In 1923, Tazuko dropped out of school for reason of “convenient to do housework”, and in March of the following year, her mother died suddenly at the age of 47.

In line with the marriage recommended by her late mother, Tazuko met with an obstetrician and gynecologist named Takaoka and married in 1925 at the age of 21.

Mizoguchi then made “Taki no Shiraito” (1933, 滝の白糸), “Gion Festival” (1933, 祇園祭), and “Kanfuren” (1934, 神風連), and Tazuko helped him as a director's assistant.

Tazuko started living near her father in Kyoto, and served as assistant director under Mizoguchi for “Otsukuru Osen” (折鶴お千), “Maria no Yuki” (マリヤのお雪), and “Koujaku Grass” (虞美人草, all in 1935).

Although “First appearance” was not successful industrially and did not get a good reputation from critics, Tazuko did not give up and continued to make movies with Mizoguchi.

Around this time, Mizoguchi's wife Chieko, who had a close relationship with Tazuko, had a mental disorder and was admitted to Kyoto Prefectural Hospital.

In 1942, Tazuko joined the Keimin Movie Club (啓民映画部) of Manchu Film Association (満洲映画協会) in Manchuria as an immediate action.

However, Tazuko was unable to join as director assistant due to the struggle of power in Shochiku, and was hired as a recording staff in the editorial department.

She appeared as a collaborator in the documentary film “Record of the life of a movie director Kenji Mizoguchi”(ある映画監督の生涯 溝口健二の記録) released about four months before her death.

Before the 1980s, the hierarchical corporate structure of the major studios was a major barrier to women entering the industry in a creative capacity, with the scant handful of those who did direct hailing from an acting background, barring the freak exception of Japan's first woman director, Tazuko Sakane, who made one feature, 1936's "Hatsu Sugata".

Denied work after the war (on the ground that she had to have a college degree to be a director), she was forced, at age forty-two, to return to Mizoguchi as his script girl.

In the Sakane collection's file for The Downfall of Osen, roughly half of her records and Mizoguchi's one-page scribble of the sequence order survive.

[6] Situated as a minority in the film industry, Sakane was nevertheless a privileged majority member of wartime society, as a Japanese national, and as a person who had some control over the mass media.

[7] A large part of Sakane's experience with filmmaking came from assisting and editing films under the tutelage of Kenji Mizoguchi.

Similar to this experience, Sakane fell under scrutiny following her first film as a director, New Clothing(1936), in which her personal life, including intimate topics such as her virginity, was publicly criticized and shamed in an article merely in the studio's effort to gain attention.

Despite being enlisted as a director in an effort to create a propagandic film that documented Japan and assertion that the country was "one nation, one people," Sakane's personal intentions interfered.

Due to wanting to maintain her personal style in spite of the colonialist assignment, Sakane created a film that documented the loss of history and native culture within Japan.

[8] It wasn't until Japan fell into war that Sakane found herself developing a sense of personal filming style that was not under the control of the studios she worked under.

It was there that a majority of Sakane's films were focused on providing educational material for female audiences that didn't exist prior to her directorial debut.

It was here that her style became evident in reestablishing what exactly domestic relationships looked like and how women existed alongside men in Japanese and Chinese society.