Tokyo Story 9781911239260

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Acknowledgments I am grateful to all the friends and colleagues who have been with me on the many journeys that this book involved. Doˉgase Masato helped me realise my goal of bringing Ozu’s past into the present of the printed page. This would be a very different publication without his gentle kindness and scholarly perseverance. I treasure my memories of our various Tokyo wanderings and discussions. Thank you to my friends Hideaki Fujiki and Wujung Ju, who continue to teach me much about Japanese cinema, and Ozu in particular. I am very thankful for Hideaki’s editorial guidance in the final lap. Saitoˉ Atsuko accompanied me on a vital research trip to Kamakura and was with me when I entered Ozu’s room at Chigasaki-kan. Atsuko also helped translate valuable articles on the inn. Our host, Mori Haruko, was especially generous with her time and recollections that day. Wachi Yukiko at the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute and Odaishima-san at the Kamakura Museum of Literature: hoˉnto ni doˉmo arigatoˉ gozaimashita. As manager of the invaluable Ozu Network, Tsukiyama Hideo (Nagano University) has also been of enormous assistance. It has been a special honour to collaborate with the relatives of Ozu Yasujiroˉ and Atsuta Yuˉharu. Without the help of Ozu Akiko, the daughter of Ozu Shinzoˉ (Ozu’s younger brother), and Sugano Kimiko, the daughter of Atsuta-san, this book would look quite different. Fujii Hiromi and Hosoda Hitomi at Shoˉchiku were also generous with their assistance. Hosokawa Eiko and Mike Nix helped provide welcome hospitality in Japan. Daniel Raim kindly gave me access to his beautiful short film, In Search of Ozu. Alison Butler and Rosie Thomas read early drafts of several chapters and I am grateful for their feedback. Richard Perkins, Rachel Moseley, Karl Schoonover and Tiago de Luca have all been valued colleagues in the supportive constellation of Film and Television Studies at the

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University of Warwick. Thank you also to Jinhee Choi, Mark Cousins, Richard Dyer, Miguel Gaggiotti, Duncan Hewitt, Katie Hill, Michael Jones, Morten Kringelbach, Daisuke Miyao, Lúcia Nagib, Hélène Neveau, Valerie Orpen, Doug Pye, Yue Su, Con Verevis, Ginette Vincendeau, Gro Ween and Peter Westwood for various forms of conversation, correspondence and guidance. The research for this project, including the necessary costs of translation involved, was funded by the British Academy and the Humanities Research Centre at the University of Warwick. I want to acknowledge the assistance of the libraries at the University of Warwick and Nagoya University, the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, the National Diet Library and ˉ ya Soˉichi Library. Thank you to Rebecca Barden and Veidehi the O Hans at Bloomsbury for their kind support. Sophie Contento managed the production process with exemplary skill. Elena Marcarini helped kickstart the credits and Yuko Shimizu designed the beautiful cover. Finally, I want to express my lasting gratitude to three important people who have, in very different ways, helped shape this book. John Gillett first introduced me to Ozu when we used to work together at the British Film Institute. V. F. Perkins went on to teach me at Warwick and helped steer the genesis of many of my ideas about the film. Last, but by no means least, Mark Kurzemnieks gave me my first copy of Tokyo Story. We also had our own Tokyo story, and it changed my life. A note on conventions I have followed the conventional word order for the presentation of all Japanese names with the family name coming first. In the case of authors who work mainly in English, however, I cite the example of their English language publications. Macrons have been included to indicate the extension of a particular vowel sound in all Japanese words except those commonly used in English such as Tokyo and Osaka. Film titles are introduced with the transliterated Japanese title followed by the common English title. All subsequent mentions refer to the latter. Japanese words used in the text such as furosato are italicised except for those in common English parlance such as futon.

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1 Openings and Journeys On New Year’s Day 1953, writing from his new home in the coastal city of Kamakura, the community where he now lies buried, the renowned Japanese film director Ozu Yasujiroˉ noted the strong wind blowing outside. He drank heated sake and enjoyed the warmth of his kotatsu (a traditional low wooden table covered with a futon and a charcoal brazier positioned underneath). Reflecting on his life, and perhaps also considering the film script that he was to shortly begin work on the following month with his long-term collaborator, Noda Koˉgo, he recorded his intentions for the coming year: to not drink too much, to look after his health, to watch lots of films, to not covet things too greatly and to do his very best at work.1 Despite then being seen as one of the grand masters of contemporary Japanese cinema, and certainly one of Shoˉchiku studio’s most valuable economic assets, Ozu himself could hardly have anticipated how the passage of time would treat the film that he went on to complete and release that year. Toˉkyoˉ monogatari/ Tokyo Story (1953) is now recognised as one of the very finest accomplishments of international film history. In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of ‘the 100 Greatest Films of all Time’, film directors from around the world voted it number one, with the film coming third among a similarly diverse body of international critics and scholars. Tokyo Story is specifically a film about the flow of time, and it marks this trajectory through a series of locations that inform the internal structure of this book. In one sense a family drama telling the story of an elderly couple’s single trip to the Japanese capital to visit their adult children and grandchildren, the film also has an unusually dynamic narrative that looks back to the losses of Japan’s long Pacific War, and forward to the uncertain social and material changes then underway in Japanese society with the recent end of the American

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Occupation (1945–52).2 The parents’ train journey from the provincial coastal town of Onomichi to Tokyo thus ends up as just one of a series of journeys that the film depicts, suggests or occludes, with its uniquely resonant sense of space and movement being visible from its famous initial sequence of establishing shots. Tokyo Story opens with a harbour scene of Onomichi and the impressive curvilinear verticality of a traditional toˉroˉ (stone lantern) dominating the left-hand half of the frame. Further back, and to the right of the image, we see a horizontal pavilion, the sea and a jumble of rooftops which echo the contours of the hills in the far distance beyond. It is a quintessential Ozu shot that combines a keen sense of graphic potential with an attentive interest in the unremarkable passage of the everyday. At the very point the eye settles on this conjugation, a fishing boat enters the frame to the right of the lantern and underneath the canopy. We only cut when the vessel is finally on the verge of disappearing from the image. Almost everyone who remembers this shot can also recall the steady, resonant put-put sound of the boat, its affecting timbre somehow linked to the gentle nature of its trajectory and the extended duration of the image. Ozu moves to a picture of schoolchildren on their way to class: there is the same play between vertical and horizontal space, with a cart and bottles replacing the toˉroˉ, and the children and their satchels replacing the boat. The rightwards progression of their bodies produces an unforced visual rhyme, the first of dozens that the film will contain as it unfurls to connect the timeless rituals of the sea with the time-to-come of the schoolchildren and their future lives in the world. The film then cuts to a shot of the town’s rooftops and the hills and temples beyond. A small domestic chimney to the left and the taller modernity of a telegraph pole to the right connect the old and the new, with the chugging direction of the fishing boat replaced here by the faster, but still repetitive, rhythm of a steam train passing through the town and across the screen. A penultimate shot, this time in reverse perspective, links a line of domestic washing to the linear movement

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of the train, now pictured travelling leftwards, and the stillness of the sea and harbour seen below. The abrupt release of the train’s whistle provides an affirmative sound bridge as we finally cut from the railway to a closer shot that looks out across a stretch of empty space to a temple on a hillside. As the whistle fades, we become aware of another chimney, its ephemeral coil of smoke matching the disappearing sound of the train and announcing the settled and routine nature of the home we are about to enter from which it emanates. Within the pictorial and aural patterning of these five remarkable opening shots, all of which have their own unique reverberations, The five opening shots of Tokyo Story

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lies the heart of Tokyo Story and its mesmerising interest in ordinary lives lived in motion. This suggestive arrangement of sound and image may currently speak of a story yet to unfold, but when we revisit its secrets at the end of the film and hear and see its repetition, a sense of attentive, almost healing, completion emerges. This emphatically replaces the initial idea of a line and its inevitable implication of disappearance with the expression of something altogether more cyclical. In so doing, the film therefore also contains the suggestion of perpetual renewal and return – something, one might say, that also speaks to Tokyo Story’s enduring reputation as a masterpiece of global cinema with its own unique form of intergenerational appeal. Tokyo Story is indeed a film that I have returned to over the years, and it continues to offer new insights as I grow older. I first watched it as an eager undergraduate film student and probably approached it then as an interesting exercise in style. When I next saw it in a crowded cinema in Tokyo a few years later, it left me devastated and unable to speak for some time afterwards. Despite my minor irritation with the sentimental scoring, I remember being in tears at the gentle sound of Ryuˉ Chishuˉ’s voice and the rhythmic chugging of the tugboats on the tranquil waters of the Inland Sea. I was fascinated by the scene in which the visiting grandmother speaks to her grandson in Tokyo and wonders aloud about her old age and what will become of the young boy when she is no longer there. I studied the film closely as a postgraduate and have since gone on to teach it to generations of students willing to enter its world and unravel the secrets of its lasting emotional pull. For years, I have asked my class why Tokyo Story is not, in fact, called ‘Onomichi Story’ – a question I have never really been sure I could answer myself despite obviously wanting to know what others thought. In some ways, this book is an attempt to formulate my response. I have prioritised the question of place in several ways. I begin by positioning Ozu as a citizen of Tokyo and explore how the various strands of the film’s production history intersected closely with its subject of representation. Far from seeing Ozu as a timeless,

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somewhat distant, aesthete, I have sought to localise him and provide a set of more intimate historical markers in my coverage of the film’s gestation. As Donald Richie wrote long ago, Ozu always ‘feels it important we keep our bearings’.3 In the next two chapters, I follow through on this idea by anchoring my discussion in terms of the politics and aesthetics of location. Having one’s bearings meant many different things for Ozu. It could be the positioning of the camera, the framing of a doorway or the decision to cut from one character to another across the space of a room. But these compositional decisions always required a degree of proximity and temporal sensitivity that also had profound ethical and emotional repercussions. In Tokyo Story, this was true in terms of how the film reckoned with the turning point it occupied within the flux of Japan’s postwar modernity. Ozu’s film is especially sensitive to the historical shape of female experience, and I therefore explore how its protagonists navigate the city’s different spaces in ways that also generate a moving sense of the time they find themselves in. Tokyo Story may be a consensual film, but it incorporates many different shades of the past and the present. I then go on to consider Tokyo Story’s reception and critical standing in both Japan and the rest of the world. I argue that one important dimension of its status as a film classic is its capacity to speak not just to the canon of Japanese film history, but the shifting priorities of global cinema. The book concludes with a brief account of my own journey from Tokyo to Onomichi as I retrace the various locations of the film and consider these encounters in the context of today. Tokyo Story’s status as a film classic is surely down to a combination of all these things. It is a marker of a transformational moment in Japanese and international film culture, but it also has the capacity to speak beyond geographical boundaries in ways that recognise the universal human experience of everyday family relations. Most importantly, it achieves this as a film, using Ozu’s profound understanding of the spatio-temporal potential of cinema to tell us what it might be like to be in the world in one place and in one time.

