title: Svara

text: The "svara" concept is found in Chapter 28 of the ancient "Natya Shastra", estimated to have been completed between 200 BCE to 200 CE. It names the unit of tonal measurement or audible unit the "śruti", with verse 28.21 introducing the musical scale as follows:


title: Svara

text: These seven "swara"s are shared by both major "raga" systems of Indian classical music, that is the North Indian (Hindustani) and South Indian (Carnatic).


title: Svara

text: "Sapta svara", also called "sapta swara" or "sapta sur", refers to the seven distinct notes of the octave or the seven successive "svara"s of a "saptak". The "sapta svara" can be collectively referred to as the "sargam" (which is an acronym of the consonants of the first four "svara"s). "Sargam" is the Indian equivalent to solfège, a technique for the teaching of sight-singing. As in Western moveable-Do solfège, the "svara" Sa is the tonic of a piece or scale. The seven "svara"s of the "saptak" are the fundamentals of heptatonic scales or "melakarta raga"s and "thaat"s in Carnatic and Hindustani classical music.


title: Svara

text: The seven "svara" are "Shadja" (षड्ज), "Rishabh" (ऋषभ), "Gandhar" (गान्धार), "Madhyam" (मध्यम), "Pancham" (पंचम), "Dhaivat" (धैवत) and "Nishad" (निषाद). The "svara"s of the "sargam" are often learnt in abbreviated form: "sā, ri" (Carnatic) or "re" (Hindustani), "ga, ma, pa, dha, ni". Of these, the first "svara" that is ""sa"", and the fifth svara that is ""pa"", are considered anchors ("achal svara"s) that are unalterable, while the remaining have flavours ("" and " svara"s) that differs between the two major systems.


title: Svara

text: North Indian Hindustani music has fixed name of a relative pitch, but South Indian Carnatic music keeps on making interchanges of the names of pitches in case of ri-ga and dha-ni whenever required. Swaras appear in successive steps in an octave. More comprehensively, swara-graam (scale) is the practical concept of Indian music comprising seven + five= twelve most useful musical pitches. Sage Matanga made a very important statement in his Brihaddeshi some 1500 years ago that:


title: Svara

text: i.e. Shadja, Rishabh, Gandhar, ... (and their utterance) are not the real svaras but their pronunciation in the form of aa-kar, i-kaar, u-kaar ... are the real form of the svaras.


title: Svara

text: It is said that "Shadja" is the basic "svara" from which all the other 6 "svara"s are produced. When we break the word "Shadja" then we get, Shad- And -Ja. "Shad" is 6 and "ja" is 'giving birth' in Indian languages. So basically the translation is :


title: Svara

text: The absolute frequencies for all "svara"s are variable, and are determined relative to the "saptak" or octave. E.g. given Sa 240 Hz, Re 270 Hz, Ga 288 Hz, Ma 320 Hz, Pa 360 Hz, Dha 405 Hz, and Ni 432 Hz, then the Sa after the Ni of 432 Hz has a frequency of 480 Hz i.e. double that of the lower octave Sa, and similarly all the other 6 svaras. Considering the Sa of the Madhya Saptak then frequencies of the other svaras will be,


title: Svara

text: All the other "svara"s except "Shadja" (Sa) and "Pancham" (Pa) can be ' or " svara"s but Sa and Pa are always "shuddha svara"s. And hence "svara"s Sa and Pa are called achal svaras, since these "svara"s don't move from their original position. "Svara"s Ra, Ga, Ma, Dha, Ni are called chal svaras"', since these "svara"s move from their original position.


title: Svara

text: The "svara" differs slightly from the "śruti" concept in Indian music. Both the "swara" and the "śruti" are but the sounds of music. According to the music scholars of the distant past, the "śruti" is generally understood as a microtone besides "veda" and an ear. In the context of advanced music, a "śruti" is the smallest gradation of pitch that a human ear can detect and a singer or instrument can produce. There are 22 "śruti" or microtones in a "saptaka" of Hindustani music but Carnatic music assumes 24 "śruti". A "svara" is a selected pitch from 22 "śruti"s, using several of such "svara"s a musician constructs scales, melodies and "raga"s. In the presence of a drone-sound of perfectly tuned Tanpuras, an ideal "svara" sounds sweet and appealing to human ear but particularly some 10 "śruti"s of the "saptaka" sound out of pitch (besuraa) when compared to the very drone. A tuneful and pleasing tone of the "svara" is located at a fixed interval but there is no fixed interval defined for two consecutive "śruti"s anywhere that can safely and scientifically be used throughout with respect to a perfect drone sound.


title: Svara

text: The ancient Sanskrit text "Natya Shastra" by Bharata identifies and discusses twenty two "shruti" and seven shuddha and two vikrita "swara". The Natya Shastra mentions that in Shadja graama, the swara pairs saa-ma and saa-pa are samvaadi swaras (consonant pair) and are located at the interval of 9 and 13 shruti respectively. Similarly, swara pairs re-dha and ga-ni are samvaadi swara too. Without giving any example of 'a standard measure' or 'equal interval' between two successive shrutis, Bharata declared that saa, ma or pa shall have an interval of 4 shrutis measured from the pitch of the preceding swara, re or dha shall have an interval of 3 shrutis measured from the pitch of the preceding swara and ga or ni shall have an interval of 2 shrutis measured from the pitch of the preceding swara respectively. The following quote explains it all:


title: Svara

text: Bharata also makes some unscientific and unacceptable observations ignoring practically proven truths like samvaad (samvaada/ संवाद) or consonance of ma-ni, re-dha, re-pa and ga-ni as each of these swara pairs do not have equal number of shrutis to establish samvaad. In reality, the above-mentioned pairs DO create samvaad or consonances which Bharata did not recognize for unknown reasons. None of the musicologists give in writing the 'practical basis' or technique of ascertaining the ideal tonal gap between the note pairs like saa-re, re-ga, ga-ma, ma-pa, pa-dha, dha-ni, ni-saa* (taar saa) until Sangeet Paarijat of Ahobal (c. 1650). The "swara" studies in ancient Sanskrit texts include the musical gamut and its tuning, categories of melodic models and the "raga" compositions.


title: Svara

text: Perhaps the greats like Bharata, Sage Matanga and Shaarnga-deva did not know the secret of tuneful tones (up to acceptable level of normal human ear, on the basis of taanpuraa drone) for they do not mention use of drone sound for any of the musical purposes. Most of the practicing musicians knew very well that all the tuneful tones of seven notes could be discovered with the help of the theory of samvaad, in which saa-saa* (*means upper octave), saa-ma and saa-pa play the most crucial role.


title: Svara

text: As per the widely used Bhatkhande Svara Lipi (Bhakthande's Swar Notation script), a dot above a letter (svara symbol) indicates that the note is sung one "saptak" (octave) higher, and a dot below indicates one saptak lower. notes are indicated by an underscore, and the Ma has a line on top which can be vertical or horizontal. (Or, if a note with the same name - Sa, for example - is an octave higher than the note represented by S, an apostrophe is placed to the right: S'. If it is an octave lower, the apostrophe is placed to the left: 'S. Apostrophes can be added as necessary to indicate the octave: for example, ``g would be the note komal Ga in the octave two octaves below that which begins on the note S (that is, two octaves below g).) In other words, the basic rule is that the number of dots or apostrophes above or below the svara symbol means the number of times dots or apostrophes, respectively, above or below the corresponding svara in madhya saptak (middle octave).


title: Svara

text: The basic mode of reference is that which is equivalent to the Western Ionian mode or major scale (called "Bilaval thaat" in Hindustani music, "Sankarabharanam" in "Carnatic"). All relationships between pitches follow from this. In any seven-tone mode (starting with S), R, G, D, and N can be natural (', lit. 'pure') or flat (', 'soft') but never sharp, and the M can be natural or sharp (') but never flat, making twelve notes as in the Western chromatic scale. If a swara is not natural ('), a line below a letter indicates that it is flat (') and an acute accent above indicates that it is sharp (', 'intense'). Sa and Pa are immovable (once Sa is selected), forming a just perfect fifth.


title: Svara

text: In some notation systems, the distinction is made with capital and lowercase letters. When abbreviating these tones, the form of the note which is relatively "lower" in pitch always uses a "lowercase" letter, while the form which is "higher" in pitch uses an "uppercase" letter. So Re/Ri uses the letter r and Re/Ri, the letter R, but Ma uses m because it has a raised form - Ma - which uses the letter M. Sa and Pa are always abbreviated as S and P, respectively, since they cannot be altered.


title: Svara

text: The "svara"s in Carnatic music are slightly different in the twelve-note system. Each "svara" is either "prakr̥ti" (invariant) or "vikr̥ti" (variable). "Ṣaḍjam" and "Pañcamam" are "prakr̥ti svara"s, whilst "R̥ṣabham", "Gāndhāram", "Mādhyamam", "Dhaivatam" and "Niṣādam" are "vikr̥ti svara"s. Ma has two variants, and each of Ri, Ga, Dha and Ni has three variants. The mnemonic syllables for each "vikṛti svara" use the vowels "a", "i" and "u" successively from lowest to highest. For example, "r̥ṣabham" has the three ascending variants "ra", "ri" and "ru", being respectively 1, 2 and 3 semitones above the tonic note, "ṣaḍjam".


title: Svara

text: As you can see above, "Catuśruti Ṛṣabham" and "Śuddha Gāndhāram" share the same pitch (3rd key/position). Hence if C is chosen as "Ṣaḍjam", D would be both "Catuśruti R̥ṣabham" and "Śuddha Gāndhāram". Hence they will not occur in same rāgam together. Similarly for the two svaras each at pitch positions 4, 10 and 11.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The Arabian leopard (Panthera pardus nimr) is a leopard subspecies native to the Arabian Peninsula. It has been listed as Critically Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1996 as fewer than 200 wild individuals were estimated to be alive in 2006. The population is severely fragmented. Subpopulations are isolated and not larger than 50 mature individuals. The population is thought to decline continuously.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The Arabian leopard is the smallest leopard subspecies. It was tentatively affirmed as a distinct subspecies by genetic analysis of a single wild leopard from South Arabia, which appeared most closely related to the African leopard.


