Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice

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The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (Ochazuke no aji)

Initially, the team Ozu/Noda worked out an entirely different, serious subject matter for the film following Early Summer. the story of an old mother and her five children. set in the countryside. Since this was quite dark and serious, the course was changed.

After his return from the Chinese battlefront in 1940, Ozu had teamed up with Tadao Ikeda for a screenplay called The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, which did not pass the censorship. Now, twelve years later, this scenario was revived. However, the extreme political differences between 1940 and 1952 made many changes necessary. The precondition for eating ochazuke (green tea over rice) had been the husband's call to arms, and changed into his business trip abroad. By the introduction of the young office worker Noboru Okada, a kind of modernism was brought in. In the details, the effort to add contemporary manners can be observed. However, there are no substantial changes concerning the plot. In particular, since the space of living did not change in The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice, the essential development of the original remained intact.

The couple in this film, again, lives in a mansion in Kojimachi, that is, in an 'uptown house'. It seems almost impossible that a countryside-born office worker, even if an extremely brilliant one, could achieve to live there in the first generation, if it were not for his wife's father, probably a leading businessman.

Probably the biggest miscalculation at the time of the remodeling of a twelve-year old scenario was the cast of the same actor, Shin Saburl, in the role of the husband, raising the age of the couple (Saburi was born in 1909). The role of the wife was to be played by Michiko Kuwano (1915-1946). The contrast between the wife with an 'uptown' lifestyle and the husband with a provincial lifestyle, the wife's selfishness, and the husband's sense of incongruity would have been more natural because of their youth. In 1953, their advanced age deprives the film of its lightness and freshness. The adaptation to contemporary times also goes against the spirit of the original work. The soul of the wartime scenario was its opposition to the trend of the times, to the point of not passing the censorship.

The significance of The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice lies in Ozu's homecoming to a Tokyo setting.[1]