Let me take the issue of camera movements, which I extensively discuss in Chapter 3, as an example. Ozu is often associated with minimal camera movement. How does my historicized and transnational reading complicate that view? In what sense can camera movement be "moralistic"?

Most famously, Jean-Luc Godard said, "Tracking shots are matters of morality," discussing the camera movements in Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Jacques Rivette also defended Resnais and, as a contrast, criticized the tracking shot in Gillo Pontecorvo's Kapo (1960) because it functions to view a concentration camp victim at a "safe distance from the world she inhabits, treating her as a spectacle." In Resnais's Night and Fog (1956), the camera pulls back to show that it was already inside the camps. The implication is that we were inside the camps with the victims, even if we didn't know it. The film makes the viewers aware that we cannot escape these boundaries. Here, Godard and Rivette think of two different types of films: those that "manipulate" their audience to make them renounce their free choice and those that "open up spaces of liberty and autonomy." However, do the tracking shots in Night and Fog make the film an open text? These shots may not give them the only one meaning as Kapo does, but aren't they still delivering the director's viewpoint by implying, for example, that the audience is not living safely outside of the horror of genocide, free from their responsibility for war?

In contrast, I think the strange camera movements in Ozu's postwar films, Early Summer (Bakushū, 1951) and The Flavor of Green Tea Over Rice (Ochazuke no aji, 1952) are too ambiguous. I am not sure the audience is free, though. For example, in Early Summer, there are so many references to Yamanaka Sadao, the filmmaker who was Ozu's close friend but died in the war in China. One Japanese critic regards the camera movements in this film as the POV of Yamanaka's spirit or ghost. I, on the other hand, read it as a technical, technological, and physiological experiment to mobilize the audience's eyes in the composition of depth. Yamanaka's cinematographer was Mimura Akira, who was a co-worker of Gregg Toland in Hollywood. Toland was, of course, famous for his deep focus in Citizen Kane. Ozu had a chance to work with Mimura in his previous film, The Munekata Sisters (Munekata kyōdai, 1951). As such, from a historical and transnational viewpoint, Ozu's ambiguous and mysterious camera movements allow us multi-directional reading, which I think is an example of the ethics of indeterminacy.

In this book, by way of discussing Ozu films, I want to foster readers' historical awareness and political consciousness. If Ozu has been called the "most Japanese," I want to start by asking what Japanese is. I want the readers living in the age of globalization, without necessarily questioning it, to start becoming aware of the tension between national and transnational. Thus, this book is not only for those already invested in Ozu, Japanese studies, or film studies, but also for all readers of the humanities, the fundamental study of all aspects of human society and culture. Ultimately, I want to discuss how human beings can live in this world as human beings in their relationships with others, including fellow human beings in society and animals in the surrounding environment.