Tokyo Story (東京物語)

Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari)

Directed By: Yasujiro Ozu

Released: November 3, 1953

            Tokyo Story is a 1953 Japanese film about a couple who are visiting their grown-up children in the city of Tokyo. The children of the parents are constantly busy, so they decide to send their parents off to a spa. The couple goes to the spa, but only comes back after a short while, which causes the children of the parents to figure out where their parents can stay. Along the way back home to their youngest daughter, the mother falls suddenly ill. This film, took a similarity of the American film directed by, Leo McCarey, Make Way for Tomorrow. Although both films have slight differences, there is a similar plot of a couple visiting their grown-up children.

            The film follows a Japanese lifestyle, which “…the Japanese appear to be fascinated simply with the pulse and movement of the lives themselves,” (Varley 2000). Tokyo Story, definitely appeals more to Japanese people than outsiders of Japan. Ozu can appear to be ‘most Japanese of all directors, if Kurosawa is regarded as the most Western of Japanese film directors,’ (Varley 2000), by the fact that his films portray a conflict between traditional and modernization relationships. “Japanese youth is intensely conscious that the parent represents a traditional and still precisely understood pattern of conduct that continues to call all Japanese,” (Varley 2000).  I think it is important to understand the views of Japanese people and Western people are very different. How a Japanese family is brought up and how a Western (American) family is brought up, also varies. In the Japanese culture, kids are taught to respect their elders, and since the Japanese parent holds on to tradition, the kids should be able too. While in Western (American) culture, kids are not really brought up to show the up most respect to elders.

            Tokyo Story, takes a simple Japanese family and shows the generations of relationships between them. “…evoking a timeless melancholy about what was fading quickly in a transforming Japan,” (Kingston 2001). Unlike the first Ozu film we watched in class, Late Spring, I think other viewers will enjoy Tokyo Story. The film starts a little slow, but as characters develop throughout the film, one may become attach to the characters. Although it is a little harder to relate to the characters since they are depicting an ordinary Japanese lifestyle, those of the Japanese lifestyle, may be able to relate.

           

Reference

Kingston, Jeff. Japan in Transformation, 1952-2000. Pearson Education, 2001.

Varley, H. Paul. Japanese Culture. University of Hawaii Press, 2000.