Social Context and Stylistic Significance of Ozu Yasujiro’s Banshun

Here's a paper I did for a class on Japanese culture a couple terms back:

          Late Spring (晩春 Banshun) was my personal introduction to the understated yet mesmerizing cinema of Yasujiro Ozu.  It stood out to me as a beautiful and tender family melodrama on the one hand, presenting an interesting intellectual alternative to Hollywood’s stylistic standards on the other, while somehow giving us a straightforward narrative.  It was my introduction to the Japanese shomin-geki (middle class family drama).  Feeling a particularly attachment to the main character in her transitional dilemma (my wife and I had just returned from our honeymoon), I related strongly to Late Spring’s overt themes.

The film is a picture of postwar reconstruction Japan and the social changes that were taking place at the time.  Ozu’s editing and composition are also of great relevance to us, as his approach is so distinctly Japanese, giving the viewer a traditionalist perspective to the actions which unfold before us on the screen.  I will attempt to briefly examine and contextualize both the narrative themes, as well as the cultural significance of Ozu’s editing choices.

            Ozu uses the film’s narrative to examine ongoing changes in societal values 4 years after the end of the war, giving us a snapshot of the postwar reconstruction from the perspective of a typical middle class family.  Noriko lives with her father, an aging professor, who wishes that she will soon marry.  Her friends and meddling aunt are of no help and Noriko finally relents to this inevitability and marries, leaving her father alone.  The final shot of the film is one of waves on a beach, evoking again the sense of eternal transition.  The exploration of this theme would be of particular interest to a Japanese audience in 1949, whose society was undergoing a major transitional period following the end of World War II, the reconstruction marking the beginning of a new way of life for the Japanese.

         Noriko’s dilemma, of being a young person caught between encroaching western ideals, the traditional and familial expectations of a Japanese daughter, and her own desires.  As the film’s themes were so clearly relatable to many Japanese during the reconstruction, the film won the prestigious Kinema Junpo award for the best Japanese film of the year in 1949.  Further development of feminist ideals and the natural corresponding conflict aroused by traditional Japanese values were ongoing social issues.  The place of women in society has been a recurring issue in Japan since the advent of the Yuzu Nembutsu school of Pure Land Buddhism brought into question the role of women in religion.  This trend would continue thanks to newly emergent secular values (commercialism, liberation) brought on by the occupation. 

           Notably, in spite of his traditionalism, Ozu portrays Noriko’s decision as hers to make, though heart-wrought, and his film welcomes these new influences (a joke about Noriko’s suitor looking like Gary Cooper- groan).  Ozu remains very Japanese though, and when Noriko is to meet Satake, it is at a traditional Noh performance, serving as a nod to Japanese cinema’s strong influence from traditional theatre.

            The film is also of great stylistic significance to us, particularly Ozu’s use of shot and editing technique evoke the wabi aesthetic; order, quiet and calm are all highly valued here and the transient nature of life is a major focus.  In line with this, Ozu’s visual style and composition are highly contrived to evoke a natural aesthetic.  Ozu uses unusually long establishing shots, with a focus on the natural, which slows the pace of the film and dilutes the drama of the unfolding events, giving the film a stronger structural significance.  What results is like a series of snapshots from an ephemeral world, bits and pieces of Noriko’s life. 

            This is clearly an intentional effort on Ozu’s part, as he goes to great lengths to provide the viewer with a series of strictly static shots, all from a very low angle, mimicking the point of view as if seated on a tatami mat.  Even the shot in which Noriko is taking a bike ride with Hatori (Prof. Sumiya’s assistant), while the camera is moving with the riders, it is kept equidistant and at a low angle relative to its subjects throughout the scene.  They are kept center frame, barely moving,  giving the viewer, again, the impression of a still photograph.

The long establishing shots play a further role, in interrupting the narrative continuity, subverting our expectations as viewers; where a Hollywood melodrama from this period would highlight Noriko’s wedding as the climax of the film, in Ozu it’s completely consumed by a narrative ellipse.  We are given establishing shots for an art exhibit that we know occurred in the film’s plot, but is completely ignored in the diegesis, we never see the marriage, their first meeting, or even the (allegedly) handsome Satake.  This focus on the all of life’s little dramas makes Noriko’s predicament all the more personal and real, and I think is the whole point of Late Spring.  That this impermanence of life and time makes all of these little dramas just as important as the Hollywood climaxes.  In fact, these little dramas are really what give life its meaning, a profound statement, which Ozu makes reliant largely on a traditional Japanese perspective.