title: Arabian leopard

text: "Felis pardus nimr" was the scientific name proposed by Wilhelm Hemprich and Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg in 1830 for a leopard from Arabia. "Panthera pardus jarvisi", proposed by Reginald Innes Pocock in 1932, was based on a leopard skin from the Sinai Peninsula.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In the early 1990s, a phylogeographic analysis was carried out based on tissue samples from Asian and African leopards. "P. p. jarvisi" was provisionally grouped with the Persian leopard, as tissue samples were not available. Molecular biologists tentatively proposed in 2001 to group the Sinai leopard with "P. p. nimr", as again tissue samples were not available.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The Arabian leopard's fur varies from pale yellow to deep golden, tawny or grey and is patterned with rosettes. Males have a total length of including long tails and weigh about ; females are long including long tails and weigh around . The Arabian leopard is smaller than both African and Persian leopards.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The geographic range of the Arabian leopard is poorly understood but generally considered to be limited to the Arabian Peninsula, including Egypt's Sinai Peninsula. It lives in mountainous uplands and hilly steppes, but seldom moves to open plains, desert or coastal lowlands. It prefers well-vegetated terrain that is difficult for humans to reach. Since the late 1990s, leopards were not recorded in Egypt. One individual was killed in the Elba Protected Area in 2014.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Modeling suggests that the species accumulated genetic and phenotypic differences from its conspecifics at a series of glacial maxima during the last glacial period in a Yemen refugium, from where it expanded elsewhere in the Holocene warming following the expansion of suitable landscape types. As humans expanded as well, they eventually restricted the source populations of the leopard to an area intersecting eastern Yemen and western Oman today.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Until the late 1960s, the Arabian leopard was widely distributed in the mountains along both the coasts of the Red Sea and Arabian Sea. In Saudi Arabia, leopard habitat is estimated to have decreased by around 90% since the beginning of the 19th century. Of 19 reports obtained from informants between 1998 and 2003, only four are confirmed including sightings in one location in the Hijaz Mountains and three locations in the Asir Mountains, with the most recent record in 2002 south of Biljurashi. No leopard was recorded during a camera trapping survey conducted from 2002 to 2003. Although the leopard is officially protected in the country, its remaining range is not encompassed by protected areas.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In the United Arab Emirates, the Arabian leopard was first sighted in 1949 by Wilfred Thesiger in Jebel Hafeet. The exact status of the leopard in the country is unclear. It is either extinct or very rare in the eastern region, with occasional sightings being reported in places like Wadi Wurayah. Before the end of the 20th century, sightings were reported in the areas of Jebel Hafeet and Al Hajar Mountains.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In Oman, leopards were reported to have occurred in the Hajar Mountains until the late 1970s. The largest confirmed sub-population inhabits the Dhofar Mountains in the country's southeast. In the Jabal Samhan Nature Reserve, 17 individual adult leopards were identified between 1997 and 2000 using camera traps. Leopards were also sighted in the Musandam Peninsula, particularly Ras Musandam. The home range of Arabian leopards in this reserve is roughly estimated at for males and for females. The Dhofar mountain range is considered the best habitat for leopards in the country. This rugged terrain provides shelters, shade and trapped water, and harbors a wide variety of prey species, in particular in escarpments and narrow wadis.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In Yemen, leopards formerly ranged in all mountainous areas of the country, including the western and southern highlands eastwards to the border with Oman. Since the early 1990s, leopards are considered rare and close to extinction due to direct persecution by local people and depletion of wild prey.


title: Arabian leopard

text: There was a small population in Israel's Negev desert, estimated at 20 individuals in the late 1970s. Leopards were hunted until the early 1960s. By 2002, fewer than 11 isolated individuals were estimated to survive in the Judaean Desert and the Negev Highlands. Six males, three females and two unsexed individuals were identified in the country, based on genetic analysis of 268 scats collected. The last wild leopard in the Negev desert was sighted in Sde Boker in 2007, which was so sick it was taken into a sanctuary and died in 2009. The latest sighting came in 2010/11, when a leopard was sighted in the northern Arabah Valley.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Arabian leopards are predominantly nocturnal, but are sometimes also seen in daylight. They seem to concentrate on small to medium prey species, and usually store carcasses of large prey in caves or lairs but not in trees. Scat analyses revealed that the main prey species comprise Arabian gazelle, Nubian ibex, Cape hare, rock hyrax, porcupine, Ethiopian hedgehog, small rodents, birds, and insects. Since local people reduced ungulates to small populations, leopards are forced to alter their diet to smaller prey and livestock such as goats, sheep, donkeys and young camels.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In addition to humans, the main competitors of the Arabian leopard are the caracal and the Arabian wolf. It has been suggested that human poaching has reduced the leopard population to an extent that natural competition with other predators is now a threatening factor. Population viability analysis in Saudi Arabia suggests that under stable natural conditions in absence of poaching and restocking, the Arabian leopard would have a survival probability of only 37%; without competition by the caracal, this would increase to 89%; and without the Arabian wolf to 98%. Assuming a moderate poaching rate of six individuals per year would lead to extirpation over the next 100 years.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Information about ecology and behaviour of Arabian leopards in the wild is very limited. A leopard from the Judean desert is reported to have come into heat in March. After a gestation period of 13 weeks, females give birth to two to four cubs in a cave amidst boulders or in a burrow.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Leopard cubs are born with closed eyes that open four to nine days later. Captive-born Arabian leopard cubs emerged from their den for the first time at the age of one month. Cubs are weaned at the age of about three months, and remain with their mother for up to two years.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Three confirmed separate subpopulations remain on the Arabian Peninsula with fewer than an estimated 200 leopards. The Arabian leopard is threatened by habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation; prey depletion caused by unregulated hunting; trapping for the illegal wildlife trade and retaliatory killing in defense of livestock.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The leopard population has decreased drastically in Arabia as shepherds and villagers kill leopards in retaliation for attacks on livestock. In addition, hunting of leopard prey species such as hyrax and ibex by local people and habitat fragmentation, especially in the Sarawat Mountains, made the continued survival of the leopard population uncertain. Other reasons for killing leopards are for personal satisfaction and pride, traditional medicine and hides. Some leopards are killed accidentally when eating poisoned carcasses intended for Arabian wolf and striped hyena.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Among the products sold in the tent city of Mina, Saudi Arabia after the Hajj of 2010, skins of Arabian leopards that were poached in Yemen were offered.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The leopard population in Saudi Arabia is affected by the decrease of natural prey species so that leopards increasingly prey on livestock. Local people therefore consider leopards a threat and kill them either by using poison or snares. The leopard population is close to extinction in the country.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In the 1950s, the Arabian leopard population was already decreasing drastically due to habitat degradation and fragmentation, and killing of leopards and prey species.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The Arabian leopard is listed in CITES Appendix I. The current network of protected areas largely under-represents the species suitable habitat only covering its 11%, and most of the survey effort to detect and ensure the survival of the leopard in the peninsula has taken place outside the polygons identified by models as core areas for the species.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The Jabal Samhan Nature Reserve was established in 1997 after camera trap records of leopards were obtained; camera trapping since then has identified 17 individual adult leopards, including one cub. Al Jazeera spotlighted successful tracking efforts in the Nature Reserve in a 2012 episode of its program "Witness".


title: Arabian leopard

text: At least ten wild leopards were live-captured in Yemen since the early 1990s and sold to zoos; some have been placed in conservation breeding centers in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.


title: Arabian leopard

text: A detailed study of leopard distribution and habitat requirement is needed for the management of the species. The ecological information needed include data on feeding behavior, range use and reproduction. This information is of great importance to the survival of the species. There are many sites already surveyed and considered to be suitable for preservation for leopards in the plan adopted by the national commission for wildlife conservation and development. These areas include Jebel Fayfa, Jebel Al-Qahar, Jebel Shada, which has already been gazetted as a protected area, Jebel Nees, Jebel Wergan, Jebel Radwa and Harrat Uwayrid. The formal establishment of some of these areas is now urgent.


title: Arabian leopard

text: A successful conservation strategy must promote the awareness of the importance of leopard conservation, employing the media and perhaps other sources for basic education programs. The support and involvement of people living close to leopard habitats are vital in such efforts. This is true not only because they might affect the conservation of the leopard in one way or another, but also because they depend on their livestock which could be killed occasionally by leopards. Although it is not always practical, compensation for lost livestock from leopard predation should be considered.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Revenue from sources such as hunting rights and ecotourism, services such as roads and school employment in protected areas would encourage local residents to participate in leopard conservation. Furthermore, well-managed protected areas will ensure the continued survival of the species until other factors enhancing its survival become effective. Public awareness, fruitful consideration of the needs of local people and ecological studies may take years to be useful.


title: Arabian leopard

text: In Yemen, Dutch efforts are underway to conserve leopards at two sites, including Hawf Protected Area. In Saudi Arabia, authorities have undertaken efforts to create Sharaan Nature Reserve, a wildlife sanctuary for the leopard in the area of Al-`Ula.


title: Arabian leopard

text: The first Arabian leopards were captured in southern Oman and registered in the studbook in 1985. Captive breeding was initiated in 1995 at the Oman Mammal Breeding Centre and is operated at a regional level on the Arabian Peninsula. Since 1999, the regional studbook is coordinated and managed by personnel of the Breeding Centre for Endangered Arabian Wildlife in Sharjah. , nine institutions participated in the breeding programme and kept 42 males, 32 females, and three unsexed leopards, of which 19 were wild caught. This captive population comprised 14 founders that have an unequal number of descendants.


title: Arabian leopard

text: Leopard subspecies: African leopard Amur leopard Anatolian leopard Indian leopard Indochinese leopard Javan leopard Persian leopard Sri Lankan leopard


title: Saison

text: Saison (French, "season," ) is a pale ale that is highly carbonated, fruity, spicy, and often bottle conditioned. It was historically brewed with low alcohol levels, but modern productions of the style have moderate to high levels of alcohol. Along with several other varieties, it is generally classified as a farmhouse ale.


title: Saison

text: 'Bière de saison' is first mentioned in the early 19th century. It was most widely known as a beer from the industrial city of Liège, where it was brewed by professional breweries as a keepable version of the city's spelt beer that had been produced for a few centuries. It was made with malted spelt, unmalted wheat and only a small amount of barley malt. It was typically brewed in winter and drunk after four to six months.


