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confronted with almost caustic bits of realism, such as a ‘thousand-stitch belt’ (senninbari), one of the many that were communally made by civilians and given to servicemen to raise morale, being described as crawling with ‘goddesses of mercy’, apparently a military euphemism for ‘lice’. Ozu was sometimes scornful of the sanitised, reverential tone of other directors’ war films. The tone of this unmade script seems closer in American terms to Samuel Fuller than John Ford. The two films which were actually made lay stress on self-sacrifice as a virtues in families as much as in servicemen. The tone of The Land of our Parents so Far Away is very different, coarse and almost nihilistic in its militarism, to judge by the song sung at one point, to a traditional tune: We take a piss from the Great Wall of China And make a rainbow over the Gobi. As the fog clears in London See the koinobori [traditional carp banners] fluttering high! In the streets of Chicago thick with gangsters Raise a memorial stone for our grandchildren to remember us by . . . Nothing about the glory of the Emperor or the justice of the cause, just global rampage and death-wish. It’s possible to fantasise a narrative in which Ozu deliberately sabotaged the propaganda film he 234
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was commissioned to make by taking an objectionable tone – as an ex-censor himself he could hardly claim ignorance of the rules – and was consequently punished by being drafted in June 1943 (he had already seen action). This seems rather overdramatic, in fact positively Hollywood, but in the absence of evidence about why the film wasn’t made it isn’t fair to assume that Ozu was fully committed to the imperialistic project either. Still, if I’m saying that censorship enriched Ozu’s procedures when he came to make Late Spring, I have to acknowledge the force of the same proposition as applied to the earlier set of restrictions. Noel Burch goes further, suggesting in his 1979 book To the Distant Observer that the two wartime films, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and There Was a Father, represent ‘the plateau/peak of Ozu’s mature development’. His argument is that Western film conventions never really dovetailed with traditional Japanese aesthetics, so that the closing of cultural borders associated with the rise of militarism had the fringe benefit of allowing Japanese film-makers to refine their own style. By this reckoning the cultural atmosphere of Japanese fascism, unlike its European counterparts, wasn’t necessarily retrogressive in artistic terms. This is a point of view that takes some absorbing, pulling apart as it does the tidy join we’re used to making between oppressive regimes and artistic 235

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confronted with almost caustic bits of realism, such as a ‘thousand-stitch belt’ (senninbari), one of the many that were communally made by civilians and given to servicemen to raise morale, being described as crawling with ‘goddesses of mercy’, apparently a military euphemism for ‘lice’. Ozu was sometimes scornful of the sanitised, reverential tone of other directors’ war films.

The tone of this unmade script seems closer in American terms to Samuel Fuller than John Ford. The two films which were actually made lay stress on self-sacrifice as a virtues in families as much as in servicemen. The tone of The Land of our Parents so Far Away is very different, coarse and almost nihilistic in its militarism, to judge by the song sung at one point, to a traditional tune:

We take a piss from the Great Wall of China And make a rainbow over the Gobi. As the fog clears in London See the koinobori [traditional carp banners] fluttering high! In the streets of Chicago thick with gangsters Raise a memorial stone for our grandchildren to remember us by . . .

Nothing about the glory of the Emperor or the justice of the cause, just global rampage and death-wish.

It’s possible to fantasise a narrative in which Ozu deliberately sabotaged the propaganda film he

234

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