the sacrifices
by
Douglas Messerli
Tadao
Ikeda, Yasujirō Ozu, and Takao Anai (screenplay), Yasujirō Ozu (director) 父ありき(Chichi
ariki) (There Was a Father) / 1942
One
might justifiably read Yasujirō Ozu’s 1942 film, There Was a Father, as a statement not only of the masculine bond
between father and son, but how that bond is crucial to the survival of order
in pre-World War II Japan. Certainly the father of this film, in this case,
Shuhei
Horikawa (Chishū Ryū), is a gentle
authoritarian who imposes his views, as a mathematics teacher, not only upon
his loving pupils, but upon his adoring son, Ryohei (Haruhiko Tsuda). A
trusting and good boy, whose only complaints seem, at first, to be devoted the
decayed condition of his shoes—his father is happy to buy him new shoe polish,
but argues that the shoes are still wearable—Ryohei is a model son, who clearly
will go on to high school and college, playing an important role himself in the
society as is destined by his education.
Throughout this film, moreover, the father,
living as a widower (we never know the cause of his wife’s death) willingly
embraces the pre-World War II Japanese moral values, even going so far as determining
that he is no longer worthy of his position when, a senior class trip he
oversees ends in the accidental death of one of his pupils by drowning. The
students who took the outlawed boat excursion had been told of the dangers of
the waters, and had sneaked away from the general group to take their deadly
voyage; yet Shuhei still blames himself, quitting his position as teacher as he
attempts to sort out his life in his hometown if Ueda, where he decides to
enroll his son in a Junior High School, while he travels to the distant Tokyo
in order to find work in order to support his son’s education.
The day before he reveals this change to
his son, the two go on a fishing trip, where the two are shown, as critic Tony
Rayns describes it, “casting their lines in unison and then the boy standing
stock-still as his father casts again. The effect of that momentary refusal to
act in sync is indescribably poignant,” which is reitereated in the dinner-time
discussions between father and son when Shuehi reveals to Ryohei his plans.
When the boy breaks down in tears, the father utters the horrible cliché that
all males have been forced to hear from time immemorial: men don’t cry.
Buy Ryohei does cry, even when, after
suffering alone for years, he has achieved the position of a chemistry
professor at a provincial school. After all the years of have living apart, Ryohei
tells the visiting father—who has supported him by becoming a clerk in a Tokyo
textile plant—that he plans to leave his teaching post and join him in the
capital city. His father reacts strongly, insisting that it is the boy’s
destiny to teach (we have already witnessed the young man blithely explaining
to his students the chemical power of TNT), to help educate Japan’s future soldiers.
This time, Ryohei is fully aware that adult males are not permitted tears, but
he cries nonetheless, and we feel in his welling tears the years and years of
loneliness and loss of familial life his has suffered. If Ozu is not telling us
that something is amiss in this pre-war society, then I feel we’re not
responding to the obvious.
During Ryohei’s stay, his father and
Hirata are celebrated by their former students. Although the students tease and
even mock their former teachers, it is clear that they still admire and love
them. But in their celebrations we also see that the world has passed Shuhei
by. These former boys are now almost all married and have, at least two
children, one having already four. Shuhei and Hirata are now empty old men
whose lives have passed. And these young, virile men will soon all be going off
to war. To what purpose, we can only ask, has Shuhei and Hirata even educataed
them?
We cannot be sure of precisely what that
painful scene might actually have said about the war. The movie was censored by
General Douglas McArthur, and this scene, in particular, was highly edited. Yet
we know that the event surely has an effect on Shuhei and his dedication to the
status quo, for when he returns home, having too much to drink, he becomes ill
and dies soon after. Clearly, he has sensed that his time is over, a life lived
in obedience but without most of joys of loving and living life.
The last scene of the film show Ryohei
returning by train (a symbol throughout this film of the distances that keeps
father from son) with his new wife, an urn which holds his father ashes safely
stashed away in the overhead. Ryohei, as we perceive, has become a man in his
father’s mold, who will blindly go off to war, perhaps never to return to his
far-too obedient wife, himself having never been able to experience the true
ties of love he so desperately sought.
Many critics, including Rayns, have argued
that we do not really know what Ozu felt about the war. Ozu later served
military duty twice (even though we know that some of the joys he had in his
service was that we could take in Western movies such as Citizen Kane stationed in China and Singapore).
But I would argue that this threnody of a
film makes it quite clear that living one’s duty does not mean the same as
living one’s life. Even if later Ozu’s sons and daughters of the sad Toyko Story seem mean and selfish in
comparison with Ryohei’s loving obedience, they at least have their own lives
to live, with their own problems to solve. Ryohei has little ahead, even if he
survives the battles of the war. And, it is quite apparent, that he also is
unfit to be a teacher.
Los Angeles, June
25, 2017
Years ago I saw this touching, powerful movie.I always felt that Ozu believed in the old order much more than he let openly expressed even though he was fully aware of the human cost it involved. In some of his post war movies (for instance in Early Summer), there are passing references to or in the mis-en-scene the photograph of a son who was lost in the war. Do you remember the patriotic song everybody sings together in the final farewell dinner in the film? Ciao, Murat
ReplyDeleteYes, Murat. But to me it's clear they all suffer and lose their emotional beings because of it. Ozu was not a fighter against the status quo, that's certain. But I think it makes it quite clear there is no future in the self-sacrifice everyone has been asked to make.
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