title: Saison

text: While Liège's saison disappeared after the First World War, it continued to be brewed, generally as a barley-only beer, by professional breweries in the province of Hainaut, who sold it as a 'cuvée réservée' luxury beer, which was 'to be served at room temperature like a good wine' and 'to be poured with care'.


title: Saison

text: In the late 1980s, American importer Don Feinberg was urged by beer writer Michael Jackson to import Brasserie Dupont's saison to the United States. It was Feinberg who re-styled saison as a 'farmhouse ale':" 'People asked: is it a wheat beer? Is it a lambic? I told them it was a hoppy farmhouse ale.' "


title: Saison

text: Saison's reputation was further cemented by Phil Markowski's 2004 book "Farmhouse ales" and has since become a popular beer style worldwide. It was however only these developments in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s that cemented saison's reputation as a 'farmhouse ale': in older sources it is never indicated as such and though there has been a limited tradition in Belgium of brewing on farms or brewing for farm workers, it seems to have been conflated with saison only from the 1980s onwards.


title: Saison

text: Modern saisons are not exclusively brewed seasonally anymore. Generally they are highly carbonated, fruity and spicy — sometimes from the addition of spices.


title: Saison

text: The type of malt determines the color of the saison, and although most saisons are of a cloudy golden color as result of the grist being mostly pale or pilsner malt, the use of darker malts results in some saisons being reddish-amber. Some recipes also use wheat.


title: Saison

text: Spices such as orange zest, coriander, and ginger may be used. Some spice character may come through due to the production of esters during fermentation at warm temperatures.


title: Saison

text: Modern examples brewed in the US tend to copy the yeast used by the Dupont Brewery, which ferments better at warmer temperatures like than the standard fermenting temperature used by other Belgian ales.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Arcadia Group Ltd (formerly Arcadia Group plc and, until 1998, Burton Group plc) was a British multinational retailing company headquartered in London, England. It was best known for being the previous parent company of British Home Stores (BHS), Burton, Dorothy Perkins, Debenhams, Evans, Miss Selfridge, Topman, Topshop, Wallis and Warehouse. At its peak, the group had more than 2,500 outlets in the UK, as well as concessions in UK department stores and several hundred franchises operated internationally.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The company was majority owned by Taveta Investments, owned by Tina Green, wife of Sir Philip Green, chairman of the Arcadia Group.


title: Arcadia Group

text: BHS, also owned by Green, was integrated into Arcadia in 2009. In 2015 the then loss-making BHS was sold for £1 to Retail Acquisitions Ltd owned by Dominic Chappell. In 2019, on the bankruptcy of BHS, British MP Frank Field, who previously investigated the BHS pension deficit, criticised Philip Green for paying huge dividends to his family and to friend Richard Caring "when things are going well", and making his employees pay "when things are not going well".


title: Arcadia Group

text: In April 2019, it was reported that the Arcadia Group, controlled by the Green family, had recorded a £300m deficit in its pension fund, while the Green family had cashed out £1.2bn in dividends from Arcadia in 2005.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The Arcadia Group entered administration on 30 November 2020. By 8 February 2021 all of the brands previously owned by Arcadia had been sold off by administrators to online retailers, mainly ASOS and Boohoo, sealing the fate of the remaining bricks-and-mortar sites and thousands of jobs. Outfit, an out-of-town retail chain which comprised numerous Arcadia subsidiaries' merchandise, was not sold and so was closed.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The Arcadia Group has its origins in the firm founded by 18-year-old Lithuanian immigrant Montague Burton in Chesterfield in 1903 as The Cross-Tailoring Company. Burton's initial operation, a men's clothing manufacture, tailoring and retailing operation, became the genesis for the current Burton Menswear chain, which still remains part of the company, albeit having moved away from traditional tailoring to mainstream men's off-peg casuals and formalwear line with shifting trends in fashion and clothing. The eventual holding company survived as Burton Group plc until 1998, when the current name was substituted.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The firm's headquarters moved from Chesterfield to Leeds in 1910, and The Cross-Tailoring Company had changed its name to Burton by the time the First World War broke out in 1914.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in 1929, by which time it had 400 stores, factories and mills. By then, the company had a large factory in Leeds.


title: Arcadia Group

text: After World War II, Montague Burton offered men the chance to buy a full suit, which included jacket, trousers, waistcoat, shirt and underwear, which became known as The Full Monty. In 1946, the company acquired the Peter Robinson women's fashion chain. By 1952, the year Montague Burton died, the company was the largest multiple tailor in the world. Burton was the official suit supplier of the England national football team for the World Cup in 1966.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 1964, the Peter Robinson chain began what became a relaunch as Topshop. This was in response to the development of a new young fashion culture around Britain in the 1960s; Topshop became the company's home of young, modern, on-trend ladieswear, a role it continues to hold. The Topshop launch began with Topshop-branded departments within Peter Robinson stores in 1964, with the first standalone Topshop stores opened ten years later in 1974. Eventually, the Peter Robinson name was dropped altogether. In 1971 the Group acquired Evans, a major operator in the field of fashionable clothing for women wearing larger-sized clothes.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In the 1970s, and as a complement to the suit business, the Group began to develop itself significantly in mainstream clothing retailing by beginning to target chains to precisely defined markets - for example it launched Topman for young men in 1970. This development capitalised on the success of Topshop in catering for a young, fashion-savvy audience, and reflected the growth in men's casual clothing, with formal-wear sales declining due to the trend for more casual general clothing.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The firm also expanded its horizons by acquiring businesses outside its fashion heartland, at one point owning Ryman, the stationery chain, but later scaled back to focus principally on clothing.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The Dorothy Perkins chain was acquired in 1979, enabling the Group to expand into the mainstream womenswear market, following the success of its previous ladieswear ventures (Topshop and Evans). The Dorothy Perkins chain has subsequently been positioned as the group's main ladieswear operation, focused towards a similar target audience as Burton is in menswear.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 1984, the Group launched a new chain, Principles, for fashion conscious women with a higher disposable income; this allowed the firm to capitalise on emerging new fashion and business trends of the 1980s, such as power dressing. Principles for Men was launched a year later, in 1985, following the success of the ladies' division.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Also in 1985, the Group acquired Debenhams, then the largest department store group in the UK. The large store Browns of Chester, which had previously been part of the Burton group, was subsequently moved across to trade as part of the Debenhams chain, and remained part of the Debenhams unit following the unit's divestment (it was only Debenhams-owned department store to retain a unique name alongside the corporate brand at the time of its closure in 2021).


title: Arcadia Group

text: The firm also purchased menswear firm Colliers, ultimately rolling this into the Burton, Topman and Principles For Men chains.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 1993, spurred on by the recession of the early 1990s which had led to declining sales across the clothing retail market, the Burton Group undertook a major review of its trading space portfolio. Under the banner of Townprint, the firm reviewed the location and branding of its stores in each town and city in which they operated. At the time of the review, the Group was operating in the region of 1,600 stores, some of which had been with the group for some years and some of which were no longer performing adequately. The ultimate result was that the Group ended the leases on around 380 of the outlets they were trading from at that point, though replaced over half of these (around 220 stores in all) with the lease of store units which the Group had not previously been trading from. Around 350 stores were transferred from one of the company's brands to another. As part of the Townprint programme, the firm began to roll out new ways of working, such as operating increasing numbers of combined stores, where several brands shared the same unit; these combinations (such as Topshop/Topman or Burton/Dorothy Perkins unit-shares) would continue to be developed through the 1990s and 2000s as a way of reducing overheads whilst maintaining geographical spread of the brands.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 1996, the Group made its first move into home shopping with the acquisition of Innovations, a mail order catalogue company, along with the Hawkshead brand in July 1996 and Racing Green in October 1996. Innovations and some related brands were then sold to the home shopping group Great Universal Stores in November 1997.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The decision to de-merge Debenhams and separate it from the rest of the Group was announced in July 1997: the plan was approved by shareholders in January 1998 and the de-merger took effect later that month. At that time, Debenhams became a separate company with its own listing on the London Stock Exchange. It was at this point that the Group, until then still known as Burton Group plc, became Arcadia Group plc.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The late 1990s also saw the launch of a new experimental high-fashion menswear chain, SU214 (Style Union 214), which took its name from its flagship store at 214 Oxford Street in London. The chain aimed to capitalise on the growing demand for high-end casualwear and expand upon the group's presence in the young menswear market.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In June 1998, the Group acquired Wade-Smith, the Liverpool-based retailer of designer childrenswear, menswear and womenswear. The acquisition was primarily to allow Arcadia to expand its presence in the childrenswear market, which they had made little attempt at up to this point. New Wade Smith Jr stores opened in locations such as the Bluewater shopping centre in Kent.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In June 1999, the Arcadia Group launched Zoom, an e-commerce and Internet Service Provider that forms a key part of the Group's multi-channel approach to retailing. Shortly after Zoom's launch, Associated Newspapers Ltd acquired a 50% stake in Zoom, allowing both partners to benefit from the increased joint marketing opportunities.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In July 1999, Arcadia Group increased its share of the UK womenswear market with the acquisition of the Sears womenswear businesses, comprising the Warehouse, Wallis, Richards, Miss Selfridge and Outfit brands from the defunct Sears plc. Shortly afterwards, Arcadia chose to close down the underperforming Richards chain, though shops in suitable locations were rebranded under other Arcadia store brands. Arcadia continued to develop the Wallis, Miss Selfridge and Warehouse brands, and expanded significantly the Outfit out-of-town store chain, introducing other Arcadia brands to the stores and expanding the store network.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 2000, the firm undertook a strategy known internally as BrandMAX under which underperforming brands were closed or scaled down. In some cases stores which were closed were replaced by other Arcadia properties. As part of BrandMAX, the Wade Smith Jr, Principles For Men and SU214 store brands ceased to trade and were absorbed as concessions into other group businesses (for instance, menswear chain SU214 was absorbed into Topman). Miss Selfridge was also reduced significantly in size (though gained a new London flagship store in the former SU214 flagship site) and all remaining standalone Topman stores were replaced by combined Topshop-Topman stores, a process of integration which had begun some years previously.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 2002, Arcadia Group plc was bought by Taveta Investments, owned by Taveta Ltd, based in Jersey. Taveta Ltd is owned by Philip Green's family, the only director being his wife, Tina Green. Accordingly, Arcadia Group became a private company and was delisted from the London Stock Exchange.


