There Was a Father (1942)
Directed by Yasujirô Ozu

Film Review

Yasujirô Ozu wrote the first script for There Was a Father in 1937, shortly after completing work on The Only Son (1936), with which it shares many similarities, notably its heartrending account of the separation of a child and a self-sacrificing parent.  Ozu was unable to make the film at the time as he was conscripted into the Japanese Army in September 1937 and spent the next two years stationed in occupied China.  On his return to Shôchiku studio in 1939, Ozu immediately began writing the script for The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, but refused to make the film as he disagreed with several changes required by the military censors.  It was only after The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941), his first significant commercial success, that Ozu was minded to return to There Was a Father, although the script went through a substantial revision before it went into production.

There Was a Father was the closest that Ozu ever got to making a wartime propaganda film, although its explicit propaganda content (a few patriotic songs) is minimal and ended up being excised (and destroyed) by the US army censor after WWII.  What we have now is probably nearer to the film that Ozu, left to his own devices, would have made - a home drama that pays lip service to the military leaders' expectations with its emphasis on duty and manly self-restraint, but one that never lets us forget the incredible human cost that inevitably goes with such noble self-sacrifice.  The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and There Was a Father were the only two films that Ozu completed during the Asia-Pacific War and whilst neither strictly counts as a propaganda film both were favoured by the military and were seen to promote wholesome Japanese values, filial devotion being read as a metaphor for diehard patriotism.

Ozu seldom took elements from his own life and plugged these directly into his film, but there is an unmistakable autobiographical component to There Was a Father, which adds to its uniqueness.  Like the son depicted in the film, Ozu was separated from his father at an early age and attended school in his father's hometown (Matsusaka in Mie Prefecture) whilst his father was away in Tokyo, earning money to support his family.  For the next ten years, Ozu hardly saw his father and was reared by his mother.  The father-son relationship figures strongly in a number of Ozu films but nowhere is it explored with such depth, eloquence and heart-aching sincerity as in There Was a Father, one of the director's most personal and most powerfully moving films.

Picking up from where he left off in The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, Ozu takes the theme of filial duty and develops it further, in a way that appears to lend its weight to 'national policy' but which in fact seems to caution against blind devotion to an ideal.  It is an abject sense of guilt, not paternalistic ideology, that compels the father, Horikawa, to act as he does, first giving up his job and then separating from his son in what he believes is the best interests of his son.  The demands he places on his son, Ryohei, are well-meaning but appear heartlessly misguided and Ozu makes no attempt to conceal the misery that Ryohei experiences as a result of his father's stubbornness, first as a little boy, then as a young man.  Horikawa reprimands his son for crying, but at the same time we feel his own anguish, revealed to us with sublime subtlety through a remarkably controlled performance from Ozu's finest actor, Chishû Ryû.

There Was a Father may be a film in which Ozu tackles some of his favourite themes, with as much delicacy and compassion as anything else in his oeuvre, yet it somehow stands apart.  Far darker in tone than much of Ozu's other work and rendered ambiguous by the circumstances under which the film was made, it is permeated by an almost overwhelming sense of remorse, which can be interpreted both as disillusionment with Japan's expansionist ambitions of the 1940s (which would involve the sacrifice of a generation of young men) and Ozu's personal regret for not having been able to become better acquainted with his own father.  In the film's closing sequences, Ozu quietly subverts the 'duty before all' message that he hammers home in previous scenes by showing the damage such stubborn high-mindedness can lead to - a son lamenting the father he never knew and a heart broken beyond repair.

Film Synopsis

Shuhei Horikawa is a schoolteacher and widower who is devotedly attached to his ten-year-old son, Ryohei.  During a class outing, some of his pupils disobey his instructions and go off on a boating trip, in which one of them drowns.  Shuhei blames himself for the tragedy and immediately gives up his job.  He returns to his father's town with his son but has difficulty finding work.  To pay for his son's education, Shuhei moves to Tokyo and soon finds a post as a clerk in a factory, whilst Ryohei stays behind in Ueno to attend boarding school.  Fifteen years later, Ryohei has graduated from university and works as a teacher in Akita.  He has rarely seen his father over the intervening years and wants nothing better than to live with him in Tokyo.  Shuhei is moved by his son's intent but insists that he must not give up his teaching job in Akita.  It is the duty of every father to provide for his son, and the duty of every son to dedicate himself to whatever career he chooses for himself...