Ozu And Imported Fame
Speaking of assumptions (or approximations, which aren't dissimilar), a student asked me why Yasujiro Ozu is popular in America. Maybe I'd had too much caffeine, but this was my answer. I wouldn't be surprised to find that it's mostly wrong, but, hey, why do actual research? I was only getting ¥200, for this, and I'm lazier that you're giving me credit for being.
As for the popularity of Ozu's movies, I can only speak about America. Among American movie buffs, Ozu is famous. But among regular people, he probably isn't. And neither is Kurosawa - even though he's the most famous Japanese filmmaker. (This is also true of many of the great European filmmakers.)
The reason for this is probably, chiefly, the occupation of Japan by American military forces. Kurosawa, Ozu, Neruse, Mizoguchi, et al., were making (censored) films in Japan at the time, and American GIs were exposed to them during their time here. (GIs also brought hundreds of American films to Japan, which had some effect on future Japanese filmmakers, but this is a different topic.)
Cities with strong movie cultures (New York City; Los Angeles; Portland, Oregon; etc.) had some pre-war exposure to Japanese films and filmmakers, but probably only these places. Sadly, in cities like these, they were limited to art house theaters (small movie theaters that specialize in rarer and more advanced films). To some extent, this is still true these days, except that there are many very-famous Japanese films.
But as the GIs returned to America, so did some of the Japanese movies they discovered here. This also served as wartime propaganda in America, by showing American citizens how Japanese people were prospering under the occupation.
This helped to spread some of the greatest and more popular Japanese movies in America - Roshomon and Tokyo Story, in particular. And samurai movies helped introduce Japanese historical cultures to the west (for example, Kurosawa's Yojimbo and Sanjuro, although these arrived a little later).
Nearly simultaneously, the French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) happened. Godard, Renais, Bazin, Truffaut, etc., began, for the first time, to talk about movies as a serious art form. They focused especially on what they called the auteurs (artists who wrote and directed their own movies - people who had a vision in their minds and then created it on film). This intellectual argument shifted the focus onto serious filmmakers like Bergman in Sweden, Kurosawa and Ozu in Japan, Renoir in France, Hitchcock in England and America, et al. And it had a lasting effect on how we think of films and filmmakers.
This caused a rise in the number of foreign films that were imported into America, the places they could be seen, and the respect given to their creators.
Finally, and this should not be considered a small point, Ozu made extraordinarily beautiful and evocative movies. You can pause any of his films and admire the composition as if they were just great landscape/portrait photographs.
So these three reasons are probably the biggest and best ways to explain why Ozu is popular in America. There are probably dozens of other reasons, but these are the key ones.
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