title: Arcadia Group

text: By the middle of October 2002, the company had sold some of its chains, including Principles, Warehouse, Racing Green and Hawkshead, to Rubicon Retail for £35m. Those Outfit stores which were already retailing Principles and Warehouse clothing continued to do so by arrangement with the new owners. Arcadia also entered into discussions regarding the sale of the Wade Smith brand back to its previous owners.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In 2005, Sir Philip Green bought the UK retail stores of Etam and Tammy; these stores were converted into other Arcadia retail outlets, with Tammy clothing subsequently being retailed through BHS and Outfit stores. Some of the stores not retained by Arcadia were taken up by other fashion retail groups, with Monsoon acquiring a large number of the outlets.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In February 2009, it was announced that the BHS department store chain, also owned by the Greens, would be integrated into Arcadia. As part of the changes, some administrative functions previously run separately were intended to be consolidated to improve efficiency, and some BHS retail stores were to begin to carry Arcadia brands as concessions, enabling Arcadia to expand the presence of its brands without having to lease numerous new stores, and allowing the firm to cut costs by transferring operations from stand-alone stores into BHS locations.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In late 2010, Arcadia began a further review of its property portfolio, similar to those undertaken under the Townprint and BrandMAX schemes; several hundred of the group's existing store leases were set to expire over the next three to five years. Analysts estimated that between 150 and 300 stores could be shut and replaced with new locations or integrated/combined stores. After Phillip Green confirmed that the number of stores under lease was to fall, in 2013–14, Arcadia began shutting stores in several locations, mostly small-to-medium-sized towns and cities, including South Shields, Barnsley, Scunthorpe, Dartford, Crawley, Erdington, Birmingham and Market Harborough. Arcadia cited the rise in online shopping and "destination" centres as a reason for moving away from high street locations. In March 2015, following continued losses, BHS was sold to Retail Acquisitions Ltd.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In March 2019, after continued losses, it was reported that Sir Philip Green was exploring a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) to restructure the company. It was feared the plan could lead to more shop closures and job losses. A month later, two restructuring specialists were added to the Arcadia Group's board to oversee the implementation of the CVA. Amid the 2020 UK outbreak of COVID-19, the group cancelled £100m of clothing orders which added to growing concerns of labour rights organisations of the impact on garment manufacturers globally.


title: Arcadia Group

text: In May 2019, Arcadia Group confirmed it planned to close multiple stores across the UK, US and Ireland with the possibility of further closures worldwide. Many stores across the UK were set to close including Topshop's flagship store on London's Oxford Street and up to five Topshop stores closing including the branch in Swindon.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Stores outside the UK, US and Ireland were expected to remain open as they are currently under a franchise agreement, but subject to change. A total of 17 stores were confirmed for closure in the UK and a further six stores in the Republic of Ireland. Eleven Topshop and Topman co-branded stores were to close across the US with their products being available online through Nordstrom in North America.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Between summer 2019 and winter 2020, Wallis, Evans and Dorothy Perkins (Dublin and Cork) stores exited the Irish market, Miss Selfridge stores (in Galway and Dublin) and flagship stores belonging to Topshop and Topman (Dublin) also closed. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and continued issues with its parent company, Arcadia was expected to confirm a full closure of its Irish operations for late 2020 or early 2021. In December 2020, Arcadia's Irish companies (Arcadia Group Multiples Ireland Ltd, Topshop/Topman Ireland Ltd, Wallis Retail Ireland and Miss Selfridge Retail Ireland) confirmed they would be liquidated, however, they will continue to trade until early 2021. The impending closure of its Irish operations would result in less than 500 job losses in Ireland.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Arcadia Group went into administration at 8pm GMT on 30 November 2020, placing 13,000 jobs at risk. On 25 January 2021, ASOS said it was in "exclusive" talks to buy Arcadia's Topshop, Topman, Miss Selfridge and HIIT brands out of administration, though it only wanted the brands, not the shops. A consortium including Next had earlier dropped a bid to buy Topshop and Topman; interest in Arcadia operations had also been expressed by Mike Ashley's Frasers Group, a consortium including JD Sports, and online retailer Boohoo.


title: Arcadia Group

text: On 1 February 2021, ASOS announced it had acquired the Topshop, Topman and Miss Selfridge brands out of administration for £265 million, paying an additional £65 million for current and pre-ordered stock. ASOS kept 300 employees on as part of the deal but didn't keep any of the brand's 70 stores, putting 2,500 jobs at risk.


title: Arcadia Group

text: On 8 February 2021, Boohoo announced it had acquired the Burton, Dorothy Perkins and Wallis brands out of administration for £25.2 million. Boohoo took on the ecommerce and digital assets of the three brands, as well as their inventory and transfer of 260 jobs. The deal did not include the brands' combined 214 stores, concessions or franchises, putting 2,450 jobs at risk.


title: Arcadia Group

text: Arcadia's brands, including Dorothy Perkins, were mainly supplied by International Clothing Designs, a company owned by Philip Green's long-time friend Richard Caring, owner of the Annabel's nightclub.


title: Arcadia Group

text: All of Arcadia's brands were sold during January and February 2021 to online retailers, meaning that the related stores will eventually close. Outfit, out-of-town stores carrying various Arcadia brands but not a clothing brand in its own right, closed in January 2021.


title: Arcadia Group

text: The Green family bought BHS for £200m in 2000, and it became part of the Arcadia Group in 2009, before being sold in 2015 for £1 to Dominic Chappell.


title: Arcadia Group

text: By the time of its sale to Chappell, the company had a pension deficit of £571m. This deficit was attributed to Green having paid dividends to his family and to Richard Caring. Caring, a personal friend of Philip Green, secretly owned a stake in BHS in the early 2000s, and was awarded £93m in dividends.


title: First Carnatic War

text: The First Carnatic War (1740–1748) was the Indian theatre of the War of the Austrian Succession and the first of a series of Carnatic Wars that established early British dominance on the east coast of the Indian subcontinent. In this conflict the British and French East India Companies vied with each other on land for control of their respective trading posts at Madras, Pondicherry, and Cuddalore, while naval forces of France and Britain engaged each other off the coast. The war set the stage for the rapid growth of French hegemony in southern India under the command of French Governor-General Joseph François Dupleix in the Second Carnatic War.


title: First Carnatic War

text: In 1720 France effectively nationalised the French East India Company, and began using it to expand its imperial interests. This became a source of conflict with the British in India with the entry of Britain into the War of the Austrian Succession in 1744. Hostilities in India began with a British naval attack on a French fleet in 1745, which led the French Governor-General Dupleix to request additional forces. This resulted in the despatch of a fleet under La Bourdonnais that arrived in 1746. In July of that year La Bourdonnais and British Admiral Edward Peyton fought an indecisive action off Negapatam, after which La Bourdonnais put in at Pondicherry for repairs and strategising with Dupleix. The fleets met again on 19 August, but Peyton refused battle, recognising that La Bourdonnais had acquired additional guns at Pondicherry, and retreated to Bengal. On 4 September 1746, La Bourdonnais led an attack on Madras. After several days of bombardment the British surrendered and the French entered the city. The British leadership was taken prisoner and sent to Pondicherry. It was originally agreed that the town would be restored to the British after negotiation but this was opposed by Dupleix, who sought to annex Madras to French holdings. The remaining British residents were asked to take an oath promising not to take up arms against the French; a handful refused, among them a young Robert Clive, and were kept under weak guard as the French prepared to destroy the fort. Disguising themselves as natives, Clive and three others eluded their inattentive sentry, slipped out of the fort, and made their way to Fort St. David (the British post at Cuddalore), some to the south. Dupleix, in the meantime, had before the assault promised to turn over Fort St. George to the Nawab of the Carnatic Anwaruddin Khan, but refused to do so.


title: First Carnatic War

text: Anwaruddin responded by sending a 10,000-man army to take the fort from Dupleix by force. Dupleix, who had lost the support of La Bourdonnais over the status of Madras, had only 930 French troops. In the Battle of Adyar this small force successfully repulsed the attacks of Anwaruddin's army.


title: First Carnatic War

text: Dupleix then launched an assault on Fort St. David. Stung by his defeat at Adyar, Anwaruddin sent his son Muhammed Ali to assist the British in the defence of Cuddalore, and was instrumental in holding off a French attack in December 1746. Over the next few months Anwaruddin and Dupleix had made peace, and the Carnatic troops were withdrawn.


title: First Carnatic War

text: The French, under the command of De Brurie, launched another attempt to take Fort St. David, forcing the British defenders inside the fort's walls. The timely counterattack by the British and the Nawab, however, turned the tables and prompted the French to withdraw to Pondicherry.


title: First Carnatic War

text: In 1748 Major Stringer Lawrence arrived to take command of the British troops at Fort St. David. With the arrival of reinforcements from Europe, the British besieged Pondicherry in late 1748. Clive distinguished himself in successfully defending a trench against a French sortie: one witness of the action wrote "[Clive's] platoon, animated by his exhortation, fired again with new courage and great vivacity upon the enemy." The siege was lifted in October 1748 with the arrival of the monsoons, and the war came to a conclusion with the arrival in December of news of the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle. Under its terms Madras was returned to British control.


title: First Carnatic War

text: The power of a small number of heavily-trained French and French trained Indian troops over larger Indian formations using older military tactics was not lost on Joseph Dupleix, and over the next several years he capitalised on this advantage to greatly expand French influence in south India. In the Second Carnatic War (1748–1754) he took advantage of struggles for succession to the Nizam of Hyderabad and Nawab of the Carnatic to establish strong French influence over a number of states in south India. The British East India Company, in contrast, did little to expand its own influence and only weakly attempted to oppose Dupleix's expansive activities. Robert Clive recognised that this threatened the entire livelihood of the Company in the area, and in 1751 engaged in a series of celebrated military exploits that cemented British control over Madras by the end of that conflict. There were no territorial gains for either the British or the French and the former territories were restored to these two parties. The war had also enhanced the prestige of the French in the Carnatic Region.


