Days of Youth (1929, dir. Yazujirō Ozu)

26 May, 2026

It is a three-day weekend here, and everyone has their own way of celebrating. My partner went out dancing, and told me with a worried voice that a bunch of twinks¹ were picking out the drinks for the pregame festivities.

It's finals season for me, so I brought home the stack of 3,000-word research papers to get a head start on them over the weekend. The house is clean, the laundry got taken to the laundromat, I did my Anki flashcards, the birds are fed, the stray cat² is fed, and my TV watch playlists are re-re-re-organized. Somehow, I haven't had a chance to start grading the papers. Also, I watched Yasujirō Ozu's oldest surviving silent film from 1929/Showa 4: 学生ロマンス 若き日 (Days of Youth).

Coincidentally, it's also a film about getting distracted during finals.

Of course, the advantage to the film being 98 years old is that it's in the public domain, so the whole thing is just... on Wikipedia.

I won't really get into any plot details—I think it's actually a pretty cute little romantic comedy, but mostly what I was paying attention to was the language and the typography throughout it.

I'm speculating mostly based on the "Title" credit, but I believe all of the intertitles and opening sequence were done by hand by 堀川嘉一 (HORIKAWA, Yoshikazu). There's a couple stylistic flourishes in there that I think are just neat. The way the short vertical strokes in 学生 drag down to the bottom in the title card, the way the interior strokes in characters like 田 and 日 are separated from the exterior strokes, the way the tops of the characters rounds out. The way the curve in て and the slant in 今 become vertical. I've been taking a 書道 class lately and have just been thinking more about like... letterforms? They're kind of cool, it turns out! I've also just been thinking more about handwritten typography as I work very slowly on my card game that involves writing all your cards out by hand.

This wheel of college pennants is both something I've never seen or thought of, and also feels like such a slick little piece of mise-en-scène. This is the kind of person who went on a ton of I assume college tours, ended up going to Tokyo, but still wanted the trophies to brag about it in an aesthetic way. Also, his wall is full of cutouts of who I assume is Janet Gaynor from Seventh Heaven (1927).

More signage appreciation. I like how「チョコレート」is written, and how the ん eats up all the space on the brushwork sign.

Tinned asparagus. That's all.

That old money man is, I am learning, 武内宿禰 (Takenouchi no Sukune).

One of the main characters, played by Tatsuo Saito, has a very cool jacket with a giraffe on the front.

I had never actually seen さようなら written with kanji before. Also, learning that skiiers have their own German loanword greeting. In that first intertitle screenshot, there's also 氣, an archaic form of 気. And I learned 「シャン」, another German loanword for schön (beautiful).

#movies