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 (Chichi to musume) 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. Starring 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", succeeded by Early Summer (Bakushu, 1951) and Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari, 1953); 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.The surnames of the three Norikos in Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story are, respectively, Somiya, Mamiya and Hirayama. See Bordwell (1988), pp. 307, 316, 328.
Late Spring belongs to the type of Japanese cinema known as shomin-geki, 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". These films are characterized by, among other traits, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, a tendency towards very simple plots and the use of a generally static camera.
Late Spring was released on September 19, 1949, to critical acclaim in the Japanese press. In the following year, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. In 1972, the film was commercially released in the United States, again to very positive reviews. Late Spring has been referred to as the director's "most perfect" work, as "the definitive film of Ozu's master filmmaking approach and language" and has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema". In the 2012 version of Sight & Sounds decennial poll of "The Greatest Films of All Time", published by the British Film Institute (BFI), Late Spring appears as the second highest-ranking Japanese-language film on the list at number 15, behind Ozu's own Tokyo Story at number 3.
Plot The film opens at a tea ceremony. Professor Shukichi Somiya, a widower, has only one child, a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried daughter, Noriko, who takes care of the household and the everyday needs—cooking, cleaning, mending, etc.—of her father. On a shopping trip to Tokyo, Noriko encounters one of her father's friends, Professor Jo Onodera, who lives in Kyoto. Noriko knows that Onodera, who had been a widower like her father, has recently remarried, and she tells him that she finds the very idea of his remarriage distasteful, even "filthy." Onodera, and later her father, tease her for having such thoughts.
Shukichi's sister, Aunt Masa, convinces him that it is high time his daughter got married. Noriko is friendly with her father's assistant, Hattori, and Aunt Masa suggests that her brother ask Noriko if she might be interested in Hattori. When he does bring up the subject, however, Noriko laughs: Hattori has been engaged to another young woman for quite some time.
Undaunted, Masa pressures Noriko to meet with a marriageable young man, a Tokyo University graduate named Satake who, Masa believes, bears a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper, a favorite of Noriko. Noriko declines, explaining that she does not wish to marry anyone, because to do so would leave her father alone and helpless. Masa surprises Noriko by claiming that she is also trying to arrange a match between Shukichi and Mrs. Miwa, an attractive young widow known to Noriko. If Masa succeeds, Noriko would have no excuse.
At a Noh performance attended by Noriko and her father, the latter smilingly greets Mrs. Miwa, which triggers Noriko's jealousy. When her father later tries to talk her into going to meet Satake, he tells her that he intends to marry Mrs. Miwa. Devastated, Noriko reluctantly agrees to meet the young man and, to her surprise, has a very favorable impression of him. Under pressure from all sides, Noriko consents to the arranged marriage.
The Somiyas go on one last trip together before the wedding, visiting Kyoto. There they meet Professor Onodera and his family. Noriko changes her opinion of Onodera's remarriage when she discovers that his new wife is a nice person. While packing their luggage for the trip home, Noriko asks her father why they cannot simply stay as they are now, even if he does remarry – she cannot imagine herself any happier than living with and taking care of him. Shukichi admonishes her, saying that she must embrace the new life she will build with Satake, one in which he, Shukichi, will have no part, because "that's the order of human life and history." Noriko asks her father's forgiveness for her "selfishness" and agrees to go ahead with the marriage.
Noriko's wedding day arrives. At home just before the ceremony, both Shukichi and Masa admire Noriko, who is dressed in a traditional wedding costume. Noriko thanks her father for the care he has taken of her throughout her life and leaves in a hired car for the wedding. Afterwards, Aya, a divorced friend of Noriko's, goes with Shukichi to a favored eatery. Over celebratory sake, he confesses that his claim that he was going to marry Mrs. Miwa was a ruse to persuade Noriko to get married herself. Aya, touched by his sacrifice, promises to visit him often. Shukichi returns home alone to an empty house. He sits down in a chair and starts to peel an apple with a small knife. The apple peel grows into a long continuous ribbon before it finally drops loose onto the floor. Shukichi slowly lowers his head in silence.
