Critically speaking, Kido’s promotion of Oshima to director in 1959 proved far more disastrous than his years-earlier alternations between indifference and antipathy that resulted in the ouster or voluntary exiting of Shochiku auteurs including Shimizu, Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse, of whom the emotionally color-blind Kido once quipped, “We’ve already got an Ozu.” (Shohei Imamura and Seijun Suzuki both began as director’s assistants at Shochiku, though both left before making any films of their own.) Indeed, one can only begin to imagine the chagrin of the Ozu-loving executive when, having failed to cash in on both the taiyozoku craze and the giant monster jamboree that was keeping Toho afloat, he realized he’d inadvertently created a teenaged Frankenstein that was suddenly belching fire all over the home dramas that served as the studio’s aesthetic backyard. And yet here came Oshima—a towering, untamable behemoth born from the black-market bile of the American occupation! A defiant and gigantic boy glowering down at the grown-ups as he crashes into everything! Castle Shochiku’s home-grown Anti-Ozu!

Not that the old tofu vendor himself appeared, on the surface, particularly concerned. Perhaps Ozu had simply managed to internalize all those elliptical absences from his movies, and let whatever nuisances the noisome Oshima might have posed disappear into the Zen spacelessness of a synaptic splice. Still, the presence/absence issues that he’d long been tinkering with continued. A decade earlier, Ozu had worried that the climax of Late Spring (49), with Chisu Ryu silently peeling an apple as he sits alone in his house at the end of his daughter’s wedding day, smacked rather heavily of art-for-art’s-sake. Now he found himself working for a studio where, in movies like Cruel Story of Youth, the teenaged thug and apprentice pimp who passed for the movie’s hero wouldn’t just ruminatively regard that apple; he’d pornographically devour it while pouring sweat and pondering the supine body of his girlfriend, still under anesthesia from the abortion he’d ordered her to have an hour before.

That Ozu may have never even seen Oshima’s films is possible, though unlikely. The reverse is less likely still. A former film critic, Oshima knew exactly where he’d come from, and when he determined to sabotage his cinema’s history, he knew exactly how short to cut the fuse. Take another look at the moment in Cruel Story when that “heroic” pimp meets his permanently pouting girlfriend, whose innocence he’ll soon violate in a log-filled harbor not far from Shimizu’s old hooker-stroll. Rushing in to rescue her from the geezer who’s given her a ride and begun to get grabby, our pimp-hero beats the would-be masher down to the concrete, stands to straighten his jacket, and as he turns to ask if sweater-girl’s all right, does a sudden, stiletto-sharp 360-degree spin on his heels—exactly the sort of well-rehearsed show-offery that every boy and boy-hoodlum back on Planet Ozu used to do. Is that the scent of tofu burning? Ozu smelled it too. Returning from his mother’s funeral, he wrote in his diary: “Spring has arrived. Cherry blossoms are in full bloom. Here I am agonizing over An Autumn Afternoon. Like torn rags, the cherry blossoms display a forlorn expression—sake tastes as bitter as gall.”

Oshima continued, after a time, to let the studio distribute the films he went on to make through independent means. In 2000, he returned to make one final film under the Shochiku insignia, the deeply subversive jidai-geki entitled Gohatto—a film in which a whisper is made to seem altogether more radical than a scream. Ozu—whose first film, now forever lost, was a jidai-geki called The Sword of Penitence—finally took his leave from Shochiku, and slipped the surly bonds of earth as well, in 1963. His tombstone is famously inscribed with the Japanese character that signifies nothingness; it is pronounced, with a whisper, “mu.” Kido (whose grandson, a former lawyer with degrees from Harvard and ucla, now runs Shochiku) hung on until his retirement in 1977. Later that same year, Ozu’s one-time assistant director, Shohei Imamura—who’d once famously remarked that while he was but a farmer, Oshima was a samurai—returned to the studio with a new project. What might Imamura have been imagining when he titled it Vengeance is Mine?