The contrast between peace and chaos, exemplified particularly by a juxtaposition between elderly and youthful characters, is a common theme in Japanese cinema. Furthermore, the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki played an important role in dividing the nation between those who experienced the bombs’ fallout and those who were either too young to remember or were born after the bombings. The nuclear bombs and their effect on the development of Japanese society afterward plays an important role in the films of directors Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, who saw the bombings as a national tragedy that would force Japan to turn from its historical values and traditions toward industrialization and the family unit. In his film Kagemusha, Kurosawa likens the bombings to the devastating historical Battle of Nagashino and draws comparisons between pre-war Japan and post-war Japan using the patient, elderly Takeda Shingen and his brash, vengeful son Katsuyori. Ozu also uses an age difference in his film Tokyo Story between the elderly parents and their busy children to show a changing Japan, breaking free of its history and devotion to the traditional family unit.
Kurosawa’s Kagemusha focuses primarily on the division of Japan as a result of the nuclear bomb and forced Westernization after the end of World War II. In the film, Takeda Shingen is a feudal lord killed by a sniper while at war with three other lords: Oda Nobunaga, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Uesugi Kenshin. His death forces his generals to make the decision to use his political double as a stand-in for him to keep his death a secret; however, his double is a lower-class thief and Shingen’s heir Katsuyori refuses to bow to him. Ultimately the secret is revealed, the double is dethroned, and the vengeful, young Katsuyori leads the Takeda army on a counteroffensive attack against Nobunaga, who had attacked his territory earlier. Nobunaga’s forces, using guns brought by the Portuguese, annihilate Katsuyori’s army and the double dies trying to retrieve the banner flown by Shingen. Written upon this banner is a battle strategy gleaned from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, which reflects balance in leadership in war. The double, though of a lower class, dies trying to retrieve this lost balance, traditional samurai values, after the catastrophic defeat by a foe using Western weaponry. Katsuyori in his youthful vigor departed from the traditional values of steadiness and balance and through the Battle of Nagashino, Kurosawa evokes the semblance of the nuclear bombings to make the departure from these traditions a poignant experience for the viewer. Kurosawa likens the physical and class division of Japan during the Sengoku period to the age division after the nuclear bombings and uses these moments in time to make the argument that a divided Japan inherently leads to the death of its values, a national tragedy in his eyes.
Similarly to Kagemusha, Tokyo Story focuses primarily on the division between generations after the nuclear bombs destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki; however, while Kurosawa accomplished this through battle scenes, Ozu did so through quiet reflection and masked disappointment. Tokyo Story shows two parents visiting their distant children to spend time with them, but their doing so disrupts the children’s busy lives, disappointing both generations. The children sequester their parents upstairs and send them away to a spa before the parents decide to return home. Soon after returning home, the mother dies and the children have to take the time to visit their father for her funeral rituals. The father, exemplifying the stillness of his generation does not cry, but holds in the emotion. Ozu also shows this emotional restraint in his vase sequence from Late Spring, in which he uses graphic matching to cut between a stoic elderly man, a vase, and a young character who fails to contain her tears, comparing their ability to hold in their emotion to an item used for containment. This film relies on generational units more than it does individual characters. The identification of characters reflects interesting individual developments, but focusing on the two primary generations as characters reveals more about Ozu’s intent with the film. The younger generation is closed off, reserving their living space for businesses and limited interaction with each other reflecting a post-war focus on rapid industrialization instead of family units. The shots from within the children’s homes are tight, with little-to-no open space, especially in the upstairs room where they keep their parents locked away until it is convenient to dine with them. On the contrary, the position of the camera within the parents’ house shows the entire house, reflecting openness with each other and with the community around them. Their neighbor occasionally walks past, stopping at their open window to greet them and inquire about their day. The peace of the elderly characters, like in Kagemusha, reflects the adherence to traditional values such as balance and calmness, abandoned by the younger generation that focuses itself on industrialization after the war’s conclusion. While Kagemusha looks at this departure with scorn, Ozu chooses to look at it from the parents’ generation’s perspective: with a still camera and hushed disappointment. He too is disappointed by the younger generation’s abandonment of traditional values, but looks at it from a calmed perspective, espousing the worldview of the elderly parents, his generation.
Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story focus on similar themes of generational divide after a national tragedy, but do so from two drastically different perspectives. While Kagemusha is a disdainful cautionary tale about the death of a national identity, Tokyo Story reflects a calm acceptance of it. The final shots of both films reflect this in that Kagemusha ends with a dead thief floating on the waves, symbolic of time, trying to hold onto values of balance inscribed upon the banner flown by upper class members of his generation. Tokyo Story ends with the father alone on his balcony looking silently over the sunset, symbolic of the elderly generation watching the sun set on their values and their generation. Both films, whether explicitly or implicitly, use the nuclear bombings as a catalyst for this departure from tradition. The nuclear bombs dropping on Japan and the following industrialization and Westernization often play a primary role in the themes of Japanese film in general, and both of these films accentuate generational division as a juxtaposition between traditional peace and modernized chaos.
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