Yasujiro Ozu Filmed Daughters Leaving Home and Never Married Himself

Yasujiro Ozu

Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 12, 1903 Fukagawa, Tokyo, Japan
Died	December 12, 1963 (60)
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Tokyo Story, Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon
Awards	Sutherland Trophy, London Film Festival · Mainichi Film · Blue Ribbon · Medal with Purple Ribbon · Japan Art Academy Prize · Order of the Rising Sun, 4th class

Yasujiro Ozu’s grave at Engaku-ji, in Kamakura, carries no name. One character is cut into the stone he shares with his mother: mu, nothingness. It fits the Ozu that critics assembled after his death, the monk of Japanese cinema, the director of empty rooms and teapots, of a camera that sat on the floor and never moved. It fits the man less well. Ozu loved Ernst Lubitsch, drank his scripts into existence one bottle of sake at a time, and spent two years in China as a soldier in a war he recorded in his diary with a squad leader’s flat precision.

He directed fifty-four films, and the ones the world remembers keep returning to the same room: a widowed parent, a grown daughter, a marriage that will leave the house empty. In Late Spring and again in An Autumn Afternoon, a father steers his daughter toward a wedding the camera never attends. The man who kept filming that departure never married. He lived with his mother until she died, months before he shot his last picture.

Fukagawa, the Tokyo merchant district where Ozu was born on 12 December 1903, the second son of a fertilizer dealer, saw little of him. He grew up largely in his father’s home town of Matsusaka, in Mie Prefecture, where he cut classes to sit in cinemas. Seeing the American war epic Civilization as a schoolboy settled the question of what he wanted to do. After a failed university entrance exam and a year as a substitute teacher at a mountain school, he joined the Shochiku studio in 1923 as a camera assistant, against his father’s wishes.

The young Ozu looked nothing like his later legend. He was a “modern boy” in Western clothes, and his silent comedies borrowed openly from Lubitsch, King Vidor and William Wellman; on several scripts he signed himself James Maki. His debut, a period film written with Kogo Noda, is lost, as are seventeen of his silent features. Noda stayed, as his co-writer for the rest of his career. The low camera that became Ozu’s signature first appeared in one of the short, star-free comedies the studio wanted in 1928.

I Was Born, But… was the turn. A silent comedy about two boys who catch their father clowning for his boss, it was the first Ozu film to top Kinema Junpo’s annual critics’ list, and it already holds the subject he never left: what a family sees when it finally looks at its own head. He came late to sound, as he would come late to colour. The Only Son, his first talkie, arrived in 1936, five years after Japan’s first talking picture.

Then the army took him. Conscripted in September 1937, Ozu landed in Shanghai with an infantry regiment that handled chemical weapons, was promoted to sergeant, and fought across central China until July 1939.

This is the part of the record the serene Ozu has trouble holding. His published diaries from the spring of 1939 refer to his unit’s use of gas. A letter from 1938 and a diary entry from January 1939, documented by the film historian Masumi Tanaka in his 2005 book on Ozu and the war, set out the military comfort station his men were assigned to: the tickets and prophylactics issued, the rates, the three Korean and twelve Chinese women held there. A separate wartime diary he forbade anyone to publish. None of it reaches the screen. The films he made after coming home are about duty and quiet loss, and the Zen reading of his work, built largely by Western critics after he died, has little room for what that quiet was made of.

A second call-up in 1943 sent him to Singapore to shoot a propaganda documentary that was never finished. He spent the time reading and watching American films the army had on hand, Citizen Kane among them. When Japan surrendered he destroyed the footage. He came home in February 1946, having given his place on the first repatriation boat, won in a lottery, to a man more anxious to leave.

What followed is the work the world knows. Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story, each with Setsuko Hara as a young woman named Noriko, narrowed his field of vision to the family and found everything inside it. In Tokyo Story an elderly couple travel to the capital to see children too busy to receive them, and only their widowed daughter-in-law, whose husband did not come back from the war, makes time for them. Chishū Ryū, the actor who played Ozu’s fathers for decades, sits at its centre.

The style is easy to describe and almost impossible to copy. Ozu worked with a 50mm lens, set the camera one or two feet off the floor, replaced fades and dissolves with straight cuts and still shots of a building or a kettle, and in his colour films stopped moving the camera at all. He chose German Agfa stock for Equinox Flower, his first film in colour, because he liked its reds. When an assistant once suggested that characters in conversation ought to seem to look at each other, Ozu shot a scene both ways, compared them and declared there was no difference.

Japan honoured him early. Six of his films topped the Kinema Junpo poll, and in 1959 he became the first film-maker to receive the Japan Art Academy Prize. The rest of the world took longer, because the assumption at home was that his films were too Japanese for foreigners. Tokyo Story reached the London Film Festival only in 1958, where it won the Sutherland Trophy. In 2012, 358 directors polled by Sight and Sound voted it the greatest film ever made, and ten years later the critics’ poll still placed it fourth.

Ozu died of throat cancer in Tokyo on 12 December 1963, his sixtieth birthday, a year after An Autumn Afternoon. The arguments over him have not stopped. Wim Wenders went looking for his Tokyo in Tokyo-Ga, and Hou Hsiao-hsien made Café Lumière for his centenary. The latest is Daniel Raim’s documentary The Ozu Diaries, which premiered in the Venice Classics section in 2025 and reached television on Turner Classic Movies in May 2026 alongside twenty of his films, built from his journals, letters, drawings and home movies and told largely in his own words.

That is the right instrument. The diaries hold the sergeant noting comfort-station rates and the writer who measured a script’s progress with Noda in empty sake bottles at a mountain house in Tateshina, and the films hold only what he decided to keep. Every one of them argues the same thing: the event that changes a life happens off screen, and the camera’s job is to stay in the room afterwards.

Featured Films

Tags: Japanese cinema, Yasujiro Ozu, An Autumn Afternoon, Chishū Ryū, Late Spring, Setsuko Hara

Related People

Kenji Mizoguchi

Takeshi Kitano

Hayao Miyazaki

Hirokazu Kore-eda

Masaki Kobayashi

Shinya Tsukamoto