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2 Tokyo Stories Ozu was a child of Tokyo, or an Edokko, in the parlance of the ancient capital. He was born on 12 December 1903 in the workingclass district of Mannen-choˉ in Fukagawa ward, the second son of Ozu Toranosuke and Asae. Toranosuke ran a wholesale fertiliser business – Iwasaya – in the city, but after Yasujiroˉ reached the age of nine, and perhaps concerned about the influence of the city on his offspring, Toranosuke decided that his children should move to the provincial town of Matsusaka in Mie prefecture with their mother. In this sense, the fracture of the traditional family unit and the shifting relationship between provincial and metropolitan Japan are both inscribed within the director’s formative biography. After a brief spell as a schoolteacher (Hirayama Shuˉkichi’s former profession in Tokyo Story), Ozu returned to Tokyo in 1923 and, by now a keen film fan and admirer of American cinema, he entered Shoˉchiku’s Kamata studios as an assistant cameraman. He was given his first directing job on Zange no yaiba/Sword of Penitence in 1927. Ozu’s early filmography covers numerous popular genres including student comedies, crime melodramas and various social dramas depicting the fragile socio-economic realities of lower-middle-class Japanese family life in Tokyo.4 In films such as Toˉkyoˉ no koˉrasu/Tokyo Chorus (1931) and Hijoˉsen no onna/ Dragnet Girl (1933), the director’s work of the first half of the 1930s is marked by a restless form of experimentation with film grammar, but never to the detriment of his parallel investment in the practical realities of film-making and the guiding economic imperatives of the Japanese film industry. In many accounts of his career, Ozu’s distinctive aesthetic model, comprising a default low camera level and the absence of camera movement in favour of an ‘editing schema that constructs diegetic space through eyeline and setting rather than

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Ozu Yasujiroˉ as a young genre film director (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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screen direction’,5 dominates critical attention. But Ozu was always first and foremost a practised collaborative studio director interested in crafting popular, well-honed narrative accounts of contemporary social relations, emotions and locations in a manner that was primarily driven by genre, performance and the ability to guarantee a return on investment by completing a production on time. Several Western critics, such as Robin Wood, have mainly located Tokyo Story in terms of its relational pattern with two of Ozu’s earlier postwar films that also starred Hara Setsuko as a central female protagonist with the name of Noriko: Banshun/ Late Spring (1949) and Bakushuˉ/Early Summer (1951).6 Late Spring, for example, is certainly notable for the way it marked the resumption of the director’s formative working relationship with the scriptwriter Noda Koˉgo – the pair had not collaborated on a film since Hakoiri musume/An Innocent Maid (1935) – but more recently, many scholars have also begun to integrate a consideration of Ozu’s postwar ambition as a prestigious studio director with an interest in earlier patterns of thought and expression.7 Seen in this light, Tokyo Story can be regarded as a film that looks back to both Ozu’s prewar career and a more recent set of narrative threads that includes the culmination of his preoccupations with the postwar Japanese family initiated by the first of his so-called ‘Noriko films’. Late Spring had been an enormous commercial and critical success, not least because of its evident status as a star vehicle for Hara, who plays the unmarried daughter of a bourgeois family living in Kamakura. Early Summer inhabits a very similar milieu, but complicates the machinations involved in establishing a suitable marital partner for the Noriko character by extending the number of intergenerational family members and locations within the narrative. Hara Setsuko’s character, Noriko, in Tokyo Story remains unmarried, but this time her status is that of a war widow and her position within the Hirayama family structure is more precarious and difficult because she has no direct bloodline to the three Hirayama children. It is Noriko’s unanchored but residual status that especially

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allowed Noda and Ozu to revisit some of the thematic concerns of their recent work together and return to the more fragile urban social demographics of several of the director’s important films from the 1930s such as Hitori musoko/The Only Son (1936), a work that similarly depicts the disappointing visit of an elderly parent from the provinces to Tokyo. *** One of the keys to this more integrated understanding of the shape of Tokyo Story rests in the director’s feelings about the success of his preceding film, Ochazuke no aji/The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice (1952) – a somewhat melancholy and bittersweet marital drama that the director largely considered a failure. This disappointment propelled him back to the genre format of the family drama, but this time with a larger geographical and psychological canvas that could finally allow him to paint a vivid social portrait of the Japanese postwar moment in a way that sympathetically integrated the affinities of the past with the uncertainties of the present. ‘The idea of Tokyo Story did not suddenly occur, but it had been discussed with Noda for a while,’ Ozu recalled. ‘In fact, we tried to include it in Early Summer, but soon gave up.’8 Noda’s original intention had been to depict the intergenerational selfishness inherent in family life, with Ozu similarly interested in the degree of antipathy that children may end up feeling for the character and lifestyle of their parents.9 All of this remains present in the film, with characters such as the deliciously cunning daughter Hirayama Shige (Sugimura Haruko) plotting to pack her visiting parents off to the hot spring resort of Atami, and the undistinguished and emotionally indifferent Hirayama Koˉichi (Yamamura Soˉ) compelled to care more for his neighbourhood patients than his elderly mother and father. What properly distinguishes the outcome of the pair’s collaboration, however, is the complex emotional, temporal and spatial geography of the Hirayama family’s circumstances and affiliations. Tokyo Story is

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a far more compassionate and finely nuanced film than might first be assumed, and this is undoubtedly one of the most important underlying factors that explain its enduring status as a classic film. Three main contexts help inform this position: the broader structure of Japanese postwar family life, Ozu’s own acute interest in dramatic architecture in relation to the form of the Japanese family drama, and the director’s particular sensibility as a figure within the wider cultural family of the Japanese film industry and the nation’s artistic intelligentsia. The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice had been based on an original film script that Ozu wrote back in 1939 and abandoned the following year, thus making Tokyo Story the first original screenplay that Ozu and Noda had developed since the end of the US Occupation of Japan on 28 April 1952. The film therefore provided a timely opportunity to evaluate recent changes to the Japanese family system with five years having almost elapsed since the enactment of key revisions to Japan’s Civil Code in 1948. These amendments had enabled firmer legal equality within the institution of domestic marriage. They also accorded a greater degree of freedom to the individual rights of family members outside the traditional patriarchal security of the family home. By 1953, Japan’s material prosperity was beginning to improve, with the development of new economic opportunities in the major urban conurbations of the Kansai and Kantoˉ regions, home respectively to the two cities of Osaka and Tokyo that feature in the film. These social and economic changes had profound repercussions for how ordinary Japanese people internalised the progressive narrative of material and ethical regeneration offered by the legacy of the Occupation. On the one hand, the postwar period had encouraged a sense of economic opportunity and increased investment in the active participation of nation-building; but on the other, it had also problematised the relationship with the recent past, especially when articulated through a lingering affiliation between the traditional family system and private memories of the militarist experiment that had led to the country’s defeat in World War II.

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Ozu and Noda’s response to this situation was both uniquely personal and part of a wider discourse about the direction the country was then taking. In a 1958 article in the newspaper Hoˉchi shimbun, cited by Yoshida Kijuˉ in his eloquent book on the director, Ozu argued that ‘I am like a tofu maker. I can only make ganmodoki … or, for a change, abura-age … I am not a person who can leap into different things.’10 In typically epigrammatic style, he continued: ‘My motto in life is to follow the trends when they are unimportant and to observe morals when it’s something important.’11 These words neatly encapsulate Ozu’s careful intention to contextualise an awareness of the changes to the postwar Japanese family within an immediately consensual framework that played to his established strengths as a genre director. In his groundbreaking monograph on the director, Donald Richie famously, and mistakenly, asserted that Ozu ‘had but one major subject, the Japanese family, and but one major theme, its dissolution’.12 But instead of such a broad sociological approach, one that also assumed an undifferentiated pattern of permanent structural change, what typically really interested the director was the moral dimension of people’s various behaviours in response to circumstances. Importantly, therefore, what became of most significant dramatic interest in Tokyo Story was not so much the claim, or the event, of family breakdown itself, but the ways in which the central question of one’s responsibilities to one’s parents could reveal different intentions in terms of accommodating the past, the present and the imagined future of both the family and the country in general. This approach had enormous commercial appeal that also raised issues about tone and form. ‘Noda and I did not expect to see people weeping when they saw our work’, Ozu said in a newspaper article, published not long after the film had been released. ‘We simply tried to depict the naked relationship between parents and children without either denying or idealising it,’ he wrote. ‘We assumed it would be satisfying for us as authors if the audience neither saw

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goodness or evil but something that encouraged them to show filial devotion towards their parents.’13 Ozu’s remarks clearly point to both the film’s generosity of spirit towards the choices made within one single family at the time, and its concurrent ability to simultaneously provoke personal reflection on the part of the viewer many generations on. But what is also particularly interesting here is the uncertain duality between excessive emotion and descriptive realism; something which may be seen as one further key to the film’s original success.14 Ozu himself would later state that he felt Tokyo Story to be the most melodramatic of his films,15 probably an indication that he was aware of its relatively instrumental plot structure and the affecting death of the principal wife and mother, Tomi (Higashiyama Chieko). But he might well have been considering how the film’s profound emotional resonance also related to his well-established audience appeal as a director who favoured a predominantly popular female audience who were themselves, by then, experiencing enormous social change. The conventional patriarchal lineage of the traditional Japanese family is, for example, clearly diminished by certain recurring elements within the film’s narrative – a pattern also reinforced by the significant star presence of Shoˉchiku’s leading younger female actresses, especially Hara Setsuko and Kagawa Kyoˉko, who plays the Hirayamas’ youngest daughter, Kyoˉko. Take, for example, the way that the ageing father Shuˉkichi (Ryuˉ Chishuˉ) is shown to have no particularly enduring or convincing relationship with either of his two surviving sons: the preoccupied and slightly worn-out Koˉichi, ˉ saka Shiroˉ), whose only and the distracted and absent Keizoˉ (O significant plot interaction with his parents largely takes place outside the actual diegesis. Shuˉkichi’s second son, Shoˉji, remains missing in action: a figurative ghost who haunts the home of his widow, Noriko, in the form of a photograph that also provides a pictorial reminder of the other missing millions that comprised the true cost to families of Japan’s then still recent wartime history. Even Koˉichi’s two sons, Minoru (Murase Zen) and Isamu (Mori Mitsuhiro), are

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The Hirayama family: generational change and uncertainty

rude and wilful boys who have nothing much to do with either their father or visiting grandfather. Instead, many of the most heightened and affecting scenes of the film, such as the poignant bedtime exchange between Noriko and Tomi, and the farewell conversation between Noriko and Kyoˉko, take place in wholly female-centric spaces, in which the conventional parameters of family relations are meaningfully reconstructed within a broader pattern of generational change and uncertainty. By 1953, Ozu’s position within the firmament of leading Shoˉchiku directors was secure. To this extent he was able to count on the support and assistance of many others in his extended ‘family’ of regular collaborators including, very importantly, the producer Yamamoto Takeshi (with whom he had worked since Late Spring); the cinematographer Atsuta Yuˉharu (whose working relationship with Ozu went back to Wakoˉdo no yume/Dreams of Youth [1928]); the film editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu; the costume designer Saitoˉ

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Taizoˉ; and the art director Hamada Tatsuo. Ozu’s trust in these studio workers and professionals was forged by establishing close and sociable working relationships that in some cases, though not all, extended after hours into regular marathon drinking and eating sessions, which he had a reputation of enjoying. But he was also known as a hard and demanding taskmaster who had prethought-out views of what he wanted in every single take, both on set and on location. This combination of trust, rigour and human interaction was not just part of Ozu’s practice, but also an intrinsic component of his commercial ‘brand’ as the leading purveyor of Shoˉchiku’s successful genre format of warm-hearted, homely popular entertainment. Nothing signalled this more than the recurring staple image of Ozu in the commercial press showing him either with his co-workers or alone; his lean, purposeful and genial features regularly capped by his iconic white taupe hat.

