This dissertation deals with the post-war films of Japanese filmmaker Ozu Yasujirô. It focuses on the production and construction of family and gender roles in the fifteen films that Ozu directed between 1947 and 1962. These films serve as the primary source material. The study combines film history and cultural history and adds elements from sociology, gender studies and East-Asian studies. It looks at the post-war period in Japanese history as a time, when the nation undertook a large-scale renegotiation of social roles pertaining to categories such as age, gender, and social status, and highlights the role of cinema during this time of turmoil. It studies, first, the ways in which Ozu constructs the families who serve as the lead characters of his films and second, what kind of values, attitudes and notions are communicated through this depiction.

The dissertation consists of nine chapters. The first two analyse Ozu’s career and the cultural framework in which he operated. They look at the director’s development as an artist and track down the elements of his film-making that characterise his personal angle to film narratives and creation of characters. An optimal viewing strategy for Ozu’s work, called ‘comparative individualism’, is also introduced. Furthermore, the chapters consider the effect of outside forces, such as the Japanese studio system and the film censorship of the occupation period. Chapters 3 to 7 cover the various roles and repeated character types of Ozu’s output, as well as the cultural social expectations that are attached to these categories and points in human life. The dissertation discusses the juxtaposition between the custom of arranged marriages, and the alternative that challenges it, unions based on romantic attraction. The study also offers individual chapters to the expected life path for both men and women and what kind of arguments the films contain in the display of this everyday reality. Chapter 6 covers how Ozu depicts childhood in both the immediate post-war, and later in the more comfortable period of economic growth in the 1950s. It is then followed by an assessment of the material aspects and physical reality of domestic life present in these films in chapter 7. The final two chapters steer towards the more abstract subject matters of distance (chapter 8) and change (chapter 9), in order to gain the best possible understanding about the emotional texture woven into Ozu’s character networks.

This dissertation argues that cinema has unique abilities to affect the way social roles are viewed in society. It makes the case that Ozu’s films are more argumentative and political than has been previously established. The study looks at gender and family roles as social constructions that can be maintained, questioned, or challenged through film narratives. It argues that Ozu can even take part in these activities simultaneously in his attempt to capture his society and the direction in which it is moving. By focusing on the way the networks of social roles are assembled and how characters are depicted, the dissertation shows both the significance of the post-war era in the societal transformation of Japan, as well as the important role played by cultural products in this process.