1 - Ozu's Tokyo Story and the “Recasting” of McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow

Summary

Critics have frequently observed that Ozu Yasujiro's Tokyo monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953) was inspired by Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow (1937). David Bordwell sees Ozu as “recasting” the American film – borrowing from it, adapting it – and briefly mentions that there are similarities in story, theme, and plot structure. Indeed, these similarities are striking. Both films focus on an elderly couple who discover that their grown children regard them as a burden; both films are structured as journeys in which the couple are shuffled from one household to another; both films explore much of the same thematic material (e.g., sibling self-centeredness and parental disillusionment); and both films are about the human condition – the cyclical pattern of life with its concomitant joys and sorrows – and the immediate social realities that affect and shape that condition: in McCarey's film, the Great Depression; in Ozu's, the intensified postwar push toward industrialization. Primarily somber in tone but possessing rich and gentle humor, both films belong to a genre that in Japanese cinema is called the shomin-geki, films dealing with the everyday lives of the lower middle classes.

Ozu never saw the McCarey film. But he did not really need to, since his scriptwriter, Noda Kogo, had and retained fond memories of it. Furthermore, as a lifelong student of American film and as a director at Shochiku Studios, Ozu had firsthand knowledge of the American influence on Japanese film in general and the shomin-geki in particular.