Ozu at work in his white taupe hat (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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If Ozu’s character as a dependable and hard-working everyman formed one essential part of his very public profile – the one most naturally suggested by the homes, offices and bars that he favoured as representational locations in his films – he was also part of a much broader network of established writers, artists and show business professionals. His diaries record numerous meals, screenings and meetings with many of the cultural luminaries of the day, and through these occasions he kept an active eye on all the goings-on in the worlds of cinema, painting, graphic design and highbrow literature. Part of this activity was undoubtedly related to his prominent cultural status – his desire to be a sociable member of ‘the scene’ – but part, too, was also down to what is now increasingly recognised as Ozu’s more multi-faceted position as a polymathic visual artist invested in the totality of the images that he wished to produce. Ozu was not just a formidable film director and screenwriter; he was also a very talented potter, designer, painter, photographer and calligrapher who made numerous additional contributions to the look of his films, right down to the recurring burlap background and calligraphic style of his opening titles and the choice of individual items of domestic ceramics, furniture and signage. Many people have, for example, noted the significance of Ozu’s long-term friendship with the leading Japanese novelist Shiga Naoya (1883–1971), one of the progenitors of the watakushi shoˉsetsu or shi shoˉsetsu (‘first-person novel’) which had previously stripped back the mechanical plot dramatics of the traditional novel form in favour of a greater emphasis on conversational intimacy and the momentary nature of everyday experience. Donald Richie develops this point by citing the Japanese literary critic Imamura Taihei’s distinction of an especially ‘Japanese attitude’ in the case of writers like Shiga, ‘in that the observer [in their books] tries to recall a phenomenon instead of analytically reconstructing it’.16 This rejection of any detached circumlocutory analysis in favour of a desire to present a dramatised version of life as it is, and as it is experienced in the moment, is also essential to a closer understanding of Ozu’s intentions behind

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Tokyo Story; a project, after all, conceived just at the very time his circle of cultural intimates was intensifying, with his new home in the middle-class literary and artistic milieu of Kamakura and the formation of what he would himself term the ‘Kamakura kai’ or ‘Kamakura circle’ of initiates.17 In an article published in the Sangyoˉ keizai shimbun two months prior to the film’s release, itself a sign of the gathering attention being paid to the next instalment of his career, Ozu outlined his directorial intentions in explicitly literary terms. In contrast to Akutagawa Ryuˉnosuke’s words that ‘human misfortune stems from the relationship between parents and children’, he said, ‘I wanted to reveal the compassion of others who do not have blood relations, through the figure of a widow who is dedicated to caring for her husband’s parents, but finally leaves them to pursue her own life.’ Nonetheless, he also wanted to ‘imply a form of human salvation through the figure of the youngest daughter … the human being I wish to convey is one getting closer to the brightness of the sun, even if this is by little step by little step’.18 *** For many, Tokyo Story’s global reputation as a film classic primarily rests on the affecting quality of its carefully managed images of human interaction and human separation, and this is certainly how we follow the journey of Shuˉkichi and Tomi from Onomichi to the capital and back again. The development of these contemplative visual threads and interlocking patterns was an integral part of the intensive, collaborative scriptwriting process between Ozu and Noda that lasted a total of 103 days in the first half of 1953, during which the pair laid the groundwork for not just the situational design of the film’s narrative, but also its distinctive segmentation of conversational action. From February to May that year, they followed their now long-established working pattern of mainly sharing quarters in a traditional ryokan inn located in the coastal suburb of Chigasaki, ˉ funa. From near to both Ozu’s home and Shoˉchiku’s studios at O

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there, holed up in a shared room (number two), they would work, sleep, eat and famously imbibe vast quantities of sake warmed in a nanbu tetsubin (cast-iron kettle). Ozu was known as the itamae, or head chef, and prepared meals such as curried sukiyaki and tonkatsu using a shichirin, a compact charcoal stove. The actual number of sake bottles drunk regularly formed a lasting personal record of the intensity of their creative labour; in the case of Tokyo Story, the tally came to a formidable forty-three. ‘With Noda and me,’ Ozu said, ‘we see alike on drinking and staying up and I think this is a most important matter. On the scenarios we do, of course the dialogue is written by both of us. Although we don’t write down the details of the sets, they are in our minds as one common image. We think alike. It is an amazing thing.’19 The script of Tokyo Story (© Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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The first mention of the writing process for the film in Ozu’s diary comes in the entry he recorded for Wednesday 4 February 1953.20 The director’s sister Yukiko had arrived at Kamakura with Noda and following a visit to the company studios, the two men went to an inn at Yogawara where, after dinner, they completed tracing the main nodes of the narrative. The months of April and May were especially instrumental, with intensive work on individual scenes such as Shuˉkichi’s visit to the oden restaurant with his old friends and the beach sequence at Atami. On 18 April, amid what appears to have also been a heavy social schedule, the pair finished one of the film’s key sequences set in Noriko’s apartment.21 Finally, a draft was completed on 28 May and not long after, on the 2 June, Ozu met ˉ funa with Takamura Kiyoshi, the Head of Production at Shoˉchiku’s O operation. It was the first time the two had met since Takamura’s return from Cannes (a sign then of the growing global prestige of Japanese cinema) and Ozu noted modestly that his boss took great interest in the promise of the screenplay.22 Numerous writers have pointed out the similarities between Tokyo Story and Leo McCarey’s moving 1937 feature film, Make Way for Tomorrow, which tells the story of an elderly couple forced to move out of their home because of financial difficulties and then finally separate from each other because none of their five children will take them in. Noda had seen the film on its Japanese release, but Ozu hadn’t as he was stationed at the time in China on military service. Tokyo Story is by no means, however, a direct remake of this previous template, and Noda and Ozu were more characteristically inclined to recycle motifs from previous material of their own, such as the reshuffling of familial relationships in Toda-ke no kyoˉdai/The Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family (1941) and the emblem of the visiting father in Dreams of Youth or ageing father in Chichi ariki/ There Was a Father (1942).23 In their handling of this material, Noda and Ozu were clearly seeking to reinvigorate an existing set of aesthetic principles based on the structuring of intimate quotidian events around a particular

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dramatic context related to the pressures faced by individuals or families in their engagement with Japan’s urban modernity. In the case of Tokyo Story, the complexity of the various social and psychological pressures facing the different protagonists was handled with typical precision, to the point of what Tony Rayns terms ‘diagrammatic clarity’.24 This question of internal design is not only critical to an understanding of Noda and Ozu’s working method, but also its consequences when it came to dramatic form. In part, this takes us back to Ozu’s characterisation of the film as his most melodramatic feature to date, but it also relates to an important

Ozu’s typical precision directing Higashiyama Chieko and Hara Setsuko (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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strand in Ozu criticism articulated by Yoshida Kijuˉ, who primarily sees the film in terms of the carefully modulated way it straddles what Ozu himself termed the dramatic and the accidental. Yoshida has famously recounted how Ozu’s final words to him before dying were that ‘cinema is drama, not accident’,25 and we may briefly consider this aphorism in the light of three predominant characteristics within the narrative organisation of the script: the absence, in fact, of any significant dramatic catalyst in terms of story progression and the emphasis instead on mundane but carefully plotted and revealing human interaction; the importance of dramatic parallelism (something originally noted by Donald Richie) whereby certain key events or personal circumstances are ‘echoed or inverted elsewhere’;26 and the intriguing, but prominent, use of ellipses at certain points within the otherwise linear progression of the plot. These aspects point to a subtle orchestration of internal elements that ply an emphatic dramatic structure with the implied effect of contingency. As Ozu himself put it, when reflecting on his narrative method, ‘Rather than tell a superficial story, I wanted to go deeper, to show the ever-changing uncertainties of life. So instead of constantly pushing dramatic action to the fore, I left empty spaces, so viewers could have a pleasant aftertaste to savour.’27 *** It is certainly likely that Ozu had a very clear idea of his central casting decisions at the writing stage of the project, for his and Noda’s scriptwriting style typically meant, as Ryuˉ Chishuˉ put it, that the director had, more or less, ‘made up the complete picture in his head before he went on the set, so that all we actors had to do was follow his directions, from the way we lifted and dropped our arms to the way we blinked our eyes’. Indeed, Ozu once told Ryuˉ that ‘he was happiest when a scenario was completed’.28 According to the Shoˉchiku producer, Yamanouchi Shizuo, this degree of internal preparation would also extend to the setting of a strictly prescribed length to each film, something which Ozu would then successfully use

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Pages from Atsuta Yuˉharu’s notebook (courtesy Sugano Kimiko)

