Given this backdrop, one might expect the version of The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice that Ozu ultimately did make, in 1952, to be a rehashing of wartime ideas. On the contrary, this social comedy is thoroughly contemporary in its outlook, exploring the ideological dilemmas of postwar economic recovery and prosperity. The story had evolved from the 1939 script to share elements with What Did the Lady Forget?, including a modern niece (also named Setsuko) who causes a disruption in the marriage between her bourgeois aunt and uncle but ends up making them more tolerant of each other. But what is at stake here is no longer just the tension between old ways and new, as in What Did the Lady Forget? Instead, what Ozu is satirizing in The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice is something specific to the kind of capitalist society that Japan had just become: the way that upward social mobility in the lower classes can rankle the higher ones.

Though the businessman Mokichi Satake (Shin Saburi) hails from the socially peripheral Nagano, he has climbed up postwar ladders in Tokyo and wed Taeko (Michiyo Kogure), the modish daughter of a wealthy man, bred in the capital. Despite Mokichi’s career success, the class differences between husband and wife cause strife at home, such as squabbles over his table manners. When Taeko objects to Mokichi’s homely habit of pouring miso soup over rice, he apologizes for his careless mistake but keeps on making noise as he slurps. Disgusted by his boorishness, Taeko leaves the room without a word. Mokichi asks their housemaid, Fumi (Yoko Kosono), who is from the agricultural outskirts of Tokyo, whether people in her hometown don’t eat as he does. She says, “We do.” “In Saitama, right?” “Yes.” He replies, “We do in Nagano, too,” and drops his punch line: “I guess they don’t in Tokyo.”

Class identities are reasserted throughout The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice, through speech, activities, and tastes in clothing, food, and cigarettes. Mokichi enjoys smoking “cheap and tasty” Asahi tobacco, though Taeko disapproves of it. For his part, Mokichi’s young colleague Noboru (Koji Tsuruta)—another member of the emergent white-collar class, not someone who was born with money and status—instructs Taeko’s niece Setsuko (Keiko Tsushima) that, when it comes to restaurant food, it “should be both good and cheap.” When Mokichi compliments Noboru on his suit, Noboru blithely replies that it is “army surplus. Secondhand.” Depression-era American society had welcomed a subgenre of screwball comedy featuring interclass romances between a hardworking hero and a headstrong heroine with family money as a way of reconciling the socioeconomic disparities threatening national unity. The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice does something similar in its interweaving of the stories of two couples of different social backgrounds: the middle-aged Taeko and Mokichi and the young Setsuko and Noboru, between whom a tender romance is budding.

There is a scene in the film in which Setsuko and Noboru have ended up alone together at a ramen shop and Noboru invites Setsuko to go out another time for yakitori but immediately demurs, saying, “Your aunt might get mad.” Setsuko’s quick response—“I don’t care”—affirms that she is a modern woman who is quite willing to cross social boundaries. When the two animatedly discuss whether arranged marriage (which Setsuko is expected to participate in) is “barbaric,” their eventual marriage for love is practically assured. Though Noboru balks at Setsuko’s categorical rejection of the custom—still quite common at the time among the upper and middle classes—he is far from a pigheaded traditionalist. Such bigotry is reserved for Taeko and her elder sister, Setsuko’s mother, Chizuru (Kuniko Miyake). In a sense, what Ozu is doing is infusing the basic narrative patterns of a Hollywood romantic comedy with the complex social realities of postwar Japan. Read in this way, Noboru’s courtship of Setsuko affirms the possibility of mutual attraction and compatibility as the basis for marriage.