures, homely, mundane, often seemingly trivial, are none the less strong for all that. (p. 52)

The central figure in an Ozu film is often a character with the ability to contemplate, to remain for relatively long periods of time seemingly inactive, utterly given over to contemplation. Some scenes of Ozu characters in silent contemplation have become extremely well-known, most of them ones that occur at the film's end: the mother alone at the end of The Only Son; the son alone on the train carrying the ashes of his father in There Was a Father; mother alone in Late Autumn, fathers alone in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Tokyo Twilight, Equinox Flower, etc. Other such moments occur at the end of scenes, and the long still shot of the character simply existing, no longer acting or reacting, is usually given some small reason; often it is the weather, or some other natural manifestation. (p. 56)

The message of an Ozu film—to the extent that one can be sorted out from the sum experience of the film itself—is, perhaps, that one is happiest living in accord with one's own imperfections and those of one's friends and loved ones; that these imperfections include aging, dying, and other calamities; that man's simple humanity must, in the end, be recognized and obeyed. (p. 65)

Life is a dream. This is a familiar Buddhist concept, radically updated. Originally the observation that the world is a mirage was meant to console the sufferer, but in Ozu's universe there is no afterlife. That life is a dream means one has had no life at all. We may feel that Ozu overstates the case, but he does so with compassion and even restraint. (p. 66).

The theme of the world in change is sounded again and again in the films of Ozu. In Tokyo Story, for example, the mother says when she sees her child: "I'm so glad I lived to see this day. The world has changed so."… To which the children reply: "But you haven't changed at all."

This is the way of the world, the old no longer change, the young continue to change, as the parents in this picture discover. Yet the parents never cease to hope that their lives will find some vindication in those of their children. The happiness they seek is a mirage. Most of Ozu's films are about parents and children, all of whom suffer a degree of disappointment. As Shuichi says in Late Spring: "Raise them and then off they go. If they don't get married you worry, and if they do you feel disappointed."… This disappointment is built into the human condition, as many an Ozu character learns during the course of the picture. They begin by hoping that all will be well, that things will turn out as they wish; they often end by consoling themselves that at least they have suffered less than others they know. (pp. 67-8)

Ozu shows in his films both the natural reluctance of the old to let go of the young and the natural impatience of the young to be rid of the old. He is not, however, interested in comparing the virtues of the one with the shortcomings of the other. What Ozu chronicles, rather, is the impossibility of accord. (p. 69)

[The] end is always there, staring us in the face. When asked why he seems so sad, Kawai in An Autumn Afternoon says, "Solitary, sad—after all, man is alone."… Man is alone, and as one of the characters toward the end of The End of Summer remarks, "Life is very short, isn't it?"… The conclusions of many Ozu films—Late Spring, Tokyo Story, Late Autumn among them—underline this common fate. It is so common, indeed, that its appearance in films as in literature always surprises. Loneliness and death are in a sense such banal facts of human experience that only a great artist, a Tolstoy, a Dickens, an Ozu, can restore to them something of the urgency and sadness that we all someday experience. Ozu does this through a deliberate description of the facts, a full display of them, and—surprisingly in one so often described as an apologist for the traditional—by confrontation. Ozu is one of the very few artists whose characters are aware of the great immutable laws that govern their lives. (pp. 69-70)

We watch the people in an Ozu film choosing and deliberating over and over again, usually in the knowledge that in choosing one forms one's character. (pp. 71-2)

Here, perhaps, is the reason why Ozu's characters have … no past. They may refer to times past, but we never see them. Ozu is one of the very few directors who never once in his entire career used a flashback. A person's past has done its work, but it is not interesting. Of his people you may truly say what is important is not what life has done to them, but what they do with what life has done to them.

One understands, then, Ozu's dislike and distrust of plot. Plot is possible only if it is agreed that a character is a certain kind of person with a certain kind of past who will therefore predictably do certain kinds of things and not others—that he is, in short, limited in a way people never are, before death. One understands also why inconsistency of character is so important to Ozu: it is a sign of life because it is a sign of choice….

[This], finally, is what the Ozu film shows us—character being formed through choice. (p. 72)

Donald Richie, in his Ozu (copyright © 1974 by The Regents of the University of California; reprinted by permission of the University of California Press), University of California Press, 1974, 275 p.