Ozu Yasujirō is often called the "most Japanese" filmmaker. I see many reasons behind such a claim. Many of Ozu's post-World War II films, such as Tokyo Story (Tokyo monogatari, 1953), depicted the everyday life of middle-class Japanese people. His films are filled with traditional Japanese elements, such as Noh, Kabuki, the tea ceremony, etc. Ozu compared himself to a tofu maker, making the same thing over and over again for perfection. The dominant camera position in Ozu's films is lower than in Hollywood films and seems to be the height of the people sitting on the tatami mat.

But, to me, Ozu's films are too unique to be simply called very "Japanese." They are beyond Japanese. Ozu is one of a kind in the history of cinema. To make that point, the goal of this book is not limited to Ozu. Instead, in this book, I try to re-examine film history and theory by discussing the films directed by Ozu. I argue what cinema is in its relationship to the world and the formation of cinema studies as a global academic discipline.

In particular, I propose the notion "the ethics of indeterminacy" because I see the ethical dimension as crucial when we study not only Ozu's films but film studies in general. As a film studies scholar, I believe cinema has an ethical purpose for the world. I began seriously thinking about the relationship between myself as a film viewer and the reality of the world for the first time when I co-translated Kiju Yoshida's Ozu's Anti-Cinema, one of the foundational works of Ozu studies in Japan, into English in 2003. Yoshida was a very important filmmaker of the so-called Japanese New Wave. According to Yoshida, Ozu made filmmaking a passive act that tried to "follow, imitate, and repeat" incidents in the actual world. For Yoshida, Ozu regarded filmmaking as a non-imposing act. He tried to escape from being judgmental and authoritative. According to Yoshida, Ozu's films conspicuously present indecisive images and sound from the chaotic world. Ozu made his films as a place where agency and the spectator encounter the images. In retrospect, Yoshida's book invited me to "the site for an ethical encounter" between myself and the world mediated by cinema.

The phrase "the ethics of indeterminacy" is inspired by "the ethics of hesitation" (tamerai no rinrigaku), the notion coined by the Japanese philosopher Uchida Tatsuru. Uchida is a scholar of the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and his ethics. According to Levinas, the "face-to-face encounter with the other" who suffers painfully makes an individual aware of the other's mortality and demands an ethical response. The hesitation is not to make a hasty judgment of the other. Not to be authoritative over the other. The individual cannot help but hesitate, facing such vulnerability. This notion of face-to-face, I think, is very appropriate to discuss Ozu's unique shot/reverse shots. The shot/reverse shots in the conversation scenes in his films, for example, are astonishing – a continuous back-and-forth with characters directly looking into the camera. They look as if they are speaking to us. Being face-to-face with the characters in Ozu's films, even when they are not always suffering in pain, as a viewer, I cannot help but feel involved in their lives in the world. I discuss cinema for such an ethical purpose for the world. Examining several films directed by Ozu in detail, I explore the relationship between ethics and cinema.