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as a negotiating tool for the overall budget of the production. This calculation would also notably include the financial value of his star actors who, by the time of Tokyo Story, were becoming increasingly central to his box-office vision.29 But this would be to downplay two other essential pictorial elements of the director’s overall planning process: his working collaborations with Atsuta Yuˉharu on the cinematography and Hamada Tatsuo on the studio design. In both cases, Ryuˉ’s main point about the dramatisation of the body must be seen within the further context of the spatial choices enabled by the locations and the sets. Atsuta and Ozu worked extensively in researching the locations for the film over a period of weeks in the hot early summer months of 1953.30 Between 15 and 20 June, the pair wandered on foot around the lanes and backstreets of Tokyo’s historical shitamachi, or downtown working-class and lower-middle-class districts, including places such as Monzen-nakachoˉ, Ueno, Asakusa and the areas around the Arakawa and Sumida-gawa rivers where the Hirayama children might have settled. Ozu would kneel on a portable tatami mat and take preparatory photographs with his Leica camera while Atsuta wrote and sketched in fastidious detail in his notebooks and diaries, faithfully recording the juxtaposition of elements those particular settings might provide.31 In many cases, these would become the formative templates for the shooting set-ups that he later deployed. On the evening of 23 June, the pair left for Onomichi and stayed in the venerable Takemuruya Honkan inn with its splendid views over the waterside of the port town. From here, they explored various temples and shrines, including the Joˉdo-ji temple and Sumiyoshi shrine that feature in the film, as well as the harbour, railway station and Doˉgami Elementary School, where Kyoˉko is seen teaching at the end. On the way back to Tokyo, Atsuta and Ozu stopped off in Osaka before beginning to scout a location for Noriko’s apartment: an important structural element of the architectural mise en scène of the film and a significant visual signifier of the social position and mobility of Hara Setsuko’s protagonist. After looking around

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Ozu scouting for locations in Tokyo (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

Gotanda and Fukagawa in early July, Ozu settled on one of the reinforced concrete Doˉjunkai apartment complexes, or danchi, in Hiranuma-choˉ, Yokohama, built after the Great Kantoˉ Earthquake of 1923. The pair continued looking for working-class suburban locations for Koˉichi Hirayama’s family home and medical clinic, and visited Horikiri and Yanagihara-choˉ as well as the historical SenjuOhashi bridge, which likely features in the background of the scene between Tomi and Minoru at the Hirayamas the morning after the parents’ arrival in Tokyo. Finally, Atsuta and Ozu travelled to the resort of Atami and explored the coast before returning to the capital on 20 July, just a few days before the start of the shoot. If Ozu’s deep familiarity with the ordinary locations of eastern Tokyo’s working-class districts represented a reacquaintance with the shitamachi of his prewar films such as Dekigokoro/Passing Fancy (1933) and Toˉkyoˉ no yado/An Inn in Tokyo (1935), his collaboration with Hamada Tatsuo similarly reinscribed the worn patina of age and the passing of time within the material fabric of the film’s principal

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domestic spaces constructed in the studio. In his production report for Tokyo Story, published in Kinema junpoˉ in October 1953, the ˉ guro Toyoshi specifically noted how Hamada’s prominent critic O sets preserved the older flavour of the city, with Shige’s beauty parlour, for example, also signifying the neighbourhood’s recent recuperation from wartime bombing damage.32 Crucially, Hamada’s close collaboration with Ozu and Atsuta was also instrumental in the picturing of the fluid interaction between the Hirayama family members within the fictional interior worlds of their various homes. Prior to any actual set construction work, Ozu would typically draw up a detailed map of each envisaged property, including the spaces he knew would never be seen on the screen. This provided a viable working floorplan from which to map the designated positions of the camera and the precise movements of each actor.33 As Igarashi Taro has put it, ‘the arrangement and [the] scale of the rooms … [in Ozu’s films were thus] decided mainly by [the actual] time intervals of [the] acting’.34 In other words, contrary to some of the critical assumptions often levelled at Ozu’s apparently static directorial style, the interior spaces of Tokyo Story were primarily imagined in relation to a highly mobile awareness of the human body in its most private, but perhaps therefore also most expressive, moments of social interaction. In his recollections of working with Ozu, Atsuta elaborates on the wider intentions behind this method, especially when it came to the director’s foundational belief in the cinematic dramatisation of ordinary life. Far from merely being of intrinsic pictorial value, Ozu’s interest in dynamic spatial composition also served the function of looking ‘at people from every possible social point of view [to the extent of] incorporating various objects that were close to us’.35 For both cinematographer and director, this intensified scrutiny had a set of democratising outcomes linked to both a desire to project the roundedness of a three-dimensional character onto the flatness of the cinematic screen, and an awareness of the multiple ways one might therefore observe the motivations and consequences of intimate

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Ozu wanted the audience to feel his characters were talking to them (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

human interaction. In this sense, proximity did not just mean the matter of observing how different adult family members conversed with one another while, at the same time, being unfamiliar with the realities of each other’s lives. It also concerned the all-important relationship between the imagined family members and the imaginary spectator in the audience. As Atsuta put it: ‘Ozu was trying to give the face a sense of three-dimensional presence, to create a relatively realistic feeling, thereby causing the audience to feel that the actors were actually talking to them.’36 *** Atsuta’s negative sheets for Tokyo Story provide a minutely realised inventory of every shot including its aperture, shutter speed and scale.37 His diary records that filming began on Saturday 25 July ˉ funa studios, 1953 at 10.20 am on sound stage six at Shoˉchiku’s O

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A page from the production schedule for Tokyo Story (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

with work ending exactly eight hours later at 6.20 pm.38 If Atsuta’s cinematographic practice was consistent in its careful observation, this was merely a reiteration of Ozu’s own preparatory methods before the camera even started rolling. As in the case of many of the director’s earlier features, Ozu’s final shooting script for Tokyo Story included his private codified enumerations based on various coloured symbols marked in coloured pencil, pencil and ink pen. These were accompanied by various memos, miniature sketches and notes, all testament to his previous intensive collaboration with Noda on the dialogue and with Atsuta on the shot locations.

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One important dimension of this process was Ozu’s working relationship with his actors, but this was no matter of zealous mannerism. Ozu’s intensified gaze was the result of a lifetime of immersive looking, especially in relation to the aesthetics of Hollywood stardom and the art of still photography. In an article published in the leading photographic journal Camera mainichi, Ozu argued that Westerners’ faces were more photogenic because, to him, their features appeared more sculpted. By way of example, he cited the way that Bette Davis was framed and lit in close-up by Gregg Toland in William Wyler’s The Little Foxes (1941). ‘In the case of Japanese actors, they not only have to depend on their facial expression,’ he argued, ‘but the expression of the body such as the hands or the appearance from the rear … an accumulation of various kinds of shot is needed to provide this kind of characteristic [psychological] shadow.’39 This observation has significant repercussions for how the bodies of the actors feature in Tokyo Story as rounded, active elements within the frame, to the extent that they are not just observed from the front, but also from the side and rear, as the camera rotates from shot to shot in the course of a single conversation. It is also further testament to a long-standing investment in compositional attention dating back to Ozu’s formative discussions of photographic practice published in the magazine Gekkan Leica during the 1930s. As Ozu himself put it, ‘the image is a thing to be seen by the eyes’.40 The casting of Hara Setsuko as Noriko is instructive here. In an article published in Kinema junpoˉ in 1947, Ozu noted that he thought ‘just a skilful facial expression is insufficient … the personality is significant. … To put it extremely, I think it is possible to say that facial expression somewhat disturbs the expression of personality.’41 These remarks shed a different light on the reductive view of some contemporary critics such as Kanda Teizoˉ who suggested that the director over-managed the rigid positioning of his leading actors to the detriment of any nuanced emotional outcome.42 What clearly interested Ozu was less the obvious affiliation between

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Ozu directing Hara Setsuko: the modulated observation of gesture, posture and glance (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

performer and audience achieved by the close-up scrutiny of the face alone – a feature he had previously noticed in Hollywood cinema – and more the modulated observation of a character’s gesture, posture and glance – a characteristic that helps make Tokyo Story such a richly profound viewing experience. Although he had initially been wary of Hara’s glamorous star quality, including her intrinsic beauty and theatrical skills of self-presentation, he later came to appreciate what he called ‘her essential ability to precisely understand

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a character’.43 As such, the character of Noriko clearly resonates in the film precisely because of not just what we are shown in full view of everyone, but because of what we are also encouraged to look at which others in the frame might well be unaware of. This kind of attentive noticing of such things as the clasping of an object, the holding of one’s hands and the entrance through a doorway required several inventive visual strategies, all of which complemented the care taken with the design of the sets, the choice of the locations and the casting of the actors. One fundamental aspect of Ozu and Atsuta’s method was the decision to shoot from a static camera position at a low height: something enabled by Atsuta’s specially constructed tripod painted in red enamel and nicknamed ‘the crab’. If this facilitated a particular degree of proximity and thus familiarity with the characters, another important priority was the explicit legibility of the action. This was managed in the studio by the process of arranging lighting set-ups with the actors, and on location by the resolution to shoot mainly in daylight during the summer months. Each domestic group or two-shot with the actors would initially be set up with body doubles to determine the correct compositional features and light elements. Ozu would next revise these with his stars and character actors in situ. The camera lights would then be turned off and the actors would continue to rehearse and finesse Ozu’s directorial suggestions. The shot would only finally be taken when the lights went back on.44 All the long takes and close-ups were therefore managed separately in one go because of the different lighting set-ups required.45 In the case of exterior sequences such as those involving Shuˉkichi and Tomi’s visit to the Ginza or Atami, the natural sharpness of the available sunlight produced not only the requisite degree of clarity, but also the characteristic buoyancy of Ozu’s mise en scène noted by the critic Hasumi Shigehiko, who points out that in all of the director’s films ‘the sky can only be sunny’.46 ***

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The Onomichi shoot was covered widely in the Japanese press after it began on 16 August. Accounts reveal further interesting detail about both the public popularity of the director and his star performer, Hara Setsuko, and the surprising flexibility of some of Ozu’s working methods. This aspect of Tokyo Story’s production was certainly a media phenomenon. A report published in the Asahi shimbun, for example, detailed how 3,000 station entrance tickets had been purchased in advance by avid fans of Hara hoping to catch a glimpse of their idol arriving in town. Railway staff had to hurriedly send a telegram up the line requesting that the star get off at the previous station.47 Photographs of the time also reveal the huge number of onlookers near the shoot, eventually compelling Ozu to request that town officials remove the crowds so that he and his fiftystrong team of collaborators could concentrate solely on their work. Yet rather than recording any sense of disruptive mayhem, these images now recall the mainstream prominence of both Ozu and his leading actress. As well as underscoring the public’s obviously keen anticipation of their next film together, the photographs help clarify the director and the star’s obviously enduring affiliation with the national audience. The decision to make Onomichi the Hirayamas’ family home was perhaps the result of two interrelated factors: it had been the domicile of Shiga Naoya while he wrote his principal work, An’ya koˉro/A Dark Night’s Passing (1938), and the place where one of Ozu’s visitors at the time – a former Shoˉchiku actor – came from.48 No matter, the distinctive atmosphere of the port community and its regional vernacular were both central in the pre-planning and shooting stages of the film. Higashiyama Chieko had been unable to take part in a cast trip to study the mood of the place and so Ozu recorded someone speaking Onomichi-ben (Onomichi dialect) to help her manage the pronunciation of her character’s lines. Ryuˉ Chishuˉ later joked that this made no difference to the outcome, since they would ‘all be speaking Ozu-ben anyway’.49 Importantly, the spatial timbre of the place led to two significant revisions to the