title: Vampire hunter

text: Vampire hunter or vampire slayer is a fictional occupation in history and fiction which specializes in finding vampires, and sometimes other supernatural creatures. A vampire hunter is usually described as having extensive knowledge of vampires and other monstrous or undead creatures, including their powers and weaknesses, and uses this knowledge to effectively combat them.


title: Vampire hunter

text: Vampire hunters range in characterization in fiction from sages with more than average knowledge about the occult, to athletes with the skill and ability to confront vampires with traditional or holy weapons often including wooden stakes and holy water, to supernatural beings themselves who fight vampires with mystical powers. Many characterizations draw from the history and folklore of the Balkans.


title: Vampire hunter

text: A well known and influential archetypal vampire hunter is Professor Abraham Van Helsing, a character in Bram Stoker's 1897 horror novel, "Dracula", a foundational work in the genre.


title: Vampire hunter

text: Professional or semi-professional vampire hunters played some part in the vampire beliefs of the Balkans (especially in Bulgarian, Serbian, and Romanian folk beliefs). In Bulgarian, the terms used to designate them included "glog" (lit. "hawthorn", the species of wood used for the stake), "vampirdzhiya", "vampirar", "dzhadazhiya", "svetocher".


title: Vampire hunter

text: They were usually either born on Saturday (then called Sabbatarians, Bulgarian "sâbotnichav", Greek "sabbatianoí") or the offspring of a vampire and a woman (typically his widow), called a "dhampir" in Romanian or a "vampirović" in Serbian. It was also believed that someone born on a Saturday could see a vampire when it was otherwise invisible (and sometimes other supernatural entities as well); similarly for the "dhampir". In the case of the Sabbatarians, it was believed in some places that they needed to be fed meat from a sheep killed by a wolf (Bulgarian "vâlkoedene"); this would enable them not to fear the things that only they were able to see. In Croatian and Slovenian legends, the villages had their own Vampire hunters that were called kresniks, whose spirits were able to turn into animals at night to fight off the vampire or "kudlak".


title: Vampire hunter

text: Some carried a kit that used mallet, stake, crucifix. If part of a church it included holy water, holy oil, etc. However the most important things it carried were items such as rope, crowbars, or even pistols.


title: Vampire hunter

text: The most widely known example of a vampire hunter is Abraham Van Helsing of the novel "Dracula" and in other works of fiction adapting or modifying that work. Other more recent figures include Buffy "the Vampire Slayer" Summers from the television show and film of the same name. Buffy's spin-off series "Angel" is also focused on a vampire hunter, the titular star, Angel, a vampire himself cursed with a conscience, is often portrayed battling vampires as well as other demons. Created by Marv Wolfman, Marvel Comics character Blade is a half human/half vampire who uses his super strength and agility to hunt vampires and other monsters. The character spawned a 1998 film adaption which developed into a franchise. Vampire hunters have also appeared in video games, such as "Castlevania" (the occupation of the famed Belmont lineage), and "The Elder Scrolls" (with factions such as the Dawnguard).


title: Vampire hunter

text: As well as being knowledgeable about vampire lore, vampire hunters in fiction are often armed with an eclectic mix of items and weapons which are designed to take maximum advantage of the monster's traditional weaknesses. These have included firearms with silver ammunition, appropriate religious symbols, crossbows that fire all wood bolts and even waterguns filled with blessed holy water in the movies "The Lost Boys" and "From Dusk Till Dawn".


title: Vampire hunter

text: The organizational strength of depicted vampire hunters can vary wildly. Most hunter characters are in small groups working alone and in secret. By contrast, the Hellsing Organization in the anime television series, "Hellsing" is a British government paramilitary strike force with access to troops, heavy combat vehicles and weapons and even allied vampires.


title: Vampire hunter

text: While predominantly depicted as human, examples of other types of vampire hunters also exist. Dhampiric figures, having a mix of human and vampire blood, are a popular form. Alucard from the "Castlevania" series, and the eponymous hero of the "Blade" series of comic books, movies, , and anime, are both examples of dhampir vampire hunters. Even rarer are vampire hunters that are vampires themselves. Two examples of this type can be found in Morbius from "Ultimate Spider-Man", and Zero Kiryuu in the manga and anime series "Vampire Knight".


title: Vampire hunter

text: The image of the vampire hunter is often a mysterious and dramatic avenging hero, an eccentric extremist, a mad scientist, or sometimes a mix of these. A hunter may be a heroic figure, a villain (from the perspective of the vampire), a lonesome avenger, or sometimes, although not usually, a bounty-hunter-style character, hunting vampires for profit. Vampire hunters have also popularly been depicted as hunting various creatures such as werewolves, demons, and other forms of undead as well. Others have been depicted as mages and cyborgs. Vampire hunters are often associated with or members of the clergy, holy orders, or other religious organizations which may be dedicated to fighting vampires, other demons, and other supernatural forces. Vampire hunting as a family tradition or birthright is a popular use of the archetype in fiction, such as the Belmont family from the "Castlevania" series. Some hunters devote their entire lives to the eradication of vampires; for others it is just a strange hobby. They can also sometimes be members of law enforcement or government agencies.


title: Vampire hunter

text: The job comes with the risk of getting bitten and the hunters turned into vampires themselves. More often than not fellow hunters, usually do mercy killing to prevent them from becoming monsters, though in some fiction it may be possible for a hunter to cure themselves (and others) of vampirism, especially if the person in question was recently turned into a vampire. Another common trope is hunters being forced to slay their loved ones or allies who have been turned into vampires. Alternatively, after becoming a vampire, sometimes hunters will continue to fight and hunt vampires using their newly acquired vampire powers and abilities (sometimes being hunted by their former allies and other human vampire hunters). In addition to human hunters, dhampirs, and vampires that hunt other vampires, it is not uncommon for vampire hunters to be other supernatural creatures such as werewolves or witches. Additionally, some human hunters may possess holy powers, superhuman, or other supernatural abilities that they can use both to fight and protect themselves from vampires and other supernatural entities they hunt. Some hunters may even resort to using dark powers or weapons (usually dark magic or demonic in nature). Some human hunters may even be tempted to become vampires themselves in order to obtain their powers and immortality, either to continue hunting them, due to fear of their own mortality, or simply a lust for power.


title: Late Spring

text: "Late Spring" belongs to the type of Japanese cinema known as "shomin-geki", a genre that deals with the ordinary daily lives of working class and middle class people of modern times. The film is frequently regarded as the first in the director's final creative period, "the major prototype of the [director's] 1950s and 1960s work". These films are characterized by, among other traits, an exclusive focus on stories about families during Japan's immediate postwar era, a tendency towards very simple plots and the use of a generally static camera.


title: Late Spring

text: "Late Spring" was released on September 19, 1949, to critical acclaim in the Japanese press. In the following year, it was awarded the prestigious Kinema Junpo critics' award as the best Japanese production released in 1949. In 1972, the film was commercially released in the United States, again to very positive reviews. "Late Spring" has been referred to as the director's "most perfect" work, as "the definitive film of Ozu's master filmmaking approach and language" and has been called "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema". In the 2012 version of "Sight & Sound"s decennial poll of "The Greatest Films of All Time", published by the British Film Institute (BFI), "Late Spring" appears as the second highest-ranking Japanese-language film on the list at number 15, behind Ozu's own "Tokyo Story" at number 3.


title: Late Spring

text: The film opens at a tea ceremony. Professor Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu), a widower, has only one child, a twenty-seven-year-old unmarried daughter, Noriko (Setsuko Hara), who takes care of the household and the everyday needs—cooking, cleaning, mending, etc.—of her father. On a shopping trip to Tokyo, Noriko encounters one of her father's friends, Professor Jo Onodera (Masao Mishima), who lives in Kyoto. Noriko knows that Onodera, who had been a widower like her father, has recently remarried, and she tells him that she finds the very idea of his remarriage distasteful, even "filthy." Onodera, and later her father, tease her for having such thoughts.


title: Late Spring

text: Shukichi's sister, Aunt Masa (Haruko Sugimura), convinces him that it is high time his daughter got married. Noriko is friendly with her father’s assistant, Hattori (Jun Usami), and Aunt Masa suggests that her brother ask Noriko if she might be interested in Hattori. When he does bring up the subject, however, Noriko laughs: Hattori has been engaged to another young woman for quite some time.


title: Late Spring

text: Undaunted, Masa pressures Noriko to meet with a marriageable young man, a Tokyo University graduate named Satake who, Masa believes, bears a strong resemblance to Gary Cooper. Noriko declines, explaining that she does not wish to marry anyone, because to do so would leave her father alone and helpless. Masa surprises Noriko by claiming that she is also trying to arrange a match between Shukichi and Mrs. Miwa (Kuniko Miyake), an attractive young widow known to Noriko. If Masa succeeds, Noriko would have no excuse.


title: Late Spring

text: At a Noh performance attended by Noriko and her father, the latter smilingly greets Mrs. Miwa, which triggers Noriko's jealousy. When her father later tries to talk her into going to meet Satake, he tells her that he intends to marry Mrs. Miwa. Devastated, Noriko reluctantly decides to meet the young man and, to her surprise, has a very favorable impression of him. Under pressure from all sides, Noriko consents to the arranged marriage.


title: Late Spring

text: The Somiyas go on one last trip together before the wedding, visiting Kyoto. There they meet Professor Onodera and his family. Noriko changes her opinion of Onodera's remarriage when she discovers that his new wife is a nice person. While packing their luggage for the trip home, Noriko asks her father why they cannot simply stay as they are now, even if he does remarry – she cannot imagine herself any happier than living with and taking care of him. Shukichi admonishes her, saying that she must embrace the new life she will build with Satake, one in which he, Shukichi, will have no part, because "that’s the order of human life and history." Noriko asks her father’s forgiveness for her "selfishness" and agrees to go ahead with the marriage.


