Ozu Yasujiro's Good Morning and Technology in Postwar Japanese Childhood

Greg Johnson

Ozu Yasujiro's (1903-1963) Good Morning (1959, Ohayo) depicts the lives of suburban Japanese in the late 1950s, just on the eve of Japan's "economic miracle" and technological renown. The film offers a mild comical critique of the changes that technology and consumerism were to inflict on Japanese childhood. The daily lives of residents of a small enclave of identical modest single family homes and a nearby large dingy apartment block are disrupted by the effects that the intrusion of a television set into their midst has on a set of young brothers, Minoru in middle school and Isamu in primary school. The neighborhood is flanked by a grass-covered levee, upon which young pupils banter and joke their way to school, and covered from above by high tension electrical wires. The scene of children walking to school or playing on a suburban river embankment has become something of a trope in Japanese culture, frequently seen in everything from the often-resurrected middle school TV drama San-nen B-gumi Kimpachi-sensei (Mr. Kimpachi and his homeroom, 3rd grade class B) to the Doraemon animation film series that features a primary school boy and his cat-shaped robot friend from the future. Perhaps this is merely because there are few other open green expanses in most of metropolitan Tokyo.

The image of power lines, however, is clearer. It invokes the changes technology is delivering to average Japanese lives. In the final scene, two shy young adults stand on a train station platform and make small talk about the lovely weather to avoid any hint of their unspoken mutual affection. Ironically, they appreciate the sunshine while gazing through a twine of electrical wires, with smoke from factories hard at work on the economic miracle wafting in the distance.

The film highlights childhood in a Japan on the verge of an unprecedented high growth period, the Iwato Boom from 1959 to 1961 that provided an average growth rate of over 12%, and the start of Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato's Income Doubling Plan, which was implemented from 1960-1965. Based on Japan's prewar advances in technology, the economy was primed for technological ascension as well, particularly after Sony's 1955 introduction of the transistor radio.

Japan had profited from its position as an American military launch pad during the Korean War, but there were subsequent economic fluctuations through the 1950s, as the situation of the boys' English tutor attests. He lost his job when his employer went under so he teaches English and does technical translation work. Some aspects of the story are nevertheless remarkably contemporary. Jobs today are also being lost due to companies folding or "risutora" (from the English word "restructuring"), the Japanese word for downsizing due to mergers or outsourcing.

In contrast to the 1950s, though, unemployment and a weakened work ethic are postponing full adulthood for some Japanese youth now. Parents and politicians currently fret about semi-employed "freeters" (from the English word "free" and the German word "Arbeiter") meaning in Japanese part-time or temporary workers who may quit jobs at will, and "neets" (those Not in Education Employment or Training). Such young people are spending an increasingly longer time financially dependent on their aging parents, creating a type of extended adolescence.

The increasingly later average age at first marriage and delayed or avoided parenthood in Japan are blamed partly on the hesitation of contemporary youth to take on family responsibilities in light of financial insecurity that their parents, who married in an era of high economic growth, did not experience. The 1950s English tutor in Good Morning is actively seeking work, so he doesn't look like today's freeter or neet, but he does express reluctance to pursue a romantic relationship with the boys' aunt because he lacks a stable job. Another common point with today's Japan is the case of Minoru and Isamu's father, who is approaching mandatory retirement age with his oldest child still in middle school. This is a situation that will become increasingly familiar with the rising marriage age.

The Japanese birthrate has plummeted from the 1950s and in 2005 the nation experienced its first recorded population decline in the modern era. The government and businesses fear a decline in the supply of workers and consumers. Although children were not in short supply in Ozu's day, one can imagine from the film a future with fewer children and more resources expended per child. In fact, the steepest drop in Japan's postwar fertility rate occurred between 1950 and 1960, from 3.65 births per woman at the start of the decade, to 2.0 births at the end.(1) The suburban families in Good Morning reflect this trend, having only one or two children, invariably boys. The slovenly young couple who have a TV are childless. The brothers' English tutor lives with his mother in a childless home. In contrast to today, however, none of the married women in the film are working outside the home.

