Morning for the Osone Family

Mitsuko Miura and Eitaro Ozawa

Keisuke Kinoshita's Morning for the Osone Family, from 1946, is an affecting family melodrama set during the final three years of the Second World War. Hanuko Sugimura plays a widow with three sons and a daughter, all of whom are traumatized and forever changed by the course of the war. The drama is almost entirely contained within the walls of their home which grows increasingly dilapidated during the course of the film. The matriarch's brother in law and his wife move in after getting bombed out of their own home and bring added misery with them. The brother in law, a Colonel in the army (and expertly played by Eitaro Ozawa), is an unrepentant imperialist and warmonger. His values clash with those of his nieces and nephews who are more sensitive, culturally inclined, and influenced by Western values. The Colonel gets his comeuppance and a new hope for a more democratic Japan is trumpeted by the end of the film.

The film's conclusion is heartfelt, but also allied to the dictates of Japan's new overlord, Douglas MacArthur. The Colonel represents the nationalistic and fascistic elements of Japanese leadership that America wanted to purge. Some 1600 of Japan's leaders were convicted of war crimes and executed following the conclusion of the war. The Colonel's resemblance to ex-Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, who would be executed in 1948, is not accidental. Many elements of the Morning for the Osone Family closely resemble Hollywood films. The opening, set on a snowy Christmas with "Silent Night" on the soundtrack, could have come from a Leo McCarey film. The camera dollies back from the window and pans the room, showing a feast laid out and a host of happy family members. Kinoshita repeats the exact same shot later in the film, but the larder is bare and the family group has been diminished to its two female members. 

The film is uneven and threadbare, but Kinoshita, like McCarey, brings a winning delicacy to the film's character vignettes. Even the Colonel's jingoism is not overdrawn. The emphasis of the human qualities and frailties of the characters make their plight all the more moving as they are trapped in the maw of war. Morning for the Osone is a marker of an 180 degree shift in Japanese cinema. The unquestioning support for the military leadership and unbridled chauvinism that permeated Japan's wartime films are, largely, gone forever. The previously unheard of questioning of authority is personified by the daughter of the film, Yuko, who is portrayed with grit and tenacity by the great Mitsuko Miura. That a young, unmarried woman is questioning the wisdom of a venerated elders shows the seismic changes taking place in Japanese society.