page_title: Late Spring
section_title: Ozu's early work
hierarchical_section_title: Late Spring / Historical and biographical background / Ozu's early work
caption_attribution_description: Tomio Aoki in the the 1932 film Was Born, But... directed by directed by Yasujiro Ozu
context_page_description: Late Spring is a 1949 Japanese drama film directed by Yasujirō Ozu and written by Ozu and Kogo Noda, based on the short novel Father and Daughter by the 20th-century novelist and critic Kazuo Hirotsu. The film was written and shot during the Allied Powers' Occupation of Japan and was subject to the Occupation's official censorship requirements. It stars Chishū Ryū, who was featured in almost all of the director’s films, and Setsuko Hara, marking her first of six appearances in Ozu’s work. It is the first installment of Ozu’s so-called “Noriko trilogy”—the others are Early Summer and Tokyo Story —in each of which Hara portrays a young woman named Noriko, though the three Norikos are distinct, unrelated characters, linked primarily by their status as single women in postwar Japan.
  Late Spring belongs to the type of Japanese film known as shomingeki, a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. The film is frequently regarded as the first in the director’s final creative period, "the major prototype of the [director's] 1950s and 1960s work."
context_section_description: Yasujirō Ozu, after growing up in Tokyo and in Mie Prefecture and engaging in a very brief career as a schoolteacher, was hired by Shochiku, through family connections, as an assistant cameraman in 1923. He became an assistant director in 1926 and a full director in 1927. He would remain an employee of the company for the rest of his life. His debut film was Sword of Penitence (Zange no Yaiba, 1927), which was to be the only film of his career in the jidaigeki (period film) genre. (The work is today considered a lost film.) He later saw the film in a theatre and felt it was not truly his. From 1928 on, Ozu made only films of the gendaigeki type (that is, set in modern Japan rather than ancient times), generally within the already established shomingeki genre.
  The 1931 silent film Tokyo Chorus (Tokyo no Gassho)—about a young office worker with a family and a house in the suburbs who stands up for an unjustly fired office colleague and winds up getting fired himself—has been considered by some critics Ozu's breakthrough film in the shomingeki genre. As the Great Depression had hit Japan severely by this time, the hero’s predicament is no minor problem (one intertitle reads "Tokyo: Town of Unemployment"). In its movement from broad office comedy to the grim drama of (temporary) poverty, Ozu achieved in this depiction of the lives of ordinary people the synthesis of humor and pathos that Shiro Kido was urging his directors to strive for. It has been claimed that it was the influence of his co-screenwriter, Kogo Noda, ten years Ozu’s senior, that was instrumental in this change towards a tone darker than the director’s more lighthearted early works.
  In the following three years, Ozu accomplished the (in the opinion of one scholar) “astonishing” feat of winning, three times in a row, the “Best Film” award in Kinema Junpo magazine's "Best Ten" critics’ prize, the most prestigious of Japanese film awards at that time. These three films were I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), Passing Fancy (Dekigokoro, 1933) and A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari, 1934), respectively. Other films Ozu directed during the 1930s also won prizes in these annual awards. One critic, Hideo Tsumura, wrote in 1938 that Japan had produced thus far only two great filmmakers: Ozu and his close friend Sadao Yamanaka. Since Yamanaka made films exclusively of the jidaigeki type, Tsumura's statement would seem to indicate that, to this critic and perhaps to others, Ozu had become the preeminent shomingeki director.
  Many critics have tried to account for the apparent major change in Ozu's approach to filmmaking from the early films to the late (post-1948) films. It has been claimed, for example, that the 1920s and 1930s films tend to be livelier and more comic than the works of the last period. According to Kristin Thompson, the "inclusion of stylistic elements for their own aesthetic interest… in the early films… took a more consistently playful form, and the comedies and gangster films of the 1930s are full of flashy stylistic passages." This tendency has been partly attributed by Bordwell to a two-part structure that the director used in Tokyo Chorus and other films of the earlier period: "In the earliest films, the first part tends to be lively, often comic, and fairly tight causally, while the second part tends to modulate into greater melancholy and toward [a] somewhat more episodic structure." In the post-1949 films, Ozu retained the two-part structure, but with a very different emphasis: "The first part [now] consists of a quite leisurely exposition, a series of scenes in which chronology is more important than causality. The second part forms the bulk of the film, creating strongly defined causal lines... This is essentially the model that Ozu's films will follow from Late Spring onwards."
caption: Tomio Aoki, the child actor known as Tokkan Kozō, in Yasujirō Ozu's I Was Born, But... (Umarete wa Mita Keredo, 1932), the first of three consecutive (and six overall) Ozu-directed films to win the distinguished "Best Film" Kinema Junpo award
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