title: Late Spring

text: Noriko’s wedding day arrives. At home just before the ceremony, both Shukichi and Masa admire Noriko, who is dressed in a traditional wedding costume. Noriko thanks her father for the care he has taken of her throughout her life and leaves in a hired car for the wedding. Afterwards, Aya (Yumeji Tsukioka), a divorced friend of Noriko’s, goes with Shukichi to a bar, where he confesses that his claim that he was going to marry Mrs. Miwa was a ruse to persuade Noriko to get married herself. Aya, touched by his sacrifice, promises to visit him often. Shukichi returns home alone.


title: Late Spring

text: The central event of "Late Spring" is the marriage of the heroine to a man she has met only once through a single arranged meeting. This immediately presented a problem for the censors of the American Occupation. According to film scholar Kyoko Hirano, these officials "considered feudalistic the Japanese custom of arranged meetings for prospective marriage partners, "miai", because the custom seemed to them to downgrade the importance of the individual." Hirano notes that, had this policy against showing arranged marriages onscreen been rigidly enforced, "Late Spring" could never have been made. In the original synopsis (which the filmmakers were required to submit to the censorship before production could be approved), Noriko’s decision to marry was presented as a collective family decision, not an individual choice, and the censors apparently rejected this.


title: Late Spring

text: The synopsis explained that the trip to Kyoto by father and daughter, just prior to Noriko’s marriage, occurs so she can visit her dead mother’s grave. This motivation is absent from the finished film, possibly because the censors would have interpreted such a visit as “ancestor worship,” a practice they frowned upon.


title: Late Spring

text: Any reference in the script to the devastation caused by the Allied bombings was removed. In the script, Shukichi remarks to Onodera’s wife in Kyoto that her city is a very nice place, unlike Tokyo, with all its ruins. The censors deleted the reference to ruins (as an implied critique of the Allies) and, in the finished film, the word “hokorippoi” (“dusty”) was substituted as a description of Tokyo.


title: Late Spring

text: The censors at first automatically deleted a reference in the script to the Hollywood star Gary Cooper, but then reinstated it when they realized that the comparison was to Noriko’s (unseen) suitor Satake, who is described by the female characters as attractive, and was thus flattering to the American actor.


title: Late Spring

text: Sometimes, the censors’ demands seemed irrational. A line about Noriko’s health having been negatively affected by "her work after being conscripted by the [Japanese] Navy during the war" was changed to "the forced work during the war," as if even the very mention of the Japanese Navy was somehow suspect.


title: Late Spring

text: At the script phase of the censorship process, the censors demanded that the character of Aunt Masa, who at one point finds a lost change purse on the ground and keeps it as a kind of good-luck charm, should be shown handing over the purse to the police. Ozu responded by turning the situation, in the finished film, into a kind of running gag in which Shukichi repeatedly (and futilely) urges his sister to turn the purse in to the police. This change has been called "a mocking kind of partial compliance with the censorship."


title: Late Spring

text: One scholar, Lars-Martin Sorensen, has claimed that Ozu's partial aim in making the film was to present an ideal of Japan at odds with that which the Occupation wanted to promote, and that he successfully subverted the censorship in order to accomplish this. "The controversial and subversive politico-historical 'message' of the film is… that the beauty of tradition, and of subjugation of individual whims to tradition and history, by far outshines the imported and imposed western trends of occupied Japan."


title: Late Spring

text: Sorensen uses as an example the scene early in the film in which Noriko and her father's assistant Hattori are bicycling towards the beach. They pass a diamond-shaped Coca-Cola sign and another sign, in English, warning that the weight capacity of a bridge over which they are riding is 30 tons: quite irrelevant information for this young couple, but perfectly appropriate for American military vehicles that might pass along that road. (Neither the Coke sign nor the road warning are referred to in the script approved by the censors.) Sorensen argues that these objects are "obvious reference(s) to the presence of the occupying army."


title: Late Spring

text: On the other hand, "Late Spring", more than any other film Ozu made, is suffused with the symbols of Japanese tradition: the tea ceremony that opens the film, the temples at Kamakura, the Noh performance that Noriko and Shukichi witness, and the landscape and Zen gardens of Kyoto. Sorensen argues that these images of historical landmarks "were intended to inspire awe and respect for the treasures of ancient Japan in contrast to the impurity of the present." Sorensen also claims that, to Ozu’s audience, "the exaltation of Japanese tradition and cultural and religious heritage must have brought remembrances of the good old days when Japan was still winning her battles abroad and nationalism reached its peak." To scholars such as Bordwell who assert that Ozu was promoting with this film an ideology that could be called liberal, Sorensen argues that contemporary reviews of the film "show that Ozu (the director and his personal convictions) was considered inseparable from his films, and that he was considered a conservative purist."


title: Late Spring

text: Sorensen concludes that such censorship may not necessarily be a bad thing. "One of the positive side effects of being prohibited from airing one's views openly and directly is that it forces artists to be creative and subtle in their ways of expression."


title: Late Spring

text: On "Late Spring", Ozu worked with a number of old colleagues from his prewar days, such as actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta. However, a long-deferred reunion with one artist and the beginning of a long collaboration with another—the screenwriter Kogo Noda and the actress Setsuko Hara, respectively—were to prove critical artistically, both to this work and to the direction of Ozu's subsequent career.


title: Late Spring

text: Kogo Noda, already an accomplished screenwriter, had collaborated with Ozu on the script of his debut film of 1927, "Sword of Penitence". Noda had later written scripts with Ozu (while also collaborating with other directors) on many of his best silent pictures, including "Tokyo Chorus". Yet by 1949, the director had not worked with his old friend for fourteen years. However, their reunion on "Late Spring" was so harmonious and successful that Ozu wrote exclusively with Noda for the rest of his career.


title: Late Spring

text: Ozu once said of Noda: "When a director works with a scriptwriter they must have some characteristics and habits in common; otherwise, they won't get along. My daily life—what time I get up, how much sake I drink and so on—is in almost complete agreement with that of [Noda]. When I work with Noda, we collaborate even on short bits of dialogue. Although we never discuss the details of the sets or costumes, his mental image of these things is always in accord with mine; our ideas never criss cross or go awry. We even agree on whether a dialogue should end with "wa" or "yo"." From "Late Spring" on, partly due to Noda's influence, all Ozu’s characters would be comfortably middle class and thus, unlike the characters in, for example, "Record of a Tenement Gentleman" or "A Hen in the Wind", beyond immediate physical want and necessity.


title: Late Spring

text: Setsuko Hara (born Masae Aida in Yokohama, Kanagawa prefecture on June 17, 1920) had appeared in films since the mid-1930s, when she was in her teens. Her tall frame and strong facial features—including very large eyes and a prominent nose—were unusual among Japanese actresses at the time; it has been rumored, but not verified, that she has a German grandparent. She maintained her popularity throughout the war years, when she appeared in many films made for propaganda purposes by the military government, becoming "the perfect war-movie heroine." After the defeat of Japan, she was more popular than ever, so that by the time Ozu worked with her for the first time on "Late Spring", she had already become "one of Japan's best-loved actresses."


title: Late Spring

text: Ozu had a very high regard for Hara's work. He said, "Every Japanese actor can play the role of a soldier and every Japanese actress can play the role of a prostitute to some extent. However, it is rare to find an actress [like Hara] who can play the role of a daughter from a good family." Speaking of her performance in "Early Summer", he was quoted as saying, "Setsuko Hara is a really good actress. I wish I had four or five more like her."


title: Late Spring

text: In addition to the three "Noriko" films, Ozu directed her in three other roles: as an unhappily married wife in "Tokyo Twilight" ("Tokyo Boshoku", 1957), as the mother of a marriageable daughter in "Late Autumn" ("Akibiyori", 1960) and the daughter-in-law of a sake plant owner in the director's penultimate film, "The End of Summer" ("Kohayagawa-ke no Aki", 1961). Bordwell summed up the critical consensus of Hara's significance to the late work of Ozu when he wrote, "After 1948, Setsuko Hara becomes the archetypal Ozu woman, either the bride-to-be or the widow of middle years."


title: Late Spring

text: The films of Yasujirō Ozu are well known for their unusual approach to film narrative. Scenes that most filmmakers would consider obligatory (e.g., the wedding of Noriko) are often not shown at all, while apparently extraneous incidents (e.g., the concert attended by Hattori but "not" Noriko) are given seemingly inordinate prominence. Sometimes important narrative information is withheld not only from a major character, but from the viewer, such as the news of Hattori’s engagement, about which neither Noriko’s father nor the audience has any knowledge until Noriko, laughing, informs him. And at times, the filmmaker proceeds, within a scene, to jump from one time frame to another without transition, as when two establishing shots of some travelers waiting for a train on a platform lead to a third shot of the same train already on its way to Tokyo.


title: Late Spring

text: Bordwell refers to Ozu’s approach to narrative as "parametric narration." By this term, Bordwell means that Ozu’s "overunified" visual approach, characterized by its “stylistic rigor,” often provides the basis for "playful deviation," including narrative playfulness. As Bordwell puts it somewhat more plainly, Ozu "back[s] away from his own machinery in order to achieve humor and surprise." In his view, "in narrative poetry, rhythm and rhyme need not completely subordinate themselves to the demand of telling the story; in art song or opera, 'autonomous' musical structures may require that the story grind to a halt while particular harmonic or melodic patterns work themselves out. Similarly, in some films, temporal or spatial qualities can lure us with a patterning that is not wholly dependent on representing fabula [i.e., story] information."


title: Late Spring

text: Bordwell points out that the opening scene of "Late Spring" "begins at the railroad station, where the characters "aren’t". A later scene will do exactly the same thing, showing the train station before showing [the characters] already hurtling towards Tokyo… In Tokyo, [Professor] Onodera and Noriko discuss going to an art exhibit; cut to a sign for the exhibit, then to the steps of the art gallery; cut to the two in a bar, after they’ve gone to the exhibit."


title: Late Spring

text: To Kathe Geist, Ozu’s narrative methods reflect the artist's economy of means, not "playfulness." "His frequent use of repetition and [narrative] ellipsis do not 'impose their will' on Ozu’s plots; they "are" his plots. By paying attention to what has been left out and to what is repeated, one arrives at Ozu’s essential story."


