The surprising strengths of Ozu's Record of a Tenement Gentleman

Yasujiro Ozu has never been known for great film titles - in fact, many of his greatest films have abstract titles that (Late Spring, e.g.) that deliberately provide no useful information and make it really hard to identify from a list which films you've seen - but the title of this one - Record of a Tenement Gentleman (1947) completely baffles me: I literally can't figure out what it means, who's the gentleman, where's the tenement, what's the record? So putting the title aside, this is a good film for a # of reasons but not yet at the level of Ozu's greatest works (e.g., Tokyo Story - same actor in the lead, though, I think): the characters are not nearly as fully developed, the denouement is a little melodramatic, the editing and cinematography are a little shaky (he had not yet fully developed his famous "tatami mat" perspective), and the young boy was clearly unable to convey some of the emotions that the screenplay demanded. But, on that other hand, the story is quite straightforward and emotional: a man is followed home to his village by a young (maybe 5 years old?) boy who has become separated from his father; none of the villagers steps forward to house the boy, even temporarily, and a bitter and unfriendly widowed (war widow?) woman reluctantly takes on the responsibility. She's mean to the poor troubled child, who barely says a word through the whole film, though - spoiler alert, kinda - toward the end she has a change of heart and warms up to the child, at least a little. But then the boy's father shows up: He truly had lost the child in a crowd, and he's overjoyed to have found his son. Now the mean widow feels great remorse about her coldness and about the mean things she said to the boy, especially telling the child that his father had intentionally abandoned him. So the end is quite a kick, and unexpected. But the real strength of the film is not its story line but it's depiction of post-war Japan: Many establishment shots show us a ruined landscape and streets filled with rubble and demolished buildings. We get the sense that there are thousands, at least, of abandoned children - either orphaned in the war or victims of the complete social upheaval. The film concludes w/ some shots of a village square, where dozens of children (all of them boys, for some reason) play and horse around, and we get the sense of a complete social catastrophe: This boy's story is just one of many, maybe one of the few with a positive outcome. The film becomes, as we look back on it, almost a documentary drama, or at least a social commentary rather than a sentimental tear-jerker.