"You only have to take a glance at the filmography of Japan's most hallowed filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu to get an idea of the centrality of family life within the nation's cinema. Ozu's own adoption of such close-to-home subject matter, along with fellow directors such as Hiroshi Shimizu, Mikio Naruse and Hideo Gosha, came from his early engagement at Shochiku's Kamata studio in the suburbs of Tokyo.
In the face of a domestic cinema primarily consisting of jidai-geki (period dramas), Shochiku made a policy of focusing on modern-day melodramas, romances and comedies, collectively known as shomin-geki ('common people's dramas') and with a not insignificant influence from American filmmakers such as Ernst Lubitsch and Charlie Chaplin."
