Final Assignment: "Late Spring"

            Japanese people smile, not simply because something is funny, but also because they have certain feelings to hide in their minds. They are such feelings as anger, sorrow, jealousy, or even the very feeling you want to hide such emotions as such. Japanese smile so as to hide those ‘shameful’ feelings, so as not to let those feelings known to others (or even to themselves). In so doing, they try to keep the harmony in their community --- community without argument and conflict --- they belong to. Honne­ (your personal feelings/reactions) and Tatemae (your feelings/reactions required to show in such community) are certainly good concepts to account for Japanese people’s behavior, and their smile is, as it were, the wall that separates their Honne and Tatemae. As a Japanese, you employ smile to show your conformity to the outside community and at the same time to hide your inner Honne that often contradict with Tatemae.

            Ozu Yasujiro’s “Late Spring” was released in 1949. It is considered as one of his representative works. Aspect ratio is 1:33:1, the ratio typical to silent films, although “Late Spring” is a sound film. The basic plot is the serious (and sometimes comical) struggle between a father who wants his daughter to marry and his daughter who does not want to marry in any ways.

“Late Spring,” along with his later works “Early Summer” and “Tokyo Story,” is entitled ‘Noriko Trilogy.’ Noriko is a woman who appears in these three different stories by the same name, with similar personality. The actress is the same too, Hara Setsuko, whose distinctive character makes “Late Spring” as what “Late Spring” is.

What is distinctive about Noriko, or Hara Setsuko, is her smile. Throughout the story, Noriko keeps her smile. They are not all the same smiles, however. Rather, they are all different smiles behind which a variety of personal emotions is going back and forth. As long as you accept her smiles as just smiles, you will not be able to understand what is going on in her mind during the story. In order to approach the transition of her thinking, you have to read her uniform smiles of Tatemae that hide an always changing stream of Honne.

The very first scene is already illustrated by her smile as follows.

          This is the scene where Noriko and her aunt greet with each other at a tea ceremony. Ozu’s long takes of sceneries before this indicate that the scene is set at Kamakura, where Japanese traditional cities and temples remains. The setting of whole story is this Kamakura, the nearby areas facing with the Pacific Ocean (where I grew up) and Tokyo.

When she goes to Tokyo to buy something for his father, she happens to meet his old friend, Mr. Onodera. They go to a Japanese sake bar, where she hears a story that Mr. Onodera has remarried.  She says his remarriage is ‘distasteful’ somehow.

            Here, what she really means by ‘distasteful’ does not identifiable because she is smiling. Is she saying it seriously or is she just making fun of him? Mr. Onodera is also laughing, and he just keeps drinking. We have to suspend the judgment of the meaning of her smile yet.

One of Ozu’s cinematic techniques is a sudden introduction of an unidentifiable perspective. Audience is usually able to identify from whose perspective the camera is looking at a certain scene: A character, a bird-eye, and so forth. However, some perspectives provided with in Ozu’s films, including the extremely low angle, give audience an odd impression. Who or what is looking at this scene? These perspectives do not allow us audience to watch his films from the inside cinematic perspectives, but they ask us to watch from the outside, our own perspectives. Ozu’s films do not just let us see what we should see in them, but we need to make our own effort to find out something meaningful in his stories.

(A sudden introduction of a moving shot of Shichirigahama beach. 

It eventually turns out it is the perspective of Noriko and her father’s 

academic assistant riding on bicycles. A similar shot appears in 

“I Was Born, But…,” where a delivery boy finds the brothers 

doing calligraphy on the grass)

            After this scene, Noriko and the assistant, Hattori, continues a conversation (unknown to the audience) whether she is jealous or not. Hattori says she is not, but Noriko answers “Oh, but I am,” smiling.

It is a weird way of saying “I am jealous.” To say this with a hesitant or ashamed smile is understandable, but hers is neither hesitant nor ashamed. She rather looks confident about her statement, as if she says she know everything about herself. However, as a Japanese, you find something different beyond her smile. You assume in such a way that the more she looks confident outside, the more likely that a sort of worry and anxiety she would have inside her mind. I will come back later to explain what exactly those worry and anxiety are.

That night, Noriko and her father have a conversation about Hattori. The father, Mr. Somiya, wonders what Noriko thinks of Hattori. He is a worried father who wishes Noriko would marry as soon as possible, since she is 27 years old which is considered late for an average marriage period in those days (Few things are mentioned as to why she missed her marriage at an appropriate period other than Mr. Somiya’s words about WWII and words that ask about Noriko’s physical state. Facts about her past are unquestioned presumptions in this story). Mr. Somiya asks about Hattori because his sister, or Noriko’s aunt whom she met at the tea ceremony, has suggested that Noriko marry him. Yet, the father and the aunt did not know that Hattori has already been engaged with somebody else, which Noriko laughs at.

