Does everyone in japan fish in twos and in synchronization?

SPOILERS
1942) There Was a Father
You know sometimes I'm just left speechless after watching one of Ozu's films. Not neccesarily because of the profundity of them, though some are very, but just because theres not much to say.
Ryo Chishu plays the father, Shuhei Horikawa, who quits his job as a teacher after there is a boating accident on a class trip in which a one of his students perish. He quits his job but works hard so that he can pay for his son, Ryohei to attend school. Later he moves to Tokyo so that he can pay for Ryohei to go to college, and in all this time he rarely sees his son. After his son has graduated college and becomes a teacher himself, they have a few opportunites to get together every once in a while. Ryohei wants to quit his job as a teacher and move to Tokyo so that he and his father can live together, but his father scolds him for being so selfish, and tells him that he must work hard and do his best, for that is his duty to do the best at what is put in front of him. There is no room for doing what he wants. A little later, Ryohei is able to take a 10 day vacation and so he goes to visit his father. Some of the his fathers students decide to throw a party for Horikawa and one of his fellow teachers, a man named Hirata. Afterword, Horikawa goes home, tells Ryohei how good a time he had, and tells him to marry Hirata's daugter, Fumiko. Ryohei agrees, and then Korikawa collapses. He is taken to the Hospital where he dies. Ryohei and Fumiko ride a train back to the country where Ryohei is a teacher, and he asks Fumiko if she thinks that her father and brother would want to move in with them. He always wanted to live with his father.

Being a westerner watching Ozu can be very hard at times. Its hard to understand what is acceptable in Japanese society, and to figure out what Ozu would be trying to say to his audience in his films. For me I respond to everything with my emotions, and its hard for me to understand how much the characters are conflicted between their emotions and their duties, or if there ever is such a conflict, and how would that character who challenged expectations would be viewed by Ozu and his audience.

Also its hard to understand the class system in Japan. Horikawa has a servant girl working for him, whom he pays, so how much money does one have to make to have a servant? I never really understood Horikawa's reasoning for not letting his son live with him, I know that money is not a reason, because if it came to it, he could just dump the servant girl...or would that make him look bad? To me Horikawa is the one who seems selfish, and hides behind duty as his reason why he and Ryohei shouldn't live together. There is too much unexplained for me, and the film is just too short, its hard to decipher between what really is customary and what is the characters own intentions when you are an outsider. All in all this film didn't engage me all that much, I just feel that there is too much left out here and there. But none of Ozu's films usually affect me that much upon viewing, though somehow they manage to stay with me, and I suppose that's why I keep coming back. I don't even know why.