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The Onomichi shoot was a media phenomenon (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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planned opening and ending of the film in the script. As many of Atsuta’s original location photographs record, the initial intention had been to begin the film at the waterfront fish market, but the more time Ozu spent among the hills above the town overlooking the bay, he came to realise the virtue of the previously noted sequence of shots that distil the specific geographical features of the place, along with the sight and sound of its passing boats and trains. This undoubtedly led to another highly significant change that preserves and intensifies the newly formed bond between Kyoˉko and Noriko in the film’s conclusion. Instead of placing Kyoˉko outside her school looking down at the train and then cutting to Noriko gazing out nostalgically from her window at the passing landscape she is leaving behind, Ozu separates their gazes more completely by positioning Kyoˉko within the classroom behind a window and Noriko from within the train carriage looking forward. What unites them instead is thus the eloquent sound bridge of the train whistle and the revelation of the link between the classroom clock and the gift of Tomi’s watch – the passing of time rather than the flow of space. *** Ozu was the only one of Shoˉchiku’s rota of regular studio directors in the early 1950s given the special dispensation to approve a film’s music beforehand, and he collaborated closely with Saitoˉ Takanobu on the composer’s stirring, if sometimes sentimental, debut film score.50 It must have been positively received as Saitoˉ then went on to provide the music for all Ozu’s subsequent work bar Kohayagawa-ke no aki/The End of Summer (1961). Saitoˉ recalls that Ozu did not have any specific requirements regarding the characteristics of the music after turning over the script to him, but the director did have a very clear idea about which passages of the film should be scored and those he wished to speak on their own terms. Ozu never wanted his film music to underly the psychological attributes of an individual character on the screen; accordingly, he later instructed Saitoˉ to remove an interpretation of the key scene

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when Tomi visits Noriko a second time. In fact, Ozu would actually insist that ‘I prefer to have good weather music always. It doesn’t matter what might be happening [in the film].’51 Like all the director’s major films of the postwar period, Tokyo Story thus expresses an intimate form of audiovisual democracy in which no one personality and sentiment dominates either the screen or the soundtrack. Rather, the viewer is always guided to look and listen carefully at what is happening and who is speaking, but never emphatically so. If the weather and the music are sunny in the daytime, Tokyo Story also remains a film of the summer evening and of night. Some of its most expressive and nuanced moments occur during these hours and it is therefore an enormous loss that some of the intended finely graded black-and-white tonal contrasts devised by Atsuta are now less legible and atmospheric than they would have once been. Sadly, no original negative or print of the film survives; what we have today instead is but a compilation of internegative prints made from several of the thirty copies originally produced for export. Shoˉchiku’s ambitions for the film had been considerable at the time, but the company’s laboratories lacked capacity, especially in the lead-up to the all-important New Year market in Japan. Keen to meet their internal distribution deadline, the company dispatched the original negative to a small processing laboratory that then caught fire.52 Despite audiences being deprived of a pristine version of the film, Tokyo Story still retains its capacity to distil emotion. Complete, but not immaculate; quiet, but also attentive: it is both a film of its time and one able to subtly transcend period and place. As we shall now see as we look at the film in closer detail, Tokyo Story inhabits a cultural forcefield of its very own that truly defines its enduring status as a film classic.

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3 Tokyo Arrival Tokyo Story may be a film contingent on various railway journeys, but it neither shows the parents’ departure from their hometown nor their actual arrival in Tokyo.53 Instead, the first shot we see of the city is that of a series of vast silhouetted factory smokestacks billowing dark smoke into the urban sky. The chimneys’ scale, number and segregation from any established social community all provide an abrupt and brutal contrast to the more homely stability of the rooftops in Onomichi. The following sequence of establishing shots soon helps shift this initial impression, however, and introduces us to a modernising world of passing children, chattering housewives, light road traffic, washing lines and a local railway station, presumably leading to the heart of the Japanese capital. Within a series of economically staged images that continue with a sign for the Hirayama paediatric clinic and the first sight of Fumiko (Miyake Kuniko) preparing for the arrival of her parents-in-law, Ozu thus pictures a lively, everyday space containing elements of both the old and the new. In some ways, it makes sense that we have already ceased to track the movement of Shuˉkichi and Tomi. After all, the journey between Onomichi and Tokyo was originally made by the Hirayamas’ offspring, and it is the time that has passed since they left their hometown that we initially notice. Fumiko’s sweeping in this sense is not perfunctory; she is consciously turning a home now inhabited by her own children into one ready for their grandparents’ arrival. The printed fabric on the sliding doors is clearly worn and covered with makeshift patches, and she appears distracted and short-tempered. Family life has changed and there is not much room. David Bordwell has suggested intriguingly that the ‘Tokyo story’ of

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Introduction to Tokyo

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Tokyo Story might in fact be less about what happens to the parents during their brief visit to the city and more about what has actually already happened to their children in the intervening years.54 Or, to put it another way, the Tokyo the Hirayamas imagine visiting while they prepare to leave Onomichi might, in fact, be something more akin to Ozu’s own memories of his childhood Tokyo than the reality of the city that now exists in 1953. The matter of how both parties – parents and children – navigate the tensions of this complex set of generational disappointments lies at the very heart of the film. Ozu manages these tensions in spatial terms. Fumiko’s preparatory reordering of the home is a chance to observe how, like all the women in the film, she is largely managing life’s daily pressures on her own. We also see the cramped arrangements of the Hirayama household, with the various instruments and bottles from Koˉichi’s medical practice interrupting the general flow of the living area. The first disruption Fumiko faces is not, however, the parents, but their eldest grandchild, Minoru, who returns home from school and immediately reprimands his mother for rearranging his bedroom to accommodate the visitors. The hostile atmosphere between the two pervades the initial moments of Tomi and Shuˉkichi’s subsequent arrival. The couple remain polite in their initial interaction with the relations, although what remains most striking is Fumiko’s ensuing performance of hospitality and reconciliation, as if nothing had happened just a moment before. Reticent and modest, but also relentlessly mobile, she is the figure most clearly implicated in the dynamic emotional topography of the house as the different generations of her husband’s family all congregate in the previously silent living room. As always, the position of Ozu’s camera is revealing. The entrance of the parents is managed solely from within the home and, also importantly, from beyond Fumiko’s line of vision as she welcomes the guests. The camera sits further back at a height close to the floor of the main hallway and thus above the lower recess of the genkan (entrance porch) and external door. This has a powerful threefold

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effect which helps determine our reading of much that follows. Firstly, it allows us to view Tomi and Shuˉkichi’s tentative manner as they traverse the all-important threshold between the public world of the city and the private world of the home. Secondly, it introduces a sense of fluid congestion, a visual theme that will be richly explored as Tokyo Story progresses, and thirdly, it implicates us, the film’s viewers, within the overall compositional framework of the image. Fumiko now turns away from the door and moves forward centre screen with her parents-in-law’s modest luggage. At the point her head disappears from the top line of the frame, Ozu cuts to a The arrival of the parents

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simple long shot from inside the family living room beyond. We see her youngest son, Isamu, seated right watching his mother enter. As noted previously, Ozu has sometimes been criticised for the emphatically static framing of his actors, but the actual reverse is true in much of Tokyo Story. It is a film wonderfully alive with human bustle, wandering, displacement and motion. Its brief moments of stillness and reflection always work in opposition to this. The orchestration of the settling in of the family, for example, takes place in an animated single take, with all the adult figures, including the Hirayamas’ daughter, Shige, momentarily turning, crossing and circling the space of the room before coming together in a final seated position. Tokyo Story is a film intensely interested in these processes of belonging, of how one learns to accommodate a space with others, or not, and this simple shot is emblematic of a much broader pattern of observation that will now unravel within the cinematic spaces of the home and city. Ozu’s staging of the welcome exposes more of the film’s rich emotional architecture. We continue with a scene dissection comprising close-up one-shots of Fumiko greeting Tomi and Shuˉkichi and then each responding in turn. The couple’s children are not included in this interaction and when we do cut back to the wider, previously established, group shot, Shige and Koˉichi seem more distracted by the temperature in the room than the responses of their parents. Fumiko gets up and leaves the room with Shige tailing after her. In the kitchen, the two women converse briefly about serving Tomi’s favourite senbei (rice crackers) brought by Shige and ponder why Noriko failed to turn up earlier at Tokyo railway station. This is the first opportunity we have had to notice Shige’s good-humoured cunning, and her busy interaction with her sister-in-law about their missing fellow sister-in-law firmly establishes the affective contours of the film’s governing matriarchal hierarchy. The senbei are more than just a gift of hospitality: they act as an assertion of both belonging (Shige knows what her mother likes) and exclusion (Fumiko doesn’t). Noriko’s absence certainly illustrates her more distant position

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Noriko greeting her parents-in-law

within the family structure from the point of view of the two women, especially Shige, and when she does turn up, apologetic at being late, the way she is seen greeting Tomi and Shuˉkichi is telling. The elderly couple are shown seated on the floor of their makeshift upstairs bedroom in an identical composition to the one in which they were initially pictured in Onomichi. They have fallen into the only pattern they know, despite clearly being so far away from home. Noriko appears screen left and kneels between the two figures to bow. Instead of initially cutting to a segmentation of the room’s space, as previously, Ozu maintains the immediately established intimacy between the three in the same shot as each meets the eyeline of the other in a polite, but expressive, series of interactive gazes. The ensuing warmth and fluidity of their conversation is nonetheless soon punctured by Shige’s shrill call to her father that his ofuro (hot bath) is ready downstairs, and Shuˉkichi’s departure from the room temporarily leaves the two women alone. In an economic series of shots, we thus have a highly condensed foretelling of the two significant visits made to Noriko’s own home later in the film: one with Shuˉkichi and the other, crucially, without. These narrative rhymes, only visible on a subsequent re-viewing of the film, provide another instance of Tokyo Story’s sense of democratic internal sympathy. ‘Being in Tokyo is like a dream,’ Tomi goes on to say. And so, it is.

