The preceding chapters have discussed the three most important tendencies of Ozu's 1930s films – the shōshimin film, the Kihachi film, and the woman's film – that are not merely separable in genre but also can represent three different agents of the everyday, who, distinguished by their social, economic and gender status, lead diff erent kinds of everyday lives. The middle-class family, founded on a salaryman patriarch's waged labour, pursues the modern material life of the 1920s and 1930s, while at the same time, it suffers a fear of failure of that dream and searches for a possibility of deviation in the everyday. In contrast, Kihachi films suggest an image of the alternative everyday (albeit still male-centric) standing against what shōshimin film represent; deeply embedded in the nostalgic Shitamachi culture, the shomin class display a closed yet public world with a retrospective spatio-temporal sensitivity, in opposition to the salaryman family's ‘open (towards city centre) but private’ suburb. On the other hand, the female characters in the woman's film exhibit multifaceted identities from liberalised modern girl to conventional housewife, and their unique sense of sympathy and solidarity distinguish them from male characters, and set a basic generic rule of shinpa drama.

In the late 1930s, Ozu began to rearrange the aforementioned complex generic elements distinct from each other not only in narrative and style but also in space, class, gender and temporality to advance towards a new direction. Ozu's last two films released before he went to war, Hitori musuko/The Only Son (1936) and Shukujo wa nani wo wasuretaka/What Did the Lady Forget? (1937) respectively suggest two contrasting tendencies – comedy versus serious drama, Yamanote versus Shitamachi, bourgeois versus shomin, and female versus male – that would continue to be referred to in his later works, and thus can be regarded as a turning point in his cinema. This change was, of course, accompanied by the transformation of Shochiku and Japanese cinema against a backdrop of the oppressive political environment of militarism and war.