The Mu Carved on Yasujiro Ozu's Grave Was Something He Found on the Battlefield

By custom, Japanese gravestones are carved “Grave of the So-and-so Family,” a guarantee of the continuity of the family line. But on the hill above Engaku-ji in Kita-Kamakura, a stone of black granite shaped like a film screen bears only a single character, mu [無], “nothingness.” It was carved by the Zen master Sogen Asahina, then the chief abbot of Engaku-ji, and the man buried there is said to have asked him for this character while he was still alive.

That filmmaker’s name was Yasujiro Ozu. This heart that erased the name of the family and left behind only a single character of negation expressed the fierce struggle of Ozu’s whole life. For Ozu, mu was not a beautiful conclusion reached in old age, as it might be for a Zen monk in training. He found it, quite literally, on the battlefield.

War cannot be separated from any account of the filmmakers of this era. On September 10, 1937, just after he had finished the screenplay of There Was a Father, Ozu received his call-up papers, and he was assigned to the 2nd Field Gas Company, a unit that handled poison gas weapons. He landed in Shanghai as a soldier and fought his way through Xuzhou, Nanjing, Hankou, and Nanchang, and in June 1938 he was promoted to sergeant. He spent a year and ten months of the war abroad, and in the middle of it his close friend Sadao Yamanaka, unable to withstand the battlefield, fell ill and died.

The loss of Yamanaka, a filmmaker of genius, cast a heavy shadow over Japanese cinema at the time, and no one was more devastated than Ozu. While stationed in Nanjing, Ozu visited a run-down temple called Jiming Temple on the hill behind his barracks. There he found a resident priest named Niku, and Ozu is said to have had him write the single character mu. What is more, he sent it to the eminent Japanese filmmaker Kenji Mizoguchi.

Put simply, the hand that made films had turned into the hand of a sergeant leading a poison gas unit, and with that same hand he received a single character of Zen and sent it to a filmmaker at home as a stylish Zen riddle. The very next month, Sadao Yamanaka died of illness on campaign in Kaifeng. It is said that when Ozu heard the news, he did not speak for days. The character mu revealed itself in his hands in the very midst of such time. He did not arrive at it as a Zen idea.

For Ozu, meanwhile, the war carried a double meaning. In June 1943, he went to Singapore, this time as a member of the army press corps film unit. The purpose was to make a propaganda film, but the war situation grew so bad that shooting was out of the question, and the project was left hanging and came to nothing.

What he did once filming became impossible was to watch more than a hundred Western films, which had been banned as enemy films, in a screening room meant for censorship. Under the pretext of censorship, in other words, he gained time to immerse himself in the films of the enemy. After the defeat, he was held in a camp at Jurong, where he read the Taiheiki, The Tale of the Heike, and the Kokin Wakashu closely and wrote haiku, and in February 1946 he came home.

To set foot on his native soil again was a stroke of good fortune for the time. No one knows how many filmmakers died in those years. Among the dead there may have been directors and actors who would have defined the postwar era. In the midst of all this, those who survived had to go on living.

A filmmaker went to war twice, stood on the side of the perpetrators, lost his friend, was overwhelmed by the films of the enemy, read the Japanese classics in a prison camp, and came home. For the following seventeen years, he did not make a single war film. What does this fact leave for those of us who live after him? Thinking it through may be one of the things we need to bear in mind when we watch Ozu’s films.

For in Ozu’s films, war is not left undepicted. It is placed within daily life like a falling shadow. In the famous Tokyo Story (1953), Noriko, played by Setsuko Hara, is the widow of the second son, who was killed in the war. That son never once appears on screen. All that appears is his photograph, the weariness of a woman who still has not remarried after eight years and can tell no one of it, and the sigh of a mother who believes he is still alive somewhere.

In Tokyo Story, we tend to read the way the old couple who come up to Tokyo gradually become a nuisance as the coldness of their children. But what is truly empty is the seat where the lost son should have been sitting. Ozu, in other words, was someone who kept filming what remains after people are gone. To show the state of something being absent, one must first build up, with precision, the time when that something was present. Ozu’s uncanny strictness seems to have existed for the sake of that preparation.

Ozu died of cancer on December 12, 1963, his sixtieth birthday. The year before, he had seen off his mother, with whom he had lived all his life. The following year the Tokyo Olympics came, the nation looked upward, families scattered into apartment blocks, and an era began in which television took over the family room, but his life ended just before it. I cannot see it as mere chance that Ozu died without seeing high economic growth complete. He was someone who filmed the process of the household coming apart, not the scenery after it had finished coming apart.

Filmmakers at the cutting edge always show what lies ahead of their time, and when their work is done they quietly withdraw from the stage. The moment when Japan lost sight of “something” is surely captured in his films. The Buddhist name inscribed on his grave record is Donge-in Tatsudo Joan Koji. Donge refers to the udumbara, the flower said to bloom only once in three thousand years. Because even the most ordinary thing will never appear again, the things of this world are infinitely precious. The recognition that a thing is precious because it will never appear again and the mu on the gravestone are simply one and the same truth, spoken from its two sides.

A life run through by mu is still engraved in film, and even now, across the long years, it tells people something important. What Ozu’s films express is surely what is most precious to us, the very thing that will not come to rest in our hands however hard we struggle.