Who are the agents of cultural transformation in one nation when it is ruled by another? With the word culture, in its sense of both generator and custodian of social norms, we typically associate such notions as indigenous, organic, traditional: What happens to it when a value system – however well-intentioned is imposed from without, as was the case during the Allied (and principally American) Occupation of Japan from 1945 to 1952, following World War II? Are the tenets of democracy and individualism, so central to American life, universally desirable, regardless of the social context into which they are introduced? Are they superior or preferable to the “feudal” values of communal loyalty and selflessness they are called on to replace? Finally, does the very process of cultural transformation, when it assumes a blatantly alien mantle, inherently undermine its product? What is left, in other words, after the rebound from foreign rule?

These questions are raised, subtly yet unmistakably, in Ozu Yasujirô's (1903–63) brilliant but little noted A Who's Who of the Tenement (Nagaya shinshiroku, 1947), set in a working-class neighborhood of postwar Tokyo.