Seeing Ozu

Some filmmakers have a voice and vision so distinct, they become their own adjectives. Hitchcockian means suspenseful and voyeuristic, while Lynchian evokes things eerie, surreal, and perhaps a little quaint. Ozuesque—after Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu—often calls to mind words like “serene,” “contemplative,” and “Zen-like.” 

At a glance, such characterizations seem fitting. Much of Ozu’s filmography, like the often celebrated Late Spring and Tokyo Story, is quiet and slow-paced. Conflicts—a woman heading into marriage, an elderly couple neglected by their children—tend to be small and banal, at least by Hollywood standards. Ozu himself is often imagined as a stereotypical Japanese craftsman (a “tofu maker,” in his own words)—the kind that finds peace and purpose in restraint and repetition. Accordingly, the act of watching Ozu has been compared to meditation: pulled into the present moment, one’s attention drawn to aspects of everyday existence otherwise ignored. Prominent critics like Donald Richie and Paul Schrader have even gone so far as to argue that the Ozuesque is Japanese Buddhism in film form, the transcendent captured on camera.

Dig deeper, however, and many of these widely held conceptions fall apart. Chronicling his country through periods of peace and war, imperialism and Westernization, his films are—far from timeless and placeless—firmly rooted in the material world and the social, economic, and geopolitical processes that shape it. To approach them by way of Zen concepts like mu and mono no aware is—as Ozu scholar and film theorist Shiguehiko Hasumi puts it in his seminal book Directed by Yasujiro Ozu—not a sign of looking closely but of “not looking closely enough.” Only when we demystify Ozu and approach his work for what it is rather than what it has come to signify, Hasumi argues, does its true transcendent quality come into focus.

Credit where credit is due: Many of Ozu’s films do indeed incorporate Buddhist imagery and ideas. For instance, the Great Buddha of Kamakura, a 43.8-foot statue of Amida Butsu at Kotoku-in, a historic site and popular tourist destination in Kanagawa Prefecture, appears in three of his films: Walk Cheerfully, There Was a Father, and Early Summer. Meanwhile, his film A Story of Floating Weeds chooses as one of its chief visual motifs the daruma, a traditional doll fashioned in the stocky, bearded image of Bodhidharma, the early medieval monk credited with bringing Chan Buddhism from India to China. 

These obvious references lend credence to the existence of other, subtler ones. Given the above, it’s tempting to assume that the rolling waves at the end of Late Spring are an allusion to Buddhist cleansing rituals involving water, or that the infamous shot of a vase shown earlier in the same film represents stasis in the midst of worldly change—“a form,” as Schrader writes in his 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, “which can accept deep, contradictory emotion and transform it into an expression of something unified, permanent, transcendent.”

Of course, it’s one thing to perceive Buddhist elements as a viewer, and quite another to argue that Ozu put them there—deliberately or inadvertently, knowingly or unknowingly. Those who attempt to make such an argument have taken different directions that arrived at the same conclusion. Some, like Richie, contend that Ozu drew from his own life experiences. Others, like Schrader, suggest Zen Buddhism seeped into his films indirectly, by way of values and sensibilities embedded in Japanese culture and nationality at large. Both are equally disputable. 

Biographical details about Ozu’s interaction with Buddhism can more or less be counted on two fingers. Stationed in Nanjing in 1937 during his service years, the director is said to have obtained from a monk a calligraphic rendition of the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese character “mu,” an important term in Buddhist and Daoist texts meaning “no,” “nothing,” or “nothingness.” Today, that same character adorns the granite tombstone marking Ozu’s grave in Kamakura, not far from the Great Buddha, though exactly how or why it ended up there appears to be unknown, at least to the wider, English-speaking world. A popular pilgrimage spot despite its seemingly inauspicious corner placement in the cemetery’s upper plot, the “mu” headstone is often adorned with numerous bottles of sake and beer left there as offerings for the booze-loving filmmaker.

Even if Ozu’s exchange with the Chinese monk did occur as told, and proved meaningful enough to follow him into death, it is questionable whether it had any significant impact on his filmmaking or life at large. Though this may come as a surprise to some, Ozu rarely turned to his own experiences for inspiration. His early work—student comedies and crime films—he made despite the fact that he never attended university or operated on the wrong side of the law. More surprising still, given the prestige of his family dramas, he never married or had children of his own, living with his mother until her death in 1962—a year before his own, at 60.

