Entering the film business
With his uncle acting as intermediary, Ozu was hired by the Shochiku Film Company, as an assistant in the cinematography department, on 1 August 1923, against the wishes of his father. His family home was destroyed in the earthquake of 1923, but no members of his family were injured.
On 12 December 1924, Ozu started a year of military service. He finished his military service on 30 November 1925, leaving as a corporal.
In 1926, he became a third assistant director at Shochiku. In 1927, he was involved in a fracas where he punched another employee for jumping a queue at the studio cafeteria, and when called to the studio director's office, used it as an opportunity to present a film script he had written. In September 1927, he was promoted to director in the jidaigeki (period film) department, and directed his first film, Sword of Penitence, which has since been lost. Sword of Penitence was written by Ozu, with a screenplay by Kogo Noda, who would become his co-writer for the rest of his career. On September 25, he was called up for service in the military reserves until November, which meant that the film had to be partly finished by another director.
In 1928, Shiro Kido, the head of the Shochiku studio, decided that the company would concentrate on making short comedy films without star actors. Ozu made many of these films. Body Beautiful, released on 1 December 1928, was the first Ozu film to use a low camera position, which would become his trademark. After a series of the "no star" pictures, in September 1929, I Graduated, But..., starring Minoru Takada and Kinuyo Tanaka, was released. In January 1930, he was entrusted with Shochiku's top star, Sumiko Kurishima, in her new year film, An Introduction to Marriage. His subsequent films of 1930 impressed Shiro Kido enough to invite Ozu on a trip to a hot spring. In his early works, Ozu used the pseudonym "James Maki" for his screenwriting credit. His film Young Miss, with an all-star cast, was the first time he used the pen name James Maki, and was also his first film to appear in film magazine Kinema Jumpo's "Best Ten" at third position.
In 1932, his I Was Born, But..., a comedy about childhood with serious overtones, won wide acclaim as the first notable work of social criticism in Japanese cinema. .
In 1935, Ozu made a short documentary with a soundtrack: Kagami Jishi, in which Kikugoro VI performed a Kabuki dance of the same title. This was made by request of the Ministry of Education. Like the rest of Japan's cinema industry, Ozu was slow to switch to the production of talkies: his first film with a dialogue sound-track was The Only Son in 1936, five years after Japan's first talking film, Heinosuke Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine.
