Chichi ariki (There Was a Father)

Ever since his wife died, Horikawa has been single-handedly raising his son Ryohei while working as a middle school teacher in Kanazawa. But when an accident occurs on a school trip, Horikawa takes responsibility and resigns from his job. He moves back to his hometown in Nagano with Ryohei to work at a municipal office. When Ryohei starts middle school, he moves into a dorm. Meanwhile, Horikawa decides to go work in Tokyo so that he can earn enough money to send Ryohei to college. Eventually, Ryohei gets into the Imperial University in Sendai and is hired as a teacher in Akita. Horikawa asks Ryohei to consider marrying Fumi, the daughter of Hirata, his former colleague in Kanazawa. Ryohei bashfully tells his father that it’s up to him, but a few days later, Horikawa suddenly collapses and passes away. In the end, Ryohei and Fumi head to Akita together.

Already in 1942 Ozu had turned away from the boisterous embrace of American ideals in his Thirties comedies. “Traditional Japanese art is profoundly beautiful”, says the father in Chichi Ariki, a film whose stasis prefigures the style of the postwar films. The father exhorts his son to do his duty and not give in to sentimental desires; he thus upholds a traditional Japanese as well as a wartime virtue. Ozu’s espousal of traditional Japanese culture and virtues in the early Forties was undoubtedly due to the war effort.
Kathe Geist, Yasujiro Ozu: Notes on a Retrospective, in Film Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1 (1983), 37 (1).

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