Yasujiro Ozu once had a reputation for making films only other Japanese could understand.
His studio bosses believed overseas audiences wanted the exoticism of samurai and geisha, not Ozu¡¯s quietly realistic dramas about contemporary middle-class families.
This explains the reluctance of Ozu¡¯s studio, Shochiku, to export his films while he was at the height of his powers, despite the burgeoning outside interest in Japanese cinema sparked by the international success of Akira Kurosawa¡¯s 1950 period drama, ¡°Rashomon.¡± Indeed, Ozu¡¯s postwar classics only began to penetrate Western cinephile consciousness in the 1960s, with a retrospective of five films curated by critic Donald Richie for the 1963 Berlin Film Festival opening many eyes.
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