Tokyo Chorus / Tokyo no korasu (1931)

In Ozu’s Tokyo Chorus, we have a somewhat different take on the life of a salaryman during the Depression. The film opens like another of Ozu’s college student comedies with a professor-coach trying to bring some order to his team. Then some years later we turn to a less comedic world, where the handsome student is now married and has an office job. When he feels another co-worker has been wrongly treated, he challenges his boss and is promptly fired himself. After weeks of failed job-hunting,  and a sick child which forces him to sell his wife’s kimonos, he runs into his old coach, who has now opened a small cafe and offers him a job handing out fliers and carrying advertising banners. This gradually leads to a greater role in the cafe when it begins to become successful. Meanwhile the old professor still has a few contacts, and the young man eventually is offered a teaching job in a small town far away from Tokyo.

Despite the old melodrama standby of the sick child, the movie manages to make the financial and social situation of the couple clear while still finding space for some light comedy. It also gives us an unusually intimate look within the family itself, including a very rare scene of father, mother, and kids all playing a childrens hand-slapping game together. And it is clear that the wife is seen as the partner in the relationship, not simply the subservient appendage, for (except for Dad’s spontaneous nobility at work) no decisions are made without her serious consultation.

Once again, Ozu uses the eyes of the children to reflect the father’s humiliations. Feeling humiliated as the only boy in the neighborhood without a bike, the son waits expectantly for a promised bike of his own when dad gets his annual bonus, only to be humiliated when Dad can only bring him a little scooter since he got fired. And it’s the gang of following street urchins that illustrate how embarassing  Dad feels about his new job. 

For serious film historians, we also get one of our earliest extant views of Hideko Takamine, here about six or seven years old,  playing the family daughter. On the other hand, the parents had very short careers: the handsome leading-man father was Tokihiko Okada, who died suddenly after Mizoguchi’s Water Magician, and the mother was the excellent Emiko Yagumo, who featured in Ozu’s That Night’s Wife and Floating Weeds but apparently retired suddenly when the studios converted to sound.

Made at about the same time as I Was Born, But . . . , the two films could easily be seen as a pair to be viewed together, showing us two sides of the salaryman’s apparently comfortable but precarious position. Together, the two films also show us the early Ozu before he had developed the style (or mannerisms) that would characterize his later work.