I am not sure I really understood why Noriko did not want to get married - and there seemed something odd about her attachment to her father. Couldn't her father have lived with her and her new husband or they live with him after marriage? Wonder if anyone could comment. Thx
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MEK
Wanna talk about Ozu?
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In addition to kerpan's summing-up of the film here http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/ozu/message/1090 , I wish to say that the commentary on the Criterion DVD http://www.criterionco.com/asp/release.asp?id=331 , by Richard Peña, apart from being excellent all round, goes into the detail of the relationship between Noriko and her father and Noriko's reluctance to get married.
I cannot recommend the Criterion DVD too highly:
• SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES: New, restored high-definition digital transfer
• Tokyo-Ga (1985, 92 mins), legendary director Wim Wenders’ tribute to Yasujiro Ozu
• Audio commentary by Richard Peña, program director of New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center
• A booklet featuring new essays by critic Michael Atkinson and renowned Japanese-film historian Donald Richie
• New and improved English subtitle translation
http://www.DVDBeaver.com/film/DVDReview2/latespring.htm
The Richard Pena commentary goes into the whole explanation of Noriko's experience during the war, and theorizes why she would not want to leave the safety of her father's house. In essense, he says that her teen years and family life were interrupted by the war, when she was sent to a labor camp. So by staying home, she is trying to recreate those years.
I have another theory. I don't think Noriko had any fear of intimacy (as witness her flirt with her husband's assistant.) But having gone through the upheaval of the war, having seen her mother die, having seen young men she went to school with die, having seen Tokyo firebombed and Americans take over, she is suffering from PTSD. She wants safety and security and essentially not to be disrupted again.
I think your theory and the Pena theory actually fit together quite well.
shareActually, Pena is very wrong about Noriko being 'sent to a labor camp'. The film says only that she was 'made to work hard' during the war. She probably had to work in a munitions factory everyday during what would have been her school hours. This was very common for high school and college students. Only conscripted laborers from China and Korea, and POWs, were sent to labor camps.
Pena clearly mistranslates what was said.
With the DVD Late Spring there is a commentary feature which addresses this question. Noriko had spent a lot of her childhood in a labor camp , this is refrenced to early in the movie, her father is her only link to family life and with the death of her mother she has taken on the role of wife which gives her a kind of security she didn't have when she was younger, perhaps this is the reason for her reluctance to marry. She fears giving up the only home she has known. Her father couldn't live with her new husband because in Japanese society the parents traditionally live with the son not the daughter.
shareI dunno if I like that explanation - it seems a little pat to me. Some people are just reluctant to embrace change or evolution in their lives - isn't it true that Ozu lived with his mother until she died and that he never married? I do agree with the part about her "replacing" her mother in her father's life though. That's what I came away with.
What's the Spanish for drunken bum?
routine.....being in a comfortable and safe possition
fear of change
'why should i move away and get married, when im already happy here?'
I think on one level (and only on one level; this is not some sort of simplistic allegory), Noriko's attitude mirrors the attitude of many Japanese people in 1949: After the devastation of the war, they were very afraid of the radical changes forced upon them by the Occupation, just as Noriko, after her own mistreatment by the Japanese military government, is afraid of losing her happy and comfortable life with her father by getting married.
Noriko's lament, "I want us to stay as we are," about sums it up.
Of course, neither 1949 Japan nor Noriko and her father can stay as they are. Either they can work to control and shape inevitable change, or they can let change run over them and possibly destroy them.
I noticed that nobody alluded, even in the most roundabout and delicate way, to the sexual aspect of marriage or the possibility of children. You might expect that a father encouraging his daughter to marry might say 'I would like to have a grandson'. I wonder whether Noriko's experiences in the camp led to her fearing physical intimacy?
shareI agree with the fear of change aspect of reasoning.
She was comfortable and safe and wanted it to stay that always.
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I agree, I thought it was fear of change. Maybe she was afraid of her relationship with her father changing and of losing that closeness they had always shared.
shareHere's my input:
The war and life events led her and her father into a very unique relationship as Pena pointed out, one in which they were more equal partners than would be expected. She loves her father, but it I think its more than that. For a woman like Noriko, this would be very hard to give up, as it gave her large measure of personal freedom, and a "partnership" relationship more suited to her life style and personality. This daughter/partner-role established, it would seem unlikely that such a woman would wish to enter a partnership with an unknown quantity in a society where women still had limited choices (US changes to women's marital rights not withstanding.)
