Voyage à Chigasaki

My contribution to Ozu 120 is a zine

Yasujiro Ozu was born on this day, December 12th, in 1903. He died on December 12th in 1963. There have been events celebrating the 120th anniversary of Ozu’s birth worldwide this year. I attended as many of them as I could: 9 films at the Ozu 120 retrospective at Film Forum, a screening and ceramics exhibit at Harvard Film Archive, and Ozu Art, an exhibition at the Chigasaki City Museum of Art.

While visiting Japan in October, I stayed overnight at Chigasaki-kan, where Ozu would stay for months at a time with Kogo Noda to work on scripts. Some of the scripts written at Chigasaki-kan were Tokyo Story, Late Sping and Early Spring. Many of Ozu’s films were also shot in Chigasaki - including the scene at the beach at the end of Early Summer and Setsuko Hara’s luminous bike ride in Late Spring. I stayed in Room 2, Ozu and Noda’s room, where oil stains from Ozu’s cooking are still visible on the ceiling. I am grateful my brief stay at this significant and lovely ryokan and for my conversations with Hiroaki Mori, the 5th generation owner of Chigasaki-kan, about Ozu’s work and connection to Chigasaki-kan. He generously gave us a postcard of a photo of Ozu taken by his father and also showed us some incredible Ozu artifacts.

If you’ve been receiving this newsletter for even a few months, you already know that Ozu is my favorite filmmaker and I have an ongoing obsession with his work. This zine, Voyage à Chigasaki, is my contribution to the Ozu 120 celebrations.

The zine is available here. It has a card stock cover and is 20 pages with red risograph printing. The printing was done, as always, by my pal Rich at Flying Saucer Press. Each zine is hand bound with burgundy string.

While working on this I accumulated more photos and drawings than I could fit in the zine. I made 4 mini zines with some of this material. Any Voyage à Chigasaki zines purchased today will include 2 or more of these mini zines. Any zines purchased throughout the month of December will include at least one.

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I’ve had these poorly executed screenshots of one side of a conversation about Ozu in Kim Cho-hee’s film Lucky Chan-Sil saved on my desktop since 2021. This seems like an appropriate time to share them. This is essentially me at a party, me buying groceries, etc:

Thank you, Ozu.

Ozu’s grave at Engaku-ji in Kita-Kamakura, October 2023.