            What is intriguing here is the different camera positions of each shot. The upper one is a single shot of Noriko saying “He’s quite nice” about Hattori in response to her father’s question about him. In these words we cannot find any personal feelings of Norio. It sounds just a neutral remark. The close-shot looks indicating her confidence on her neutrality, just like the scene on the beach showed her confidence on her statement about jealous.

On the other hand, the second shot is still focusing on Noriko’s face, but now the camera is more detached as if saying she is less confident about her words. ‘She’ that is mentioned here is the woman Hattori is going to marry. From this distant camera position, Noriko’s compliment about her sounds less trustful and certain than the previous ones, and so does her smiling.

In the following day, Hattori invites Noriko to a music concert. She declines, however, saying that “She [Hattori’s marriage partner] will get the wrong idea.” Again, the camera is detached, making a two-shot of Noriko and Hattori. The perspective of the audience here is like that of an outsider rather than that of a character or a bird-eye that exist within the story. As an outsider, we do not consider her smile as a true smile any more. It is a faked one, and there must be something different behind this smile.

            It is after this scene that the smile fades away from Noriko’s face for the first time. She is on the way to home.

            If an assumption that Noriko’s smiles are just smiles was correct, this sudden single-shot of her and her disappointed face does not make sense. In order for it to make sense, other assumption has to be made.

            One thing you can assume at this point is that Noriko and Hattori would like each other. Otherwise they did not go cycling to the beach together, Hattori did not invite her to the concert, and Noriko was not depressed after she declined that invitation. But it does not explain why she declined him if she liked her. Was it really because she thought Hattori’s marriage partner “will get the wrong idea?” Why did she have to say she was jealous at the beach, and why did she call Mr. Onodera “filthy?”

            She came home to find her friend Aya visiting her. They talk about who of their friends have married and what happened to them. When Aya says that only Noriko and another girl have not married and that she should go to marry soon, Noriko answers, “I’m not going to,” again smiling.

Noriko is behaving as if trying to hide that moment when she walked the street with her depressed face a few hours ago. She is trying to hide it not only from Aya but from herself, since no one saw her then. If so, we have to assume she is hiding her Honne even from herself.

             

            A scene where Noriko teases a boy. It is seemingly irrelevant to any other scenes, but in terms of Noriko’s face expression it is also an interesting part, because this is the only scene she shows a somewhat ‘evil’ smile which she never shows to any other person around her. Also she keeps calling the boy ‘bu-chan’ in a way it sounds a pleasantry (‘bu’ can be associated to ‘buta(pig),’ implying a sense of joke --- I think it is the case in these days too). It shows that Noriko does not have someone to exchange this kind of jokes in her small community.

            It happens at Mr. Somiya’s aunt’s house, and after this the aunt talks with her about an arranged marriage. As the aunt’s repetitious ‘attack’ continues, Noriko’s ‘shield’ of smile breaks down.

            Being argued down, Noriko suddenly gives a reason why she does not want to marry anyone. She says she does not want to marry because she cannot leave his father alone, which we have never heard of. The aunt’s rebuttal, however, was heavier; Mr. Somiya will marry again so that Noriko will not be bothered about him. Noriko gets more depressed at this.

            Now that we saw Noriko strongly refuse marrying, we are able to assume that she has an intense abhorrence of marriage. It is probably her Honne she has wanted to hide, at least a part of it. It explains why she had to decline Hattori’s invitation. It was not only because Hattori’s future partner would doubt their relationship, but also because her negation of marriage prevented her from spending more time with Hattori. It also explains why she found remarriage of Mr. Onodera ‘distasteful’ because, by denying his remarriage, she could also deny her own marriage issue. Of course it is illogical and self-satisfactory excuse, but that does not matter if it functions. The statement that she was jealous also functions for her hatred against marriage because Hattori wanted to believe she was not jealous.

Can we believe her statement that she does not want to marry because of her father? Is it her true Honne or is it even an excuse for her to deny marriage?

This is a scene where Noriko finds Mr. Somiya’s future partner sitting over their place at a Noh stage. When she saw them bow to each other, she shows this half-crying face. We could interpret it as her true refusal of Mr. Somiya’s remarriage.

            After the Noh play, she goes to Aya’s house. She consults Aya if she was able to work instead of marrying someone. But Aya disagrees with Noriko. Aya, just like Noriko’s aunt, urges her to marry right away. Noriko left Aya’s house.

(Crying Noriko at Aya’s house.

