Otôsan
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- TriviaAccording to biographer Mark Schilling, in the aftermath of the terrible Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Shirô Kido, then an executive at Shochiku (he later became company president), received permission from his superiors to produce several movies at the film company's Kamata Studios, which had been badly damaged by the earthquake. He approached the sole remaining film director at Kamata, Yasujirô Shimazu, to ask if he would make a movie based not on Kabuki or Shimpa melodramas (which was the case with most of the studio's output), but rather on the real lives of ordinary Japanese people. Shimazu responded by making this film, Otôsan (Father). When the picture proved a success, he directed in 1924 another movie, also based on the unremarkable lives of ordinary people, Nichiyôbi (1924) (Sunday). This type of film soon became a staple of Shochiku's output, and came to be known as "shoshimin-eiga," which means "petit-bourgeois film," though working class and even upper-middle-class characters were sometimes featured in such movies. (In the West, this genre is widely known by the incorrect term "shomin-geki.") Shimazu went on to train at Shochiku many young directors, including Heinosuke Gosho and Keisuke Kinoshita, who would both go on to make famous shoshimin-eiga films. And though Shimazu did not train him, the famous Yasujirô Ozu also worked, from almost the beginning of his career, at Shochiku within this genre. Therefore, it could be said that the shoshimin-eiga genre was invented by one "Yasujirô'" (Shimazu) and brought to artistic perfection by another (Ozu).
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