Unlike other Japanese filmmakers of his time, Ozu cared little for traditional literary forms like the haiku and kodan. Instead, film theorist David Bordwell writes in his 1988 book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, his films evoke contemporary Japanese writers like Toson Shimazaki and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, who wrote about the friction between Japan’s unmoving past and fast-paced future. Dearer to Ozu still—and ironically so, considering his status as an emblem of “Japaneseness”—was what came to Japan by way of the West. In his youth, he was fond of serials and westerns, and became enamored with big-time directors like Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Bozarge, and D. W. Griffith. Students in Days of Youth, I Flunked, But . . ., and Tokyo Chorus chat about the Hollywood films they’ve seen—if Ozu incorporated any kind of personal experience, this is it—and the gangsters in That Night’s Wife and Dragnet Girl strike the viewer as more American than Japanese in costume and mannerisms. 

Only when we demystify Ozu and approach his work for what it is rather than what it has come to signify does its true transcendent quality come into focus.

Although Ozu’s later, more celebrated films—about the ordinary lives of parents, partners, and salarymen—developed a style and substance that was seen as distinct from, even antithetical to, what was made in the US, the director never affirmed what others said about him. “He typically refrained from comparing his work to traditional forms,” Bordwell notes. “The wide-screen frame reminds him not of emaki-mono, or scroll painting, but of toilet paper. And he once remarked of foreign critics: ‘They don’t understand—that’s why they say it is Zen, or something like that.’ ”

If Ozu did not engage with Buddhist thought or aesthetics consciously, perhaps his work was Buddhist in the same way that the films of Italian American directors like Martin Scorsese or Brian De Palma can be considered Catholic: not reflective of his own life and person but an expression of the collective unconscious of Japanese society. For decades, Western observers have placed Zen Buddhism at the center of life in Japan—a doctrine so ingrained it no longer requires institutions to propagate itself, so ubiquitous it has become as wetness is to fish. Schrader—who directed the 1985 film Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, about the life and suicide of Japanese author Yukio Mishima—called it the “quintessence” of all Japanese art, from printmaking to poetry. By this reasoning, Ozu’s films have to be Buddhist, because it was impossible for them not to be. 

It almost goes without saying that in Japan, this very view was, and is, widely recognized as reductive and Orientalist. Even if Buddhism played an important role in the country during the time that Ozu lived and worked, its character was neither homogeneous nor immutable. Divided amongst sects, practicing Buddhists were a societal force like any other, adapting to the societal shifts that came and went. Many Buddhist institutions, for instance, actively supported the colonial ambitions of the Japanese empire, emphasizing the importance of self-sacrifice in the name of the emperor.

This is the kind of Buddhism on display in There Was a Father, about a schoolteacher who quits his job after one of his students accidentally drowns on a field trip to Kotoku-in, and the son who takes over his father’s teaching career in spite of the son’s own wishes and ambitions. A propaganda film released in 1942, when Japan’s imperial government mobilized Zen Buddhism for the war effort—in 2023, scenes depicting patriotic poetry and music that had been cut from earlier existing prints by occupation censors were restored for its presentation at the Venice Film Festival—There Was a Father celebrates the Buddhist shrine as a key part of the country’s glorious past and cherished cultural heritage. The students, marching in unison like soldiers, pose for a photo in front of the Great Buddha: the last stop on an itinerary that also includes Tokyo’s Imperial Palace and Meiji Jingu, a monument dedicated to the deified spirit of Emperor Meiji. Connecting its Buddhist imagery to the self-sacrifice of the teacher’s son, the film “demonstrates,” in Bordwell’s words, “how the individual can contribute to the purity of the nation by accepting his or her proper place in the hierarchy.”

The notion of “Japaneseness” is a construct too—partly created by the imagination and prejudices of foreign countries, partly by Japan itself to project a certain image to the rest of the world. Mono no aware—the “pathos of things,” often defined today as both an understanding and kind of wistful appreciation of impermanence—did not enter conversations around Japanese aesthetics until the 18th century. Originally associated with the upper class, it was a sign not of enlightenment so much as refinement—a meaning quite opposed to the one attributed to Ozu. Commercialization of Zen—rampant since the psychedelic sixties, and currently in the midst of a mental health–fueled renaissance—was already well under way in Ozu’s childhood, when once important rituals like the tea ceremony had become, as Bordwell surmises, little more than “a hobby for rich women.”

Even if there was such a thing as traditional Japaneseness, Ozu was not much of a traditionalist to begin with. Whenever his films deal with customs or heritage, including Buddhism, the tone oscillates between openly provocative and quietly ironic and satirical. 

In Days of Youth, an early silent film about two students competing for the affection of the same girl, one of the students receives a letter from his parents telling him to come home after his exams. Declaring his intention to disobey them by going on a skiing trip, the student sticks a piece of chewing gum on a statuette of Saigyo Hoshi, a Buddhist monk from the 12th century CE: a symbolic demonstration of his insubordination to societal norms.