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The passing of the evening further illustrates Tokyo Story’s subtle method of counterpoint in relation to the compression and dilation of time. There is an extended take of Fumiko and Noriko clearing up in the kitchen. It is clear Noriko doesn’t visit often. Their conversation over which dish goes where neatly re-establishes their spatial and emotional proximity to, but also separation from, the two Hirayama siblings talking next door with their parents. As such, their interaction is set firmly in the intensified moment of the present – something we see acutely absent when we cut back to the living room. Here, there is a different temporality, one listlessly drifting as the discussion slows and turns to the asking after of remembered people in Onomichi, and the planning of a friendly social reunion in Tokyo. The time momentarily being held in this room is one based simultaneously on memory and anticipation in which the present is idly slipping away, unnoticed but pregnant with unexpressed differences in generational sentiment. No sooner does Noriko rejoin the seated group from next door than the decision is made for both her and Shige to leave. With Shuˉkichi and Tomi shot with their backs to the camera, but positioned in the centre foreground of the image, we are firmly implicated in their gaze as they once more observe the pattern of the Tokyo-based family group being reordered in front of their eyes. The reordering of the family

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It may be early on, but this will almost be the last time all five main adult protagonists share the same frame in the film. We hear the final sharp sound of the bell attached to the sliding front door and then just the soft ticking of a grandfather clock and the faint music of the summertime night slowly wafting into the space of the home. Ozu cuts back to the chanoma (living/dining room), the camera has shifted position and we now see Koˉichi and his parents facing the same direction (screen left), all three lethargically waving their uchiwa (non-folding fans). It is obviously still hot and the tempo of the characters’ hand movements, along with the momentary lull in conversation, convey a dissipation of energy and purpose that can only be resolved by the suggestion the parents retire to their makeshift bedroom above. The pair thus tiptoe slowly into the darkness of their quarters and reconvene on the floor in another Onomichi mirror-shot, as if they had either never left or are perhaps unconsciously already preparing to return home. The first stage of their journey may have ended, but in the ensuing exchange, both gradually admit to not really knowing where they are and the disappointment of being further from the centre of the city than expected. It’s a feeling Shuˉkichi knows his son Koˉichi shares but each party is prevented from expressing to the other. This is a gesture the film makes often: the compassionate blending of a sadness with the recognition of the disheartening force of external circumstances. The final shot of a night-time mackerel sky, accompanied by the distant sound of a passing train and the gentle regularity of the ongoing instrumentation off screen, all serve to reinforce the point by suggesting a steady acceptance of how things are in the world of the city we now see slowly unfurling in front of our eyes. The beauty salon We learn more of the Hirayama family’s shitamachi milieu the very next day when Ozu reveals an ordinary suburban space of interlinked transportation and workaday industrial and commercial activity.

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The fluid congestion of everyday life

This time, the scale of the opening shots is closer and the cutting more insistent. It’s daytime and there’s work to be done. The sequence begins with a cramped view of silhouetted chimneys and pylons before moving to the world of the street below. A relatively long take records everyday life outside the Urara beauty salon, home of Shige and her husband, Kaneko (Nakamura Nobuo). To the left of the image is a business sign and in the middle distance a female figure sweeps the doorway; nearby are several film posters that anticipate the cinema soon to feature in the conversation over what to do with the parents that evening. A bus and then a train and car all pass in the right-hand corner of the picture, thereby blocking any compositional sense of a wider world beyond the frame. Unlike the calmer and more open-ended milieu of Ozu’s prewar Tokyo films such as An Inn in Tokyo, the shitamachi world of Tokyo Story is one largely based on the compression of both urban space and time.55 Characters live cramped domestic lives and there is a perpetual sense of busyness and interruption in all the households. The first shot inside the salon, for example, is of Kiyo (Anan Junko) vigorously dusting in preparation for the day ahead. The concentration and tempo of her gestures offers an immediate contrast to the more distracted, slowed-down rhythm of Shuˉkichi and Tomi’s fanning seen the night before. Noriko has already missed the arrival

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of her parents-in-law because of pressing office duties and soon a patient will call Koˉichi away on his day off. Shige, here, is clearly more concerned about the brisk consumption of her breakfast than making any plans for her parents to watch a film. It’s perhaps easy to judge Shige. She makes sure she helps herself to all the beans she can while eating and appears uninterested in putting herself out and doing anything special for the guests. But isn’t her apparent selfishness as much to do with the pressures of living in the present than accommodating the memories of the past? Isn’t she just making do as best she can in a world that is not going to be doing her any favours any time soon? Her husband certainly seems a bit slow and lacking in the same resourcefulness and vitality that she so readily exudes. To survive in the city she’s adopted as her home, she has clearly learnt to manage her own time and emotions with self-protective care. There’s the hint, too, that she’s not going to put up with a wayward partner in the way her mother once tolerated her father’s drinking sessions; a point later underlined in her fury at Shuˉkichi coming home drunk after a reunion night out with his old wartime companions. Sugimura Haruko’s performance is magnificent. Trained in the Stanislavskian method and a veteran of the Japanese stage, especially in shingeki (modern realist drama), Sugimura moves with great agility and expression. In every scene of the film, there’s a sense of prudent nervosity as if her character is constantly weighing up the most resourceful way to deal with a situation or interaction, even if it inadvertently reveals her characteristic guile. By the time we return to the beauty salon, presumably later the same day after her parents’ postponed trip to the city centre, Shige has parked them at the top of her home. Tomi is darning in the bedroom and Shuˉkichi is seated on the roof above gazing out over the neighbourhood and listening to the shunting sounds of a nearby factory. The staging of this moment is immediately revealing of Shige’s need to avoid distraction from her work below. It also neatly anticipates the later separation at the film’s close when, following Tomi’s unexpected death, Shige rushes back to

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Tokyo, leaving her father on top of his own home facing the new day alone. Sugimura’s gestural and vocal range is wider than any other of the film’s leading actors. In contrast, for instance, with Hara Setsuko, whose arms are often gently swinging or held locked suggestively by her side, Sugimura’s arms and hands are in constant use: picking up objects (especially food), passing items or pointing forcefully to others. Her body is rarely still and her mind always seems to be working on what’s about to happen next. A key facet of how this is articulated lies in her voice, which slows and softens when she’s pleased with her decision-making but rises to the point of shrillness when she’s unhappy with an outcome or imagined inconvenience. There’s a complexity of thought and performance that sits differently to Hara’s restraint, which defers revelation in favour of concealment and compliance.56 A good example of this is the moment Shige rings Noriko after Kaneko has taken the parents to the local sentoˉ (bathhouse). The door closes and we see her look up from working on a customer’s hair to check that her parents have really left the salon. It’s clear she has been hatching a plan for some time as she saunters over to the telephone near the front window. Shige maintains a formal, rather strained, manner as she briefly converses with one of the employees at the Yoneyama office where Noriko works as a company secretary. When Noriko comes on the line, though, Shige’s body immediately folds and softens as she sits down to ask if Noriko would take the Hirayamas city sightseeing the next day. Shige’s smile is entirely performative and ingratiating. As she unconsciously twirls an illustrated fan while speaking, it becomes obvious how well she is also spinning Noriko figuratively in the same controlling fashion. Sugimura’s own performance thus works on multiple levels, enabling us to witness how intention, pretence and lack of self-awareness may all coexist within the same moment. Ozu cuts to watch Noriko readily agree and move across the floor to ask permission from her manager. Hara’s voice and body language are completely different to Sugimura’s when her character is required to make her own request

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Shige’s cunning nervosity

Noriko’s concealment and restraint

in turn. Throughout the exchange with her older sister-in-law, she speaks animatedly with deferential and unforced pleasure, but standing near her colleague’s desk, she moves to hold the wrist of one arm with the hand of the other – a characteristically self-contained and modest gesture we see adopted throughout the film. It is tempting to merely read this moment as a study in character, but it is also one of tradition and circumstance. Sugimura is deploying a range of actorly attributes derived from a lifetime’s experience on Japan’s modern stage. This suits the range of Shige’s persona and hints too at the character’s realisation that getting by

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in the constrained circumstances suggested by the ordinary decor of her salon clearly requires a certain degree of social dexterity. Hara, on the other hand, was a celebrated screen actress who conveys a different kind of femininity in her performance as Noriko, one that comes with an important degree of social liberty because of the lack of any restricting blood ties. There is also the hint of more material flexibility. Noriko may be one of several busy women in her modern office, but she can freely take a day off in the city. She is also framed differently in ways that link her with a wider world than Shige’s. Whereas Shige’s fan is illustrated with an image of a popular local celebrity, linking her to the more parochial shitamachi milieu of old Tokyo, Noriko is pictured in front of a map of the world, conveying the incorporation of Japan’s new globalising modernity into the everyday life of young women like herself, and indeed those watching the film in the domestic audience. The tour bus and department store To comply with family expectations, and perhaps also avoid the effort involved in mapping a route by herself, Noriko takes her in-laws on a guided bus tour around the Ginza and nearby Imperial Palace.57 The upmarket shops and Western style cafes of the Ginza district were a central aspect of the city’s consumption-orientated modernism in the earlier Taishoˉ period (1912–26). The sight of their regeneration, along with the iconic contours of the Hattori Building belonging to the Wako luxury department store, are all part of how the touristic audio monologue effortlessly integrates the official past of Japan’s imperial lineage with the informal bustle of the contemporary big city. Yet Ozu carefully resists any seamless collusion with this relentlessly official narrative and thereby presents another layer of spatial confusion on the part of the elderly visitors in relation to the capital. We begin with a mobile reframing of the film image with a shot taken through the windscreen of the bus. An off-screen voice welcomes us to the ‘great city’ of Tokyo. We then cut to rear and

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Tokyo: the official narrative

frontal shots of a seated Shuˉkichi, who, like his fellow passengers, turns obediently in unison at the instruction of the guide to briefly gaze out screen left at the passing grounds of the Imperial Palace. An insert from another angle shows Tomi and Noriko doing the same, before all return to their original doll-like upright positions. Despite the brisk tempo of the soundtrack and the promise of historical illumination, Ozu playfully (and self-consciously) deconstructs the novelty of this presentation of the city as a postcard. Tokyo is merely a series of mechanical views available for passive consumption. It is only a few moments before we see the Hattori Building again, as if to indicate we have come back to the beginning of what is surely going to be an endless loop. In his discussion of the three Tokyos of Tokyo Story, Yoshida Kijuˉ refers to the ‘dull and mediocre’58 quality of the images briefly presented to the compliant visitors on the bus. This is certainly true, and it contributes to the sense of muted disappointment experienced by the parents in the second of the Tokyos already seen in the ‘heavily documented’59 typicality of the industrial suburbs, located far from the commercial city centre. Yoshida’s third Tokyo is presented next and proposes the greatest challenge to any optical and spatial orientation on the part of both the Hirayamas and the spectator. The segment develops in three stages and, in some ways, delivers the