Cast Actor Character name (English) Character name (Japanese) Rōmaji (Japanese order) Chishū Ryū Shūkichi Somiya 曾宮 周吉 Somiya Shūkichi Setsuko Hara Noriko Somiya 曾宮 紀子 Somiya Noriko Yumeji Tsukioka Aya Kitagawa 北川 アヤ Kitagawa Aya Haruko Sugimura Masa Taguchi 田口 マサ Taguchi Masa Hohi Aoki Katsuyoshi Taguchi 田口 勝義 Taguchi Katsuyoshi Jun Usami Shuichi Hattori 服部 昌一 Hattori Shūichi Kuniko Miyake Akiko Miwa 三輪 秋子 Miwa Akiko Masao Mishima Jo Onodera 小野寺 譲 Onodera Jō Yoshiko Tsubouchi Kiku Onodera小野寺 きく Onodera Kiku Yōko Katsuragi Misako Toyoko Takahashi Shige Jun Tanizaki Seizo Hayashi Yōko Benisawa a teahouse proprietress
Production The Occupation censorship Censorship problems with Late Spring The central event of Late Spring is the marriage of the heroine to a man she has met only once through a single arranged meeting. This immediately presented a problem for the censors of the American Occupation. According to film scholar Kyoko Hirano, these officials "considered feudalistic the Japanese custom of arranged meetings for prospective marriage partners, miai, because the custom seemed to them to downgrade the importance of the individual." Hirano notes that, had this policy against showing arranged marriages onscreen been rigidly enforced, Late Spring could never have been made. In the original synopsis (which the filmmakers were required to submit to the censorship before production could be approved), Noriko's decision to marry was presented as a collective family decision, not an individual choice, and the censors apparently rejected this.
The synopsis explained that the trip to Kyoto by father and daughter, just prior to Noriko's marriage, occurs so she can visit her dead mother's grave. This motivation is absent from the finished film, possibly because the censors would have interpreted such a visit as "ancestor worship," a practice they frowned upon.
Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the American bombings was removed. In the script, Shukichi remarks to Onodera's wife in Kyoto that her city is a very nice place, unlike Tokyo, with all its ruins. The censors deleted the reference to ruins (as an implied critique of the Allies) and, in the finished film, the word "hokorippoi" ("dusty") was substituted as a description of Tokyo.
The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the Hollywood star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko's (unseen) suitor Satake, who is described by the female characters as attractive, and was thus flattering to the American actor.
Sometimes, the censors' demands seemed irrational. A line about Noriko's health having been negatively affected by "her work after being conscripted by the [Japanese] Navy during the war" was changed to "the forced work during the war," as if even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect.
At the script phase of the censorship process, the censors demanded that the character of Aunt Masa, who at one point finds a lost change purse on the ground and keeps it as a kind of totem of good fortune for the wedding succeeding, should be shown handing over the purse to the police. Ozu responded by turning the situation, in the finished film, into a kind of running gag in which Shukichi repeatedly (and futilely) urges his sister to turn the purse in to the police. This change has been called "a mocking kind of partial compliance with the censorship."
Ozu's alleged "subversion" of censorship One scholar, Lars-Martin Sorensen, has claimed that Ozu's partial aim in making the film was to present an ideal of Japan at odds with that which the Occupation wanted to promote, and that he successfully subverted the censorship in order to accomplish this. "The controversial and subversive politico-historical 'message' of the film is... that the beauty of tradition, and of subjugation of individual whims to tradition and history, by far outshines the imported and imposed western trends of occupied Japan."
Sorensen uses as an example the scene early in the film in which Noriko and her father's assistant Hattori are bicycling towards the beach. They pass a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign and another sign, in English, warning that the weight capacity of a bridge over which they are riding is 30 tons: quite irrelevant information for this young couple, but perfectly appropriate for American military vehicles that might pass along that road. (Neither the Coke sign nor the road warning are referred to in the script approved by the censors.) Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."
On the other hand, Late Spring, more than any other film Ozu made, is suffused with the symbols of Japanese tradition: the tea ceremony that opens the film, the temples at Kamakura, the Noh performance that Noriko and Shukichi attend, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto. Sorensen argues that these images of historical landmarks "were intended to inspire awe and respect for the treasures of ancient Japan in contrast to the impurity of the present." Sorensen also claims that, to Ozu's audience, "the exaltation of Japanese tradition and cultural and religious heritage must have brought remembrances of the good old days when Japan was still winning her battles abroad and nationalism reached its peak." To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal, Sorensen argues that contemporary reviews of the film "show that Ozu (the director and his personal convictions) was considered inseparable from his films, and that he was considered a conservative purist."
Sorensen concludes that such censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. "One of the positive side effects of being prohibited from airing one's views openly and directly is that it forces artists to be creative and subtle in their ways of expression."
Ozu's collaborators