It's interesting to read everyone's ideas on this. I don't think there is any one 'correct' answer. I think Ozu very intentionally made the reason for Noriko's reluctance to marry vague. The film presents a number of possibilities, any one, or a combination of several, which could 'explain' it, but Ozu wisely stops short of giving a clear definitive reason.
I just want to jump in and mention that Noriko was NOT sent to a 'labor camp,' as Pena (?) says. The dialogue in the film merely states that she 'was made to work hard during the war.' It is not explicitly stated at all what she did or where she worked. During the war, high school and college students were often sent to munitions factories to work on assembly lines instead of attending classes, but they went back to their homes every day. They weren't 'labor camps,' as some seem to think is implied in Onodera's line.
I don't know why they made such a translation error. The notorious Japanese labor camps usually refer to Chinese labors or US and UK POW, many of them were treated brutally and died miserably. The labor camps of Japanese domestic girls are unheard of. It certainly could be possible that she was captured by Soviet, Chinese or US army on foreign land, since Japanese invaded a lot of Asian countries. But as far as I know, they treated Japanese civilians much better than what Japanese did to Chinese or British, and they were delivered back to their homeland very soon.
Noriko simply had to work in a factory or something during the time she would have been attending classes. She never left Japan, so she definitely wasn't captured by any other army.
The problem here arose simply because Pena doesn't understand the wartime situation in Japan. If you didn't know what things were like, well, the dialogue might sound like some kind of 'forced labor' concentration camp. But Japan didn't do that to their OWN people, just to people from OTHER countries. The Japanese army was brutal and sadistic towards people of other nationalities, both in camps abroad and in camps in Japan. But that has nothing to do with Noriko's case. What Noriko went through was quite common for any high school or college aged students during the war. I know a few people who had to do it instead of attending classes.
...at a certain point, pretty much all middle school and high school classes were canceled. And all the high school girls were, in effect, drafted to do various types of labor. Lots of the boys were drafted for miitary service. In cities under bomb attack, girls were given the job of clearing rubble and looking for unexploded ordnance. On Okinawa, hundreds of school girls "volunteered" to serve as nurse's aides to the army during the American invasion. Few survived (see Tadashi Imai's Himeyuri no to).
MEK
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.
I think the case in Okinawa was particularly harsh. Okinawa was obviously a key battle for the Japanese if they were going to somehow stave off the Americans, so they took their most fanatical approach at that time. Add to that the Japanese government has always looked upon the people of Okinawa as second class citizens, and they must have decided the entire population was basically expendable.
On the closing of school classes I have an interesting story. When I first came to Japan as an English teacher one of my students was an old woman who had been in high school during the war. She was the hardest working student of English I have ever seen. When I got to know her a little better I asked her what motivated her to study English so hard. She told me that during the war she had to work in a munitions factory, so she felt she had basically missed out on much of her education. She was very resentful about this. And since the study of English had also been forbidden when she was in high school, she made a point to learn it afterward, almost like a form of protest, or a way to try and recapture something that had been taken away from her.
The schoolgirl nurse's aides in Okinawa were from mainland Japanese families, not native Okinawan ones.
Interesting story about your elderly student.
MEK
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.
All the explainations I've read on this thread sound reasonable. My take as to why Noriko did not want to marry was that she liked being her own individual. Living with and taking care of her Father as well as doing her own activities suited Noriko. The idea of marriage, which meant conforming to a convention of society seemed to put Noriko off. By becoming married Noriko may have felt she could no longer be herself and would have to adapt to the role of housewife and mother.
The reason why Noriko was eventually motived into marriage was due to her Father stating he was to remarry, later revealed to be a lie. Therefore the transition of getting Noriko married was conveyed in my opinion as a negative critque of tradition.
"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not".
Yes -- Ozu (despite his western reputation as a traditionalist) was often critical of Japanese tradition. Of course he was often critical of the excesses of "modernism" as well.
MEK
Analyze only when necessary.
fortune cookie, 4-24-2010
because marriage is evil
shareIt is blatantly clear. She is a lesbian. She has the hots for her best friend, whom she can never be with. Her father pushes her into the arms of a man with whom she knows she can never be happy.
shareYea, her behavior almost ruins the movie. It's a wonderful performance but annoying at times.
share