The satirical strain continues in the next year’s Walk Cheerfully, which tells the story of a gangster who changes his criminal ways after falling in love with a decent woman, when the protagonist drives his lover and her sister to Kotoku-in. Staring at the Great Buddha of Kamakura, the characters jokingly imitate the statue’s solemn facial expression before speeding away, leaving a cloud of dust in their car’s wake: a visual testament, as Bordwell puts it, to the “superiority of modern life to Japanese tradition.”

Similarly, Ozu’s 1934 silent film A Story of Floating Weeds, which was later remade as the sublime sound and color film Floating Weeds, explores a web of troubled relationships between the lead actor of a theater troupe, his son, his onetime mistress, and his current mistress. Ozu cuts to the Bodhidharma daruma—in Japanese culture, a symbol of resilience and stability—at moments in the story when characters refuse to grow. The film asks whether they can reconcile their differences, leave their old ways behind, and change their lives for the better, only for them to return to the status quo to carry on as they had when the film began. The immutability that the daruma represents—an inevitable return to a prior state—is cast not as comforting or perseverant but as tragic and regrettable: in short, yet another subversion of Japanese tradition.

And yet the point is never fixed. In Late Spring, a daughter accepts her widowed father’s wishes for her to marry and start her own life rather than to take care of him, after a pivotal scene where the two see a Noh play and the father sparks her jealousy after sharing glances with a suspected love interest. And while this film took place only two years after the newly introduced Constitution of Japan and the subsequent modernization that took place, it is seeing an ancient play—the Water Iris, which pays homage to the Amida Buddha—that causes the daughter to reflect on the impermanent and transient nature of relationships and close the door on a specific season of her life.

Neither a modernist nor a traditionalist, Ozu frequently adopts the same tongue-in-cheek attitude when depicting facets of contemporary life in Japan. As Hasumi notes, curry rice shops and other small restaurants where salarymen go to get a quick lunch are presented samsarically as “little more than sites of momentary passage, not places where people take root”—and as time goes on, the latter increasingly give way to the former. 

Hasumi notes, too, how Ozu can be almost Felliniesque in the “exaggerated unnaturalness” with which he portrays working-class crowds. Characters walk with “mechanical motion,” their movements as uniform as the uniforms they wear. During morning and evening commutes, “no casual chatter or impulsive behavior is permitted,” and the narrative pauses. In his later films, this momentary disappearance of individual personality is reflected in both acting and editing: Where, in earlier films, shots of clocks, windows, and other everyday objects are always connected to someone’s perspective, later ones unlink them from any particular character. As a result, the shots are “left to drift, unsubjectivized, in midair”—a practice that, Hasumi says, likely explains why many Western critics came to label them as “empty.”

Perhaps the best way to become acquainted with Ozu—aside, of course, from watching his films—is by reading Hasumi’s Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Originally published in Japanese in 1983 and translated into English in 2024, it treats its subject the way the fabled Zen masters of Alan Watts’s lectures treat their students: not by explaining what the Ozuesque actually is but by ruling out what it is not. Critiquing previous studies—by Richie, Schrader, and even Bordwell—Hasumi advocates for a purely formalist approach to the director’s work, one that urges viewers to forget what they think they know about Zen, Japan, or Ozu himself, and focus exclusively on what appears on- screen. Far from limiting, this approach reveals Ozu’s filmmaking to be much more versatile and multifaceted than generally accepted.

Forget, and you’ll find that Ozu’s films are not the cinematic equivalent of the overly commercialized “gratuitous, go-with-the-flow lubricant” we sometimes call Zen but portraits of “conditions, customs, and sensibilities” in states of rapid transformation, noteworthy in their impermanence. Forget, and you’ll notice that many of his supposedly gentle gestures are actually quite exaggerated and unusual, that early films like Days of Youth, in which a character chases one of his skis down the slope, contain an element of slapstick reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, or that several of his late-career household sets—so often praised for being true to life—are curiously devoid of staircases. Forget, and you’ll understand that shots that initially seem narratively or stylistically similar actually use that similarity to highlight important differences.

Forget, and you’ll notice that that shot of the vase in Late Spring is not a shot of a vase at all but a shot of a vase inside a room, with a floor and walls and shoji screens, illuminated by moonlight and patterned by the shadows of plants blowing in the wind. “Even a shot of a vase floating in a void,” Hasumi writes, “would not be a ‘shot of a vase’ but a shot of a vase floating in a void.”