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culmination of an argument the film has already begun to propose: that the Japanese capital is ultimately a space of the imagination and impossible to grasp as an organic, experiential entity existing in the whole. Ozu’s Tokyo Story is therefore not so much a film about Tokyo per se, but more a film interested in the stories that its characters tell themselves and each other about the capital when it comes to their own imagined relationship to the city. Tokyo, in this sense, ultimately becomes a place that is continuously deferred and never finally realised. The sequence initially offers an example of Ozu’s typically graphic method of staging intermediary narrative space. It opens with a succession of three low-angle establishing shots, the first two of which are paired, in that they present the geometrical windows of a modern office building receding screen right and then a parallel view of the same building with the windows receding screen left. In the second shot, we also see the tower of a commercial building with a succession of diagonal external staircases on which various people are ascending and descending in the bright sunshine. A train passes in the foreground, and we hear the loud sounds of traffic and a car horn down below. The third shot provides a more close-up view of the grid of stairs on which we see Noriko, Shuˉkichi and Tomi making their way down. In the momentary shifting of the gaze from left to right Tokyo: the geometry of the city

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and then up and down, however, Ozu is also anticipating the way in which the visitors will themselves subsequently try to make sense of a city that is now increasingly becoming configured in abstract terms. This idea becomes reinforced in the next section, which provides a low-angle shot of a viewing platform from the vantage point of a step that bit further down. The three enter the frame from the stairs above and begin a conversation about the location of Koˉichi’s and Shige’s homes. Noriko tries to orientate the pair by pointing leftwards in the direction they have come from. Crucially, Ozu does not cut to provide the characters’ field of vision at this Tokyo: the need for orientation

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point; his interest lies not so much in showing us the city, but more in observing the emotional need for orientation and belonging on the part of his protagonists. In his discussion of this section of the film, Yoshida argues that Ozu presents a sense of Tokyo that is ‘so huge … it is a city beyond words. Its empty space is beyond sight.’60 It can only be evoked in loose terms which suggest somewhere being, as Noriko puts it, ‘that way, I think’. Yet while this is true, there is a further deeper irony being played out. The parents’ desire to know where they are in the city is fundamentally based around the issue of where their children are located, and this is hardly true in the reverse case. Koˉichi and Shige currently have no idea about the whereabouts of their parents as they have outsourced their responsibilities as affective anchors to Noriko. As if to demonstrate this, the pair then enquire where Noriko herself lives, and she turns to lead them to the side of the platform off screen right. We cut to a much tighter medium long shot as she points out the direction of her home and invites Shuˉkichi and Tomi to come and visit. The three then turn with their backs to us as they begin to silently gaze out across the city. The concluding shot of the sequence reveals the long-delayed panoramic view of the congested modern city below. It is the first and only proper view of this kind that we will have of Tokyo in the film, but far from merely being an image of indecipherable alienation, or what Yoshida terms ‘a shining emptiness’,61 it may also be read as an affirmation of togetherness and shared perception. Within the visitors’ unified field of vision, there is now one location in this vast metropolis that they will not just know in terms of its place on the map, but also where they will be made to feel welcome as if they properly belong. The apartment The following exterior transition shot of Noriko’s Tokyo danchi building neatly demonstrates her class position within the new postwar Japanese economy of shared low-cost public housing, a system that especially entailed the provision of more modern

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Noriko’s Tokyo danchi building

amenities for younger, aspirational working people like herself. We’re not, however, immediately reintroduced to Noriko. Instead, we see a young woman seated on the floor of her one-room apartment folding laundry. There’s a knock on the door and in the next shot Noriko enters, a sleeping child visible on the floor screen right. She’s here to borrow some sake for her in-laws and it is clear she has been a close neighbour to the mother for some time. We then cut to Noriko in the public corridor and observe the everyday clutter of the block before a close-up of the door of her own apartment from inside as she returns home. None of these details are accidental, even if the flow of information remains somewhat unconventional in narrative terms. Where, for example, are the parents-in-law? With great economy, Ozu prefers to initially establish Noriko as an independent domestic agent marked by both mobility – the toing and froing between the rooms – and an empathetic conception of female space shared by two women of the same age. It’s a pattern reignited right at the end of the film with her conversation with Kyoˉko in Onomichi and her eventual return by train to the world we’ve just seen pictured in these opening shots. Importantly, too, Noriko is only able to host Shuˉkichi and Tomi because, like Kyoˉko, she is not a parent herself. Her presence is thus, in part, based around an absence and it is this sense of presence

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in absence that now forms the most significant spatial and affective resonance of the sequence as it progresses. The film’s orchestration of the unfolding conversation brings the past of Onomichi into the present of Tokyo and at the same time charts a new means of understanding each protagonist’s relationship with the future to come. At the heart of these tensions lies the intimate personal legacy of the Pacific War and the failure of Shuˉkichi and Tomi’s son, and Noriko’s husband, Shoˉji, to return from military conflict in China. Noriko is a single woman in the city confronted, like many women of her generation in Japan, with a significant double absence: a husband and the children that were never born. It is this perception that allows her to facilitate her empathetic relationship with her in-laws, for all parties share the same awareness of loss, even if one is tempered more by a sense of what has been (the parents), and the other more by what will now never be (the daughter-in-law). All this is enacted in the subsequent set of shots that bring the three into a new configuration that includes Shoˉji as a central point of reference in the form of both a photograph and the spoken word. We see Noriko enter her room and Ozu cuts to a medium two-shot of Shuˉkichi and Tomi gazing at a photograph of their son in the centre of the image. The pair turn immediately in unison and meet Noriko’s gaze off screen. A conversation develops about how the photograph was taken in Kamakura the year before Shoˉji was conscripted, thus revealing that the younger married couple had been living in the capital for some time before his death. The rapid pace of the editing reiterates the spatial and emotional forcefield existing between the three. This is one of the most dynamically staged and intensely felt compositional arrangements in the film, since it preserves so many different feelings, all belonging to a specific location and time. These include Onomichi (the place Shoˉji grew up and from where Shuˉkichi and Tomi have just arrived), Kamakura (the time before the realities of war) and, of course, Tokyo itself where Shoˉji’s parents can now only find him in the form of a distant

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The spatial, temporal and emotional forcefield of Noriko’s apartment

recollection. And so, we arrive at the final of the various Tokyos that Shuˉkichi and Tomi have come to visit: the city their dead son once inhabited and shared with his wife. But Noriko’s small apartment is more than just a space of memorialisation and stasis. It is, in fact, entirely possible to imagine she has put the photograph out especially for her parents-in-law to gaze at. As she pops out again to borrow a flask for Shuˉkichi’s sake from next door, we notice a box of American laundry detergent, Rinso, by the door. Shuˉkichi’s traditional habit of drinking with his male friends, something lamented by both Shige and Tomi, thus

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coincides with Noriko’s recent taste for consumer convenience. Seen in this light, the emphasis on Noriko’s mobility in the danchi becomes not just an aspect of her position as an independent woman, but also a feature of her unique ability to encapsulate both the realities of the past and present within the same presence of movement.62 By way of extension, the modern apartment complex itself is the place that most genuinely represents the old neighbourly community from some of Ozu’s earlier Tokyo-based work;63 perhaps, in this case, because it is so obviously segregated from Noriko’s main source of income, the contemporary office.64 The parents’ visit to Noriko’s apartment offers a profoundly pliable and democratic form of cinematic looking at the human figure. By the time Noriko returns to the room, Shuˉkichi and Tomi are now seated at the chabudai (small floor table), where they will remain for the rest of the sequence. Ozu immediately re-establishes the compositional triangulation between the three characters set up in the previous exchange of gazes when Noriko interrupts the couple looking at the photograph. In conjunction with his habitual rotation of the camera position in such seated conversations, he intercuts between the figures using a combination of one- and three-shots. This is a method that refuses to privilege any one aspect of a character’s subjectivity over the other. Instead, the further unravelling of the conversation allows us to sympathetically observe the interaction between Shuˉkichi, Tomi and Noriko by recognising that each may have their own well of independent feeling and recollection as they carefully adjust the rhythm of their words to one another’s. In his eloquent discussion of Hasumi Shigehiko’s writing on Ozu, Aaron Gerow makes the point that Hasumi observed how Ozu’s intent lay not in formal experimentation for its own sake, but rather in the self-conscious foregrounding of the cinematic problem of how people really look at and speak with each other given the obviously artificial restrictions of the flattened image of the film frame. ‘Far from denying the emotional power of Ozu,’ Gerow writes, ‘Hasumi focusses on an experience that is somatic and emotional, one that ultimately comes

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not from narrative, character psychology, or even formal strategies, but from the unique cinematic manipulation of these themes.’65 This scene, in which we learn so much about the family’s past and the sensitivity of each party to the other’s individual memories and losses, offers a pre-eminent instance of this dynamic melding of form and sentiment when it comes to the articulation of the body on screen. Words begin to fall away when it comes to Noriko’s memory of Shoˉji’s own social drinking and a knock on the door and delivery of food brings a welcome interruption. After a brief and polite expression of good wishes and gratitude, silence descends and the concluding shot of the sequence shows Noriko from the rear facing her parents-in-law as they start eating. It feels, miraculously, as if we are also in the room, just nearby, as the three slowly disappear into their unspoken private thoughts and feelings. Noriko picks up Shige’s fan and begins moving the air as if not just to gently dispel the sound of an off-screen passing train drifting into the room, but also move the charged tempo of the moment back into an awareness of the shared present of the Tokyo evening that we are now quietly witnessing. Atami Back at Shige’s, she and Koˉichi are also fanning themselves, with the sounds of a summer matsuri (festival) in progress in the street outside. To avoid the further cost and trouble of entertaining their parents in Tokyo, the children connive to dispatch them to a cheap inn in the popular hot springs resort of Atami. Atami is in many ways the most liminal space of the film. As such, it offers insight into the wider generational transition now underway in Japan after the tragedy of the war years and the compression of the Occupation. The opening shot, for example, presents a group of standing and seated young women in kimono and yukata (cotton bathrobe) gazing out from a concrete flood defence wall over a sunlit coastal landscape. Their shared outlook is both benign and youthful. In a sequence of further intermediary shots, we are taken into the space of the ryokan and finally the couple’s room. Despite spending their entire lives

