A hairdresser who runs a beauty parlor from her home. She wears practical, Western-style work clothes—a smock or simple blouse. Unlike a doctor’s coat, her uniform is more subtle, but no less coercive. Shige’s uniform is the costume of the "busy, practical modern woman." She uses her role to justify her stinginess. When her parents must be sent to a cheap inn (because she needs space for a hair-dressing workshop), she shrugs. Her uniform of efficiency and commerce has numbed her to filial piety. She is tempted by the uniform of the shōsha (business woman) who has no time for sentiment.
Throughout the film, Noriko appears in simple, feminine, non-professional attire: modest blouses, dark skirts, sometimes a traditional kimono when off duty. She works in an office—a low-level clerical job—but we never see her in a strict office uniform. She is not a "type." She is a specific, wounded, generous person.
The ghost uniform. The son who died in the war—his empty uniform (military) is the film’s silent antagonist. The parents visit his grave, but the true absence is not just a son; it is the failure of the militaristic uniform ideology that promised glory and delivered death. The temptation of the military uniform is shown in retrospect as a catastrophic national delusion. Part 2: The Un-uniformed Authenticity – The Daughter-in-Law Noriko Against this landscape of suits, coats, and smocks stands one figure who resists the temptation: Noriko , the widow of the couple’s second son (the one killed in the war). Played with transcendent grace by Setsuko Hara, Noriko is the film’s moral center precisely because she wears no uniform .
