Subtitled “A Picture-Book for Adults”, this is a film à thèse, an unusually explicit demonstration of a lesson. Most Ozu films of whatever period have an elusiveness of connotation that Umarete wa mita keredo… almost wholly lacks. By means of its organizational unity and stylistic control, the film achieves great didactic rigor.
The film is built around the social use of power. As the boys rise in the neighborhood gang, their father reveals more of his subordination at work. In the world of the boys, power comes from age, brains, and brawn. If the big bully beats up the brothers, they must coax the still bigger delivery boy into punishing him. In one scene, after a tiny gang member picks up a dropped bun, another boy, only slightly bigger, wrests it from him. Ozu often lines the boys up by height, diagramming their pecking order. The sons, both tyrants, know that power need not be exercised fairly, but they cannot grasp that not everyone has an equal chance to acquire it in the first place.
To the boys’ belief that ability comes from mythical sources (raw pigeon eggs), the film juxtaposes the fact that in the world of the grownups power is implacably social, derived from money and position. Iwasaki is neither strong nor smart; he is just the boss. The brothers’ illusion is that all power can be won through straightforward abilities, as they are able to take over the gang by outfighting the others. The sake-shop boy has already given them one lesson: he beats up the bully for them because their parents buy beer, but he won’t beat up Taro because his father buys sake. In the climactic scene, when Yoshii is asked why he must bow to his boss, he explains that they depend upon Iwasaki. Ryoichi replies: “I’m stronger than Taro and I get better grades.” After their fight, and during their reconciliation the next morning, the younger brother clings to the old premise: he will grow up to be only a lieutenant general because the older brother is to be general. Yet the hunger strike ends, as if the boys’ recognition of the need for survival has reconciled them to the need to obey. “If he didn’t pay me,” the father had said, “then you couldn’t go to school – you couldn’t eat.” The film preserves the protest against the established order while dramatizing the necessity of submission.

David Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ 1998