Aya is cooking something for her)

            Returning to her house, Noriko complains her father if she could decline her arranged marriage the aunt is planning. Mr. Somiya persuades her into doing it, however.

(Noriko after arguing with her father.

Mr. Somiya passes through behind Noriko,

indicating her isolation)

            In the following day Noriko meets her would-be partner as a part of the tradition of arranged marriage. However, the scene is omitted --- Ozu’s another technique that leaves out scenes that is important in general sense.

Several days later Noriko again goes to Aya’s house, discussing marrying for love and arranged marriage. Noriko still hesitates about her arranged marriage, but Aya says neither marrying for love nor arranged marriage is better than she thinks: “You never know what you’re getting, even marriage for love.” Here seems to lie Ozu’s idea on marriage. For Ozu, marriage is not something you do for your own benefit.  Of course there is a benefit, but it is not the only reason for you to marry. You marry not because you would like to, but rather you have to. Because this is the way how humans have lived. I assume that the dream of marrying for love would have introduced as Meiji era began and become widespread after the WWII due to the adoption of Western culture. Ozu might have wanted to deny such a dream, since he thought marriage is not something like that. Marriage is something you have to do whether you like it or not. In that sense, arranged marriage is a good social system to encourage young people to marry.

            If it was Ozu’s message he wanted to convey in “Late Spring,” Noriko is exactly someone whom Ozu had to persuade. Presumably, his audience was all Japanese women like Noriko.

(Noriko listening to Aya’s words)

            Having nobody who stands on her behalf, she has now no choice but to accept marrying someone she met the other day. She goes back to home to meet the aunt and the father who want to hear a good answer from Noriko. Reluctantly, she answers ‘yes.’

            The setting suddenly jumps to Kyoto. Noriko and her father meet Mr. Onodera again. That night, at a hotel, Noriko confesses to the father that she regrets what she said to Mr. Onodera. She is smiling.

            What does this smile mean? I would assume that there has been some transition in her mind. The last time she met Mr. Onodera, she found his remarriage ‘distasteful.’ By saying this, she made herself think her own marriage is distasteful as well, so that she does not have to marry. However, she now admits that it was something she should have not said. I would interpret it as a change of Noriko’s view on marriage, presumably after the conversation with Aya. She came to understand it as something good. She had to smile because this change is her Honne, a true feeling.

            She has something she has to dissolve, however. She now appreciates her marriage, but she still worries about her father. It was her Honne also, and thus she now holds two contradicting Honne in herself.

(The next night. She reveals her Honne that she wants to be with Mr. Somiya)

            Mr. Somiya allows her no more ‘dependence’ on him. His words (that is, Ozu’s words), persuade Noriko that she has to marry even if it means to leave her beloved father.

(Noriko responds to Mr. Somiya’s words ‘be happy.’

She is half crying and half smiling.)

            Following scene is the day of marriage. But as is the case with Ozu’s film, the scene of wedding ceremony is omitted. Only scene we are able to watch is before the ceremony, the time before the bride leaves her house. Noriko is in her wedding close (furisode).

            It is interesting that even though Noriko is smiling, her face is only seen in the mirror. Does it indicate that her Honne is still unclear? We have no clue to determine, since it is the last scene Noriko appears in “Late Spring.”

(Another very Ozu-like shot of an absent room. A lot of things

happened around Noriko, but she has now gone.

There is a sense of Mujo.)

            This is not the last scene of the entire film, but since our purpose here is to trace the transition of Noriko’s mind, this is the end point.

            If a question remains, it would be “why did Noriko insist she did not want to marry so that no one would force her to marry? Why did she have to struggle between her Honne and the people around her who urge her to marry?” It was because in Japanese sense, it is wrong to show your individual feeling of Honne that could bring disorder into your community. It is almost a sin, although different from the ‘sin’ in Judeo-Christian sense. Showing your Honne is not a sin against God, but a sin against the harmony of your community. Disturbing the harmony (eg. everybody saying you have to marry vs you only saying you do not want to marry, everybody insisting they should amend the Constitution vs you only insisting they should not --- there is no one definite harmony. It changes depending on who belongs to the community and who has the power in it) is almost always a sin. Therefore, Noriko’s suffering comes from her own sense of guilty that her Honne may disturb her community’s harmony. Holding such a sense in her mind, Noriko had to employ the smile to settle that sense of guilt and her Honne at the same time. And, you should not get into her Honne as long as she smiles. It is as it were a 'contract' among Japanese that as long as one smiles, you should not touch upon his/her Honne even if you know it. Since forcefully drawing someone's Honne could also break the harmony. In that sense, our attempt here to explore Noriko's Honne was also a sinful act.