title: Late Spring

text: As an example, Geist cites the scene in which Noriko and Hattori bicycle together to the beach and have a conversation there, an incident that appears to imply a budding romantic relationship between them. When Noriko slightly later reveals to her father that Hattori, before that bicycle trip, had already been engaged to another woman, "we wonder", writes Geist, "why Ozu has wasted so much time on the 'wrong man' [for Noriko]." However, the key to the beach scene’s importance to the plot, according to Geist, is the dialogue between Hattori and Noriko, in which the latter tells him that she is "the jealous type." This seemingly unlikely claim, given her affable nature, is later confirmed when she becomes bitterly jealous at her father’s apparent plan to remarry. "Her jealousy goads her into her own marriage and is thus the pivot on which the plot turns."


title: Late Spring

text: Geist sums up her analysis of several major Ozu films of the postwar period by asserting that "the narratives unfold with an astounding precision in which no shot and certainly no scene is wasted and all is overlayered with an intricate web of interlocking meaning."


title: Late Spring

text: The main theme of "Late Spring" is marriage: specifically, the persistent attempts by several characters in the film to get Noriko married. The marriage theme was a topical one for Japanese of the late 1940s. On January 1, 1948, a new law had been issued which allowed young people over twenty to marry consensually without parental permission for the first time. The Japanese Constitution of 1947 had made it much easier for a wife to divorce her husband; up until that time, it had been "difficult, almost impossible" to do so. Several commentators have pointed out that one reason why Noriko is still unmarried at the relatively late age of 27 is that many of the young men of her generation had been killed in the Second World War, leaving far fewer eligible potential partners for single young women.


title: Late Spring

text: Marriage in this film, as well as many of Ozu’s late films, is strongly associated with death. Prof. Onodera's daughter, for example, refers to marriage as "life’s graveyard." Geist writes: "Ozu connects marriage and death in obvious and subtle ways in most of his late films… The comparison between weddings and funerals is not merely a clever device on Ozu’s part, but is so fundamental a concept in Japanese culture that these ceremonies as well as those surrounding births have built-in similarities… The elegiac melancholy Ozu evokes at the end of "Late Spring", "Late Autumn", and "An Autumn Afternoon" arises only partly because the parents have been left alone… The sadness arises because the marriage of the younger generation inevitably reflects on the mortality of the older generation." Robin Wood stresses the marriage-death connection in commenting on the scene that takes place in the Somiya home just before the wedding ceremony. "After everyone has left the room… [Ozu] ends the sequence with a shot of the empty mirror. Noriko is no longer even a reflection, she has disappeared from the narrative, she is no longer ‘Noriko’ but ‘wife.’ The effect is that of a death."


title: Late Spring

text: The tension between tradition and modern pressures in relation to marriage—and, by extension, within Japanese culture as a whole—is one of the major conflicts Ozu portrays in the film. Sorensen indicates by several examples that what foods a character eats or even how he or she sits down (e.g., on tatami mats or Western-style chairs) reveals the relationship of that character to tradition. According to Peña, Noriko "is the quintessential "moga"—"modan gaaru", 'modern girl'—that populates Japanese fiction, and really the Japanese imagination, beginning in the 1920s onward." Throughout most of the film, Noriko wears Western clothing rather than a kimono, and outwardly behaves in up-to-date ways. However, Bordwell asserts that "Noriko is more old-fashioned than her father, insisting that he could not get along without her and resenting the idea that a widower might remarry… she clings to an outmoded notion of propriety."


title: Late Spring

text: The other two important female characters in the film are also defined in terms of their relation to tradition. Noriko’s Aunt Masa appears in scenes in which she is associated with traditional Japan, such as the tea ceremony in one of the ancient temples of Kamakura. Noriko’s friend Aya, on the other hand, seems to reject tradition entirely. Aya had taken advantage of the new liberal divorce laws to end her recent marriage. Thus, she is presented as a new, Westernized phenomenon: the divorcee. She "takes English tea with milk from teacups with handles, [and] also bakes shortcake ("shaato keeki")," a very un-Japanese type of food.


title: Late Spring

text: Like Noriko, her father has an ambiguous relation with modernity. Shukichi is first seen in the film checking the correct spelling of the name of the German-American economist Friedrich List—an important transitional figure during Japan’s Meiji era. (List’s theories helped stimulate the economic modernization of the country.) Prof. Somiya treats Aya, the divorcee, with unfailing courtesy and respect, implying a tolerant, "modern" attitude—though one critic suspects that a man of Shukichi's class and generation in the real-life Japan of that period might have been considerably less tolerant.


title: Late Spring

text: However, like Aunt Masa, Shukichi is also associated with the traditions of old Japan, such as the city of Kyoto with its ancient temples and Zen rock gardens, and the Noh play that he so clearly enjoys. Most importantly, he pressures Noriko to go through with the "miai" meeting with Satake, though he makes clear to her that she can reject her suitor without negative consequences.


title: Late Spring

text: Sorensen has summed up the ambiguous position of both father and daughter in relation to tradition as follows: "Noriko and [Professor] Somiya interpolate between the two extremes, between shortcake and Nara-pickles, between ritually prepared green tea and tea with milk, between love marriage/divorce and arranged marriage, between Tokyo and Nara. And this interpolation is what makes them complex characters, wonderfully human in all their internal inconsistencies, very Ozu-like and likable indeed."


title: Late Spring

text: "Late Spring" has been seen by some commentators as a transitional work in terms of the home as a recurring theme in Japanese cinema. Tadao Sato points out that Shochiku’s directors of the 1920s and 1930s—including Shimazu, Gosho, Mikio Naruse and Ozu himself—"presented the family in a tense confrontation with society." In "A Brother and His Young Sister" ("Ani to sono imoto", 1939) by Shimazu, for example, "the home is sanctified as a place of warmth and generosity, feelings that were rapidly vanishing in society." By the early 1940s, however, in such films as Ozu’s "There Was a Father", "the family [was] completely subordinate to the [wartime] state" and "society is now above criticism." But when the military state collapsed as a result of Japan’s defeat in the war, the idea of the home collapsed with it: "Neither the nation nor the household could dictate morality any more."


title: Late Spring

text: Sato considers "Late Spring" to be "the next major development in the home drama genre," because it "initiated a series of Ozu films with the theme: there is no society, only the home. While family members had their own places of activity—office, school, family business—there was no tension between the outside world and the home. As a consequence, the home itself lost its source of moral strength." Yet despite the fact that these home dramas by Ozu "tend to lack social relevance," they "came to occupy the mainstream of the genre and can be considered perfect expressions of 'my home-ism,' whereby one’s family is cherished to the exclusion of everything else."


title: Late Spring

text: "Late Spring" is the first of several extant Ozu films with a "seasonal" title. (Later films with seasonal titles are "Early Summer", "Early Spring" ("Soshun", 1956), "Late Autumn" and "The End of Summer" (literally, "Autumn for the Kohayagawa Family")). The "late spring" of the title refers on the most obvious level to Noriko who, at 27, is in the "late spring" of her life, and approaching the age at which she would no longer be considered marriageable.


title: Late Spring

text: However, there may be another meaning to Ozu's title derived from ancient Japanese culture. When Noriko and Shukichi attend the Noh play, the work performed is called "Kakitsubata" or "The Water Iris." (The water iris in Japan is a plant which blooms, usually in marshland or other moist soil, in mid-to-late-spring.) In this play, a traveling monk arrives at a place called Yatsuhashi, famous for its water irises, when a woman appears. She alludes to a famous poem by the "waka" poet of the Heian period, Ariwara no Narihira, in which each of the five lines begins with one syllable that, spoken together, spell out the word for "water iris" ("ka-ki-tsu-ba-ta"). The monk stays the night at the humble hut of the woman, who then appears in an elaborate kimono and headdress and reveals herself to be the spirit of the water iris. She praises Narihira, dances and at dawn receives enlightenment from the Buddha and disappears.


title: Late Spring

text: As Norman Holland explains in an essay on the film, "the iris is associated with late spring, the movie’s title", and the play contains a great deal of sexual and religious symbolism. The iris' leaves and flower are traditionally seen as representing the male and female genitalia, respectively. The play itself is traditionally seen, according to Holland, as "a tribute to the union of man and woman leading to enlightenment."


title: Late Spring

text: Noriko calmly accepts this sexual content when couched in the "archaic" form of Noh drama, but when she sees her father nod politely to the attractive widow, Mrs. Miwa, who is also in the audience, "that strikes Noriko as outrageous and outraging. Had this woman and her father arranged to meet at this play about sexuality? Is this remarriage 'filthy' like [Onodera's] remarriage? She feels both angry and despairing. She is so mad at her father that, quite uncharacteristically, she angrily walks away from him after they leave the theater." Holland thus sees one of the film's main themes as "the pushing of traditional and inhibited Noriko into marriage."


title: Late Spring

text: "Late Spring" has been particularly praised for its focus on character, having been cited as "one of the most perfect, most complete, and most successful studies of character ever achieved in Japanese cinema." Ozu’s complex approach to character can best be examined through the two protagonists of the film: Noriko Somiya and her father, Shukichi.


title: Late Spring

text: Noriko, at 27, is an unmarried, unemployed young woman, completely dependent financially upon her father and living (at the film’s beginning) quite contently with him. Her two most important traits, which are interrelated, are her unusually close and affectionate relationship with her father and her extreme reluctance to marry and leave home. Of the first trait, the relationship between father and daughter has been described as a "transgenerational friendship," in which there is nevertheless no hint of anything incestuous or even inappropriate. However, it has been conceded that this may primarily be due to cultural differences between Japan and the West and that, were the story remade in the West, such a possible interpretation couldn’t be evaded. The second trait, her strong aversion to the idea of marriage, has been seen, by some commentators, in terms of the Japanese concept of "amae", which in this context signifies the strong emotional dependence of a child on its parent, which can persist into adulthood. Thus, the rupturing of the father-adult daughter relationship in "Late Spring" has been interpreted as Ozu’s view of the inevitability—and necessity—of the termination of the "amae" relationship, although Ozu never glosses over the pain of such a rupture.


