Ozu's late films (of which Late Spring is the first instance) is that transitions between scenes are accomplished exclusively through simple cuts. According to one commentator, the lost work, The Life of an Office Worker (Kaishain seikatsu, 1929), contained a dissolve, and several extant Ozu films of the 1930s (e.g., Tokyo Chorus and The Only Son) contain some fades. But by the time of Late Spring, these were completely eliminated, with only music cues to signal scene changes. (Ozu once spoke of the use of the dissolve as "a form of cheating.") This self-restraint by the filmmaker is now seen as very modern, because although fades, dissolves and even wipes were all part of common cinematic grammar worldwide at the time of Late Spring (and long afterwards), such devices are often considered somewhat "old fashioned" today, when straight cuts are the norm. Pillow shots Many critics and scholars have commented upon the fact that frequently Ozu, instead of transitioning directly from the end of the opening credits to the first scene, or from one scene to another, interposes a shot or multiple shots—as many as six—of an object, or a group of objects, or a room, or a landscape, often (but not always) devoid of human figures. These units of film have been variously called "curtain shots," "intermediate spaces," "empty shots" or, most frequently, "pillow shots" (by analogy with the "pillow words" of classic Japanese verse). The nature and function of these shots are disputed. Sato (citing the critic Keinosuke Nanbu) compares the shots to the use of the curtain in the Western theatre, that "both present the environment of the next sequence and stimulate the viewer's anticipation." Richie claims that they are a means of presenting only what the characters themselves perceive or think about, to enable us to "experience only what the characters are experiencing." Bordwell sees it as an expansion of the traditional transitional devices of the "placing shot" and the "cutaway," using these to convey "a loose notion of contiguity." Some examples of pillow shots in Late Spring—as illustrated on the ozu-san.com website—are: the three shots, immediately after the opening credits, of the Kita-Kamakura railway station, followed by a shot of Kenchoji temple, "one of the five main [Zen] temples in Kamakura," in which the tea ceremony (the first scene) will take place; the shot immediately after the tea ceremony scene, showing a hillside with several