Television poisons relations in the small community. The wife with a television prances around in a bathrobe in the afternoon with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, in contrast to the more prim, kimono-clad and TV-less matrons of the neighborhood. Minoru and Isamu neglect their homework, skip their English tutorial, and steal away every afternoon to watch the forbidden electric box. They talk back when their mother rebukes them, and remain defiant with impunity when their father comes home from work and gives them a rather weak dressing down.

The boys go on strike, vowing not to speak in the presence of adults until their father buys a TV. The children are mocking meaningless adult speech and protesting their father's refusal to join the new appliance consuming society. Their silence provokes gossip of an imagined conflict between their mother and the other women of the neighborhood. News that a second neighbor has purchased a major electrical appliance, a washing machine, incites rumors about missing neighborhood association dues and the possibility of malfeasance.

When the recalcitrant boys' mother retaliates by denying them snacks, they abscond with the family rice pot. Since rice is the staple food in Japan, that would leave the family with a meager dinner. The English tutor brings the larcenous youngsters home. But instead of punishing them, their father gives in and buys the TV the brothers demand, ironically from a newly retired neighbor who has taken up a second career in electrical appliance sales.

Japanese adults today are increasingly frightened by children's use of technology. An even more insidious phenomenon than neet or freeters are the hikikomori, extreme cases of youth withdrawal from society. Unable to work or even leave their homes, they stay in their own rooms and create fantasy worlds with the internet and other media. Further dangers to childhood lurk in technology. In 2004, an eleven-year-old girl stabbed a classmate to death at school in retaliation for perceived slights in messages the victim had posted in a chat room. Both girls were known as being enthusiastic chat room participants. The perpetrator is said to have been a fan of the film (Fukasaku Kinji, 2000) and internet game Battle Royale, in which teenage classmates are isolated on an island and made to kill each other or be killed. A lack of face-to-face interpersonal communication skills among contemporary children due to excessive cell phone and internet use was cited as a factor in this crime. Cell phones link adult men to underage school girls for prostitution, so-called enjo kosai ("compensated dating"). Concern about protecting children and childhood remains high and a number of contemporary films evince anxieties about the potential threats conveyed to children by electronic media. (2)

The children of Good Morning fortunately live in a safer world. The most unsavory character in the film is a knife-wielding con man who teams with a suave partner to coerce housewives into buying home safety equipment. The only danger TV poses to the boys is that they will neglect their studies and join the throngs of idiots that the new electrical device is going to create. However, Ozu constructs a conflict between parents who distrust the latest technology and the children and irresponsible adults who become its eager consumers. And, significantly, the conflict is resolved when the parents relent to the insidious new gadget and the children get a TV.

Ozu's film Good Morning portrays family life and quotidian concerns, the trappings of school children, and the position of organization men just as Japan is entering a period of rapid economic and technological growth. Moreover, it imagines the creation of a new dubious role for Japanese children as consumers of technology. These aspects can be compared readily with Japanese images of childhood and technology in today's post economic miracle era. It is a mild comedy but it nevertheless initiates a discussion in Japanese film of the possibility that technology will create dubious new spaces for children, spaces that are outside adult supervision, in contradiction to parental values, and beyond parental understanding.

Notes:

(1) See J. Sean Curtin's "The Declining Birthrate in Japan: Part Eight:Population Scenarios and Economic Consequences" Social Trends #25: January 28, 2003, http://www.glocom.org/special_topics/social_trends/20030128_trends_s25/index.html. Accessed January 7, 2006.

(2) Here are just a few examples. In Ichikawa Jun's 1989 film No Life King (No Raifu Kingu) children become absorbed in a video game supposedly containing a fatal curse. Nakata Hideo's Ring (Ringu, 1997) similarly accosts children (and adults) with a mysterious videocassette that is killing youth who watch it. In Miike Takashi’s 2003 One Missed Call (Chakushin ari ), teenagers receive via their cell phones prophetic voice mail containing their last words. Inadvertently repeating their message causes their sudden demise. Install (Insutoru, 2004), directed by Kataoka Kei, depicts a 10 year-old primary school boy who recruits a seventeen-year-old high school girl into participating in cybersex.