The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Although Yasujiro Ozu had been making films at a prodigious rate since the late 1920s, it was not until he made The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family in 1941 that he became a box office winner in Japan.  The subject of the film is one that will be most familiar to devotees of Ozu, one of his 'home dramas' (shomin-geki) in which he explores the intricacies of family relationships, revealing the moral strengths and weaknesses of ordinary people within a domestic context.  Although Ozu's work had attracted favourable attention from the critics before this film, this was his first major commercial success.  The film capitalised on the burgeoning popularity of family dramas in the aftermath of the war between China and Japan in the late 1930s (a war in which Ozu himself had recently served).

The plot of The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family owes something to Shakespeare's King Lear and would later be recycled by Ozu for his later, better known, film Tokyo Story (1953).  When an old man dies suddenly, leaving behind an avalanche of debt, his wife and youngest daughter find themselves at the mercy of his four older children.  The youngest and seemingly most self-centred son immediately ducks his responsibilities by going off to China to look for work.  His three older siblings make a half-hearted show of filial duty but, one by one, they pass over the two homeless women so that they end up living in a dilapidated beach house.  When the youngest son returns, he takes the moral high ground and persuades his mother and sister to join him in China, but he then declares himself an 'imperfect hero', running off to the beach to avoid his sister's attempts to marry him off to her friend.

Ozu adheres to a surprisingly unromantic view of family life throughout his films, and it is in The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and Tokyo Story that he is particularly scathing about human frailty.  In both of these films, there is good and bad in virtually every character and no one is beyond redemption.  Ozu makes it easy for us engage with each of his characters and, even when they behave abominably, we continue to have sympathy for them and understand why they do what they do.  In the film about the Todas, the family members have to deal with the seismic shock of the discovery of their father's ruinous financial arrangements.  Those who have themselves taken on family responsibilities are fearful of losing their place in society and, understandably, look upon their widowed mother and young sister, whose arranged marriage has fallen through, as an encumbrance.

It is easy for the unencumbered Shojiro to flaunt his moral superiority and dish out lectures about filial obligation to his morally bankrupt siblings.  The instant he has made a pact with his sister to take care of her and their mother, he goes off to amuse himself - clearly he has no intention of taking on the shackles of domesticity for himself just yet.  Shojiro may think he is a hero, but for all his fine words he is no more endearing than the self-important brothers and sisters who play pass the parcel with their mother.  The only character who seems to be beyond reproach is the youngest daughter, Setsuko, who equates to the one sympathetic youngster in Tokyo Story, the young war widow Noriko.

The dramatic changes that took place in Japanese society in the decade between the making of The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and Tokyo Story is encapsulated in the personal stories of Setsuko and Noriko.  In 1941, the only future open to a woman in Setsuko's social position was to find a wealthy husband; the option of finding work for herself and becoming financial independent was not available to her, as it would be for Noriko after WWII.  Whereas Setsuko is entirely dependent on the generosity of others until a suitable husband can be found for her, Noriko at least has the opportunity of standing on her own two feet and choosing her own future.  In his later film Tokyo Twilight (1957), Ozu's antipathy for female emancipation in post-war Japan is revealed in the starkest terms: broken marriages, neglected children and unwanted pregnancies.  Across three decades, Ozu's series of home dramas form an insightful tapestry depicting the disintegration of the family unit and its declining status as an essential building block of Japanese society.  Such was the price of modernity.

Film Synopsis

The Todas, a respectable, upper-class Japanese family, gather for a family photograph on the occasion of their father's 69th birthday.  A short time later, the father suffers a fatal heart attack and his grown-up children - two sons and three daughters - receive the shocking news that he was a guarantor for a now bankrupt company.  To clear their father's debts, his family have no choice but to sell his house, land and possessions, making his wife and youngest daughter Setsuko homeless.  As the youngest son Shojiro goes of to China to look for work, his older brother Shinichiro takes in Setsuko  and his mother.  It isn't long before Shinichiro's wife falls out with her unwelcome lodgers, and so the two homeless women move in with the eldest sister, Chizuko.  The latter reprimands Setsuko when she says she intends finding a job and then rebukes her mother for not telling her about her son's truancy from school.  Once again, Setsuko and her mother have to move, but so as not to inconvenience the middle daughter and her husband, they decide to stay in the run-down family villa by the sea.  A year later, Shojiro returns to join the family in commemorating their father's death.  He is appalled when he discovers how his mother and youngest sister have been treated by his older siblings...