Ozu and his co-writer tracked each script by counting empty sake bottles
Yasujirō Ozu and his lifelong writing partner Kogo Noda measured progress on a screenplay not in pages but in bottles of sake emptied. The method produced Tokyo Story, which 358 directors polled by Sight and Sound in 2012 named the greatest film ever made. Critics in the same survey ranked it third.
Ozu was born in Tokyo in 1903 into a merchant family and sent as a boy to his father's home town of Matsusaka. At boarding school he did judo and cut classes to watch films, and seeing the American epic Civilization in 1917 made him decide to direct. He failed university and teacher-college entrance exams and worked briefly as a substitute teacher in the mountains, trekking to town at weekends for the cinema. In 1923 an uncle got him a job as a camera assistant at the Shochiku studio, over his father's objections.
His promotion came oddly. In 1927 he punched a colleague for cutting in line at the studio canteen, and when summoned to the studio director's office he used the meeting to hand over a script. Months later he was directing. He began with short comedies, and in 1928 Body Beautiful introduced the low camera position that became his signature. I Was Born, But..., from 1932, a childhood comedy with a serious edge, won praise as Japanese cinema's earliest significant piece of social critique. He was slow to adopt sound, making his first dialogue picture only in 1936.
War interrupted. Conscripted in 1937, he spent two years in China with an infantry regiment that handled chemical weapons, and in 1943 he was sent to Singapore to make a propaganda documentary. He passed much of that year reading, playing tennis and watching confiscated American films, admiring Citizen Kane above all, and destroyed all the footage when Japan surrendered.
Afterward came his celebrated run of quiet family dramas, including Late Spring and Tokyo Story, both starring Setsuko Hara. Ozu never married and lived with his mother until her death in 1961. He died of throat cancer on his sixtieth birthday in 1963. His grave in Kamakura carries no name, only the character mu, meaning nothingness.
Source: Yasujirō Ozu
