Ozu in Transition: The Coming of Sound and Family Melodrama

This chapter deals with the period of the mid-1930s, when Ozu had to face new challenges from the pressure of commercialism to the coming of sound technology. The main question addresses whether and how the director maintained his critical view of Japanese modernity while using mass-oriented genre formats. Firstly, the conversion to sound in the Japanese film industry is investigated in relation to how it influenced Ozu’s filmmaking. It is followed by a discussion of Ozu’s Kihachi series (such as An Inn in Tokyo (1935)) and woman’s films (such as Woman of Tokyo (1933) and Dragnet Girl (1933)), as an evidence of the director’s expanding generic interest from the middle class into the working class and women. These generic terms will be finally confirmed through textual analysis of Ozu’s films to examine how Ozu’s everyday realism, while working within the context of established generic formats (such as ‘failed moga’ narrative in woman’s film), remains as a critical view of the Japanese modernity.