title: Late Spring

text: There has been considerable difference of opinion amongst commentators regarding the complicated personality of Noriko. She has been variously described as like a wife to her father, or as like a mother to him; as resembling a petulant child; or as being an enigma, particularly as to the issue of whether or not she freely chooses to marry. Even the common belief of film scholars that she is an upholder of conservative values, because of her opposition to her father’s (feigned) remarriage plans, has been challenged. Robin Wood, writing about the three Norikos as one collective character, states that "Noriko" "has managed to retain and develop the finest humane values which the modern capitalist world… tramples underfoot—consideration, emotional generosity, the ability to care and empathize, and above all, awareness."


title: Late Spring

text: Noriko’s father, Shukichi, works as a college professor and is the sole breadwinner of the Somiya family. It has been suggested that the character represents a transition from the traditional image of the Japanese father to a very different one. Sato points out that the national "prewar" ideal of the father was that of the stern patriarch, who ruled his family lovingly, but with an iron hand. Ozu himself, however, in several prewar films, such as "I Was Born, But…" and "Passing Fancy", had undercut, according to Sato, this image of the archetypal strong father by depicting parents who were downtrodden "salarymen" ("sarariman", to use the Japanese term), or poor working-class laborers, who sometimes lost the respect of their rebellious children. Bordwell has noted that "what is remarkable about Ozu's work of the 1920s and 1930s is how seldom the patriarchal norm is reestablished at the close [of each film]."


title: Late Spring

text: The character of Prof. Somiya represents, according to this interpretation, a further evolution of the “non-patriarchal” patriarch. Although Shukichi wields considerable moral influence over his daughter through their close relationship, that relationship is "strikingly nonoppressive." One commentator refers to Shukichi and his friend, Professor Onodera, as men who are "very much at peace, very much aware of themselves and their place in the world," and are markedly different from stereotypes of fierce Japanese males promulgated by American films during and after the World War.


title: Late Spring

text: It has been claimed that, after Noriko accepts Satake’s marriage proposal, the film ceases to be about her, and that Prof. Somiya at that point becomes the true protagonist, with the focus of the film shifting to his increasing loneliness and grief. In this regard, a plot change that the filmmakers made from the original source material is significant. In the novel by Kazuo Hirotsu, the father’s announcement to his daughter that he wishes to marry a widow is only "initially" a ruse; eventually, he actually does get married again. Ozu and his co-screenwriter, Noda, deliberately rejected this "witty" ending, in order to show Prof. Somiya as alone and inconsolable at the end.


title: Late Spring

text: Ozu's unique style has been widely noted by critics and scholars. Some have considered it an anti-Hollywood style, as he eventually rejected many conventions of Hollywood filmmaking. Some aspects of the style of "Late Spring"—which also apply to Ozu's late-period style in general, as the film is typical in almost all respects—include Ozu's use of the camera, his use of actors, his idiosyncratic editing and his frequent employment of a distinctive type of shot that some commentators have called a "pillow shot."


title: Late Spring

text: Probably the most frequently noted aspect of Ozu's camera technique is his consistent use of an extremely low camera position to shoot his subjects, a practice that Bordwell traces as far back as his films of the 1931–1932 period. An example of the low camera in "Late Spring" would be the scene in which Noriko visits her friend Aya in her home. Noriko is in a sitting position, while Aya is seated at a slightly higher elevation, so Aya is looking down towards her friend. However, "the camera angle on both is low. Noriko sits looking up at the standing Aya, but the camera [in the reverse shot] looks up on Noriko's face, rejecting Aya's point of view. We are thus prevented from identifying with Aya and are forced into an inhuman point of view on Noriko."


title: Late Spring

text: There has been no critical consensus as to why Ozu consistently employed the low camera angle. Bordwell suggests that his motive was primarily visual, because the angle allowed him to create distinctive compositions within the frame and "make every image sharp, stable and striking." The film historian and critic Donald Richie believed that one of the reasons he used this technique was as a way of "exploiting the theatrical aspect of the Japanese dwelling." Another critic believes that the ultimate purpose of the low camera position was to allow the audience to assume "a viewpoint of reverence" towards the ordinary people in his films, such as Noriko and her father.


title: Late Spring

text: Ozu was widely noted for a style characterized by a frequent avoidance of the kinds of camera movements—such as panning shots, tracking shots or crane shots—employed by most film directors. (As he himself would sometimes remark, "I'm not a dynamic director like Akira Kurosawa.") Bordwell notes that, of all the common technical practices that Ozu refused to emulate, he was "most absolute" in refusing to reframe (for example, by panning slightly) the moving human figure in order to keep it in view; this critic claims that there is not a single reframing in all of Ozu's films from 1930 on. In the late films (that is, those from "Late Spring" on), the director "will use walls, screens, or doors to block off the sides of the frame so that people walk into a central depth," thus maintaining focus on the human figure without any motion of the camera.


title: Late Spring

text: The filmmaker would paradoxically retain his static compositions even when a character was shown walking or riding, by moving the camera with a dolly at the precise speed at which the actor or actors moved. He would drive his devoted cameraman, Yuharu Atsuta, to tears by insisting that actors and technicians count their steps precisely during a tracking shot so that the movements of actors and camera could be synchronized. Speaking of the bicycle ride to the beach early in the story, Peña notes: "It’s almost as if Noriko [on her bicycle] doesn’t seem to be moving, or Hattori’s not moving because his place within the frame remains constant… These are the sort of visual idiosyncrasies that make Ozu’s style so interesting and so unique in a way, to give us movement and at the same time to "undercut" movement."


title: Late Spring

text: Virtually all actors who worked with Ozu—including Chishu Ryu, who collaborated with the director on almost all his films—agree that he was an extremely demanding taskmaster. He would direct very simple actions by the performer "to the centimeter." As opposed to those of both Mizoguchi and Kurosawa, Ozu's characters, according to Sato, are "usually calm... they not only move at the same pace but also speak at the same measured rate." He insisted that his actors express emotions through action, even rote action, rather than by directly expressing their innermost feelings. Once, when the distinguished character actress Haruko Sugimura asked the director what her character was supposed to be feeling at a given moment, Ozu responded, “You are not supposed to feel, you are supposed to do.”


title: Late Spring

text: Sugimura, who played Aunt Masa in "Late Spring", vividly depicted Ozu’s approach to directing actors in her description of the scene in which Noriko is about to leave her father’s house for her wedding:


title: Late Spring

text: Ozu told me to come [back] in the room [after she, Hara and Ryu had exited] and circle around. So I did as I was told, but of course it wasn’t good enough. After the third take, Ozu approved it… The reason [Aunt Masa] circles around the room once is that she’s nostalgic for all the memories there and she also wants to make sure she’s left nothing behind. He didn’t show each of these things explicitly, but through my smoothly circling the room—through how I moved, through the pacing and the blocking—I think that’s what he was trying to express. At the time, I didn’t understand. I remember I did it rhythmically: I didn’t walk and I didn’t run; I just moved lightly and rhythmically. As I continued doing it, that’s what it turned into, and Ozu okayed it. Come to think of it, it was that way of walking rhythmically that I think was good. I did it naturally, not deliberately. And of course it was Ozu who helped me do it.


title: Late Spring

text: According to Richie, the editing of an Ozu film was always subordinate to the script: that is, the rhythm of each scene was decided at the screenwriting stage, and the final editing of the film reflected this. This overriding tempo even determined how the sets were constructed. Sato quotes Tomo Shimogawara, who designed the sets for "The End of Summer" (though the description also clearly applies to other late-period Ozu films, including "Late Spring"): "The size of the rooms was dictated by the time lapses between the actor's movements... Ozu would give me instructions on the exact length of the corridor. He explained that it was part and parcel of the tempo of his film, and this flow of tempo Ozu envisioned at the time the script was being written... Since Ozu never used wipes or dissolves, and for the sake of dramatic tempo as well, he would measure the number of seconds it took someone to walk upstairs and so the set had to be constructed accordingly." Sato says about this tempo that "it is a creation in which time is beautifully apprehended in conformity with the physiology of daily occurrences."


title: Late Spring

text: A striking fact about Ozu's late films (of which "Late Spring" is the first instance) is that transitions between scenes are accomplished exclusively through simple cuts. According to one commentator, the lost work, "The Life of an Office Worker" ("Kaishain seikatsu", 1929), contained a dissolve, and several extant Ozu films of the 1930s (e.g., "Tokyo Chorus" and "The Only Son") contain some fades. But by the time of "Late Spring", these were completely eliminated, with only music cues to signal scene changes. (Ozu once spoke of the use of the dissolve as "a form of cheating.") This self-restraint by the filmmaker is now seen as very modern, because although fades, dissolves and even wipes were all part of common cinematic grammar worldwide at the time of "Late Spring" (and long afterwards), such devices are often considered somewhat "old fashioned" today, when straight cuts are the norm.


title: Late Spring

text: Many critics and scholars have commented upon the fact that frequently Ozu, instead of transitioning directly from the end of the opening credits to the first scene, or from one scene to another, interposes a shot or multiple shots—as many as six—of an object, or a group of objects, or a room, or a landscape, often (but not always) devoid of human figures. These units of film have been variously called "curtain shots," "intermediate spaces," "empty shots" or, most frequently, "pillow shots" (by analogy with the "pillow words" of classic Japanese verse).


title: Late Spring

text: The nature and function of these shots are disputed. Sato (citing the critic Keinosuke Nanbu) compares the shots to the use of the curtain in the Western theatre, that "both present the environment of the next sequence and stimulate the viewer's anticipation." Richie claims that they are a means of presenting only what the characters themselves perceive or think about, to enable us to "experience only what the characters are experiencing." Bordwell sees it as an expansion of the traditional transitional devices of the "placing shot" and the "cutaway," using these to convey "a loose notion of "contiguity"."


title: Late Spring

text: Some examples of pillow shots in "Late Spring"—as illustrated on the ozu-san.com website—are: the three shots, immediately after the opening credits, of the Kita-Kamakura railway station, followed by a shot of Kenchoji temple, "one of the five main [Zen] temples in Kamakura," in which the tea ceremony (the first scene) will take place; the shot immediately after the tea ceremony scene, showing a hillside with several nearly bare trees, which introduces a "tree-motif" associated with Noriko; a shot of a single leafy tree, appearing immediately after the Noh play scene and before the scene depicting Noriko and her father walking together, then separating; and a shot of one of the pagodas of Kyoto during the father and daughter's visit to that city late in the film.