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overlooking the beautiful archipelago of the Inland Sea, this is the first time that Shuˉkichi and Tomi have ever been away alone. As the pair look out over the peaceful water in the glistening sunshine, they begin to regather and internalise a form of quietude that has so far eluded them during their recent journey. Atami is not just a specific location existing somewhere between Tokyo and Onomichi, it also forms an important bridge between old and new Japan. To convey this, the film momentarily takes leave of the parents and includes an interlude showing the busy social interaction of the ryokan’s other mainly younger guests as they drink, carouse and listen to lively contemporary popular music. Before cutting back to a series of low-lit shots of the elderly couple lying awake on their futons, there is a poignant image of their shoes neatly placed in pairs by the door outside their room. It is as if they are simultaneously out of time and out of place amid the shifting sounds, bodies and mores of the younger generation now coming into view. This is a generation that in just a few short years will begin to increasingly transform the texture and concerns of Ozu’s own film-making in such films as Soˉshun/Early Spring (1956) and Higanbana/Equinox Flower (1958). But for now, the emphasis rests on the Hirayamas’ mounting frustration as they begin to furiously fan themselves in the near darkness of their world apart. Atami: the bridge between old and new Japan

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Ozu was always aware of the need to balance intergenerational empathy with social observation, and mild behavioural humour with finely tuned pathos. This, after all, was part of the profitable formula of the Shoˉchiku house style and a very important reason for Tokyo Story’s immediate commercial and critical success. But the film does perhaps mark the high benchmark of this kind of film-making in the director’s career, and the concluding elements of the Atami sequence offer further evidence of this. Ozu, for instance, intersperses the fluttering motion of the gossiping maids in the ryokan the next morning with carefully staged shots of the elderly couple seated on the coastal wall seen earlier. The first of these offers a side view of the pair in a high-angle long shot, their bodies pictured against the reflection of the sun on the expanse of water rather than the social detail of the world behind them. They are now suspended temporarily between these two elements, the diminished scale of their bodies an emblem of their mounting isolation within both their children’s lives and the narrative space of the film. The conversation that ensues marks a key turning point as they agree they have seen all they need and resolve gently to return to Onomichi. ‘This place is for the younger generation,’ Shuˉkichi offers. The momentary conjugation of youthful, lightly sexualised banter on the part of the staff and poignant sentiment on the part of the parents is as tonally precarious as the actual diegetic predicament of the characters. In a few short years, the types of younger faces featured here will be watching a different kind of cinema in different kinds of surroundings. The highgrowth era of the postwar Japanese economy will have taken off and the older audience marked by Shuˉkichi and Tomi’s own age group will have gradually passed away. All this is reinforced in the transition back to Tokyo from Atami. We see Tomi stumble momentarily as she stands up to join her husband, thus providing an initial premonition of events that will frame the second part of the film. We then cut from a final view of the coastline from the parents’ guest room to the belching smokestacks of the Tokyo factory near to Shige’s home and business. Inside the salon,

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The wrong film at the wrong moment

Shige is advising a customer about getting a fashionable side wave in her hair and another asks Kiyo for a magazine and matches to light a cigarette. Within the course of everyday conversation in the salon, an emerging female-centric modernity is being practised that is just as vital as the disrespectful wit of the women seen previously in the inn. When the parents unexpectedly return early, it almost seems as if they are walking into the wrong film as well as the wrong moment, a point finely underscored as Shuˉkichi pauses in front of the young protagonists of the various glossy titles featured in the film posters on the wall next to him.66 Back to the apartment The next day, Shuˉkichi and Tomi wander the neighbourhood around Ueno in Tokyo before going their separate ways, with Shuˉkichi visiting Hattori Osamu (Toake Hisao), his old friend from Onomichi, and Tomi returning to Noriko’s apartment. They briefly move towards a wall above a railway line and, in an echo of the department store scene, gaze out at the urban landscape beyond. This time, the city is almost completely obscured from our field of vision. ‘Isn’t Tokyo vast?’ Shuˉkichi says. Agreeing, Tomi replies, ‘If we were to get lost, we might never find each other again.’ A train passes below and in one of the film’s rare tracking shots, we follow

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‘Isn’t Tokyo vast?’

the couple as they now walk in silence tracing the city spread out in front of their eyes. The remaining elements of the Tokyo visit mainly segregate the pair and thereby inflect their city experience in terms of maleor female-only spaces. Shuˉkichi and Hattori meet up with another Onomichi companion, the former police chief, Numata Sanpei (Toˉno Eijiroˉ). Their extended drinking excursion provides a chance to air their sadness about the losses of the war and the disappointing outcomes of their children. Seated in a line facing the bar hostess, the three avoid much eye contact as their feelings peel away into an alcohol-fuelled stupor; evidence, as Robin Wood subtly puts it, that ‘Tokyo mores and Onomichi mores are not totally discrete.’67 There is a cutaway shot to the empty public corridor outside Noriko’s room and the sound of a bell pealing in the summer night. We then turn to the most intimate shot of the entire film and watch Tomi kneeling with her back to Noriko receiving a soothing neck and shoulder massage from her daughter-in-law. We’ve got used to seeing Tomi walking a few steps behind her husband when outside, or seated by his side when indoors, so this is the first and only extended view of the profound impact of shared human touch. The pair talk briefly about Tomi’s tiring day, but what is really being released in this exchange of contact and feeling is an opportunity to talk freely

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The intensification of the bond between Noriko and Tomi

about the need to incorporate the past into both the present and the future of their lives. It’s a moment that intensifies the connection between the two women, but it also holds the essence of the greatness of Tokyo Story as a film that has now itself passed down the generations: the absolute importance of recognising, enabling, and then finally accepting, the inevitable passage of the flow of time. The conversation is not, however, measured out in completely equal terms despite the careful intercutting between the pair and the increasing degree of proximity to the other provided by the framing. While Tomi unburdens herself in front of Noriko, especially about her and Shuˉkichi’s concern for Noriko’s solitude as a widow, Noriko remains attentive but withheld. She responds reassuringly to Tomi’s words but does not open herself to scrutiny. Atsuta’s lighting set-up nonetheless offers the viewer considerable opportunity to notice Hara’s screen performance and examine the nature of Noriko’s decision to remain alone in Tokyo as an independent woman. Her face is sharply lit, in part thanks to her proximity to the dangling ceiling light in the centre of the room, and Ozu’s camera positioning further facilitates a closer bond between Noriko and the spectator. The sequence is as much about her reticence (or privacy) as it is about her mother-in-law’s direct expression of emotion, for the very reason that she has moved on further from her husband’s death than

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Tomi realises. Her lack of clarification is thus an act of kindness and solicitude rather than repression. As Wood suggests, we are made to feel that Noriko ‘is in full possession of an awareness that the older woman can barely imagine and would never dare permit herself’.68 This remains an important moment of transition in the film as Noriko’s subsequent dimming of the light makes clear after the women bid each other goodnight. Tomi lies down at the point that darkness falls, suggesting the character’s impending death and therefore what Woojeong Joo calls the ‘last farewell’69 to her mother-in-law. Tomi is sinking, too, into a version of her past as she momentarily occupies the position of her lost son lying next to his former wife. The final shot of the sequence is a close-up of Noriko lying in the darkness, a light from somewhere falling on her face and illuminating her private tears. What they contain lies at the very heart of the tactile melodrama of suppression and expression we have just witnessed. Two railway stations Tokyo Story is a film populated, like so much of Ozu’s work, by passing trains seen on and heard off the screen. We now cut to the first of two railway stations marking the beginning of the parents’ reverse journey from the capital to their hometown. The two sequences, one set in Tokyo and the other in Osaka, unravel in contrast to each other in terms of their distinctive temporalities. A close-up of the Tokyo station departures board announces the 21.00 express train to Hiroshima in western Japan.70 This image grounds the sequence in both the immediacy of the actual present and the time to come of the anticipated near future. From here on in, there is now the pressure of impending dissolution as all parties in the lounge know that the moment of goodbye has arrived and the worlds of Onomichi and Tokyo must therefore go their separate ways. But Ozu resists picturing the Hirayama family immediately. Instead, he continues with a further set of establishing shots that reveal the wider social world into which the film’s characters have suddenly

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Tokyo station

been transported. This is the only section of Tokyo Story that depicts all its protagonists in a real-life location within the capital, and it is one bustling with fellow passengers all set to make real-life journeys across the nation. Tokyo station is thus a space that holds both the intensification of the film’s dramatic narrative – this is the last time that any of the children will properly see their mother – and the broader dispersal of the film’s setting to include not just the capital, but Japan as a whole. Despite his predilection for the studio-based recreation of much city space in his films, Ozu always preferred to shoot on location when it came to the depiction of railway platforms, departure lounges, ticket offices and train carriages. This attention to documentation and verisimilitude facilitated the incorporation of his otherwise heavily stylised dramatic realism within a wider spatial system in ways that always had significant repercussions for his rendering of place. Here, the effects are twofold. Firstly, Ozu generates a sense of integration, in that the Hirayamas are now immediately being typified as just one ordinary family in a larger network of such gatherings and departures taking place around them. Secondly, the sense of movement and transition signalled here is being granted a greater degree of gravity and immediacy because it exists within a sense of the unfolding documentary real. In a departure,

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for example, from his regular compositional method of a heavily patterned mise en scène, we see shots in which the blurred edges of other non-actorly bodies interrupt the framing of the scripted conversation. Ozu has indeed saved the most vibrant image of Tokyo in Tokyo Story until the very end. While the dialogue between the family members informs us of the various timings and locations of the impending train journey, we see none of this in the sequence that subsequently takes place in Japan’s second city, Osaka. When it comes to the account that Keizoˉ gives to a colleague of his mother’s health difficulties the night before, Ozu prefers instead to reflect on the time that has been, rather than the time about to happen. It might initially seem strange to elide this dramatic event, especially given the fact that it is another indication that Tomi is now quite ill, but it makes sense in terms of the broader structure of the film. The fact that we never see Keizoˉ’s interaction with his parents provides a parallel form of absence to that of his dead brother, Shoˉji. It also serves as a harbinger of the character’s general lack of engagement. Despite his smiling aphorism that you cannot serve your parents beyond their graves, this is clearly something Keizoˉ shows no sign of making provision for. What matters is how Osaka itself becomes an intermediary site between Tokyo and Onomichi. As such, the city provides the spatial reiteration of Tokyo Story’s overall method of signalling the integration of the past within the ongoing moment of the present. To this extent, Ozu’s location shot compositions thus include both the electrified modernity of the city’s railway system and the older wooden homes of its riverside working-class districts. In the final image of the sequence, we see the towering edifice of the old castle pictured on the right of the skyline alongside an industrial chimney stack to the left – the old and the new once again coexisting within the same frame of the film.

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4 Onomichi If the story of Tokyo in Tokyo Story is marked by dispersal and wandering, the period spent in Onomichi is one of distillation as many of the elements previously witnessed in the film are now intensified and rendered more poignant by the circumstances of Tomi’s sudden illness and death. Most of this section takes place within the Hirayama home, the heart of the family’s extended network, but we are also introduced to the wider terrain of the town through various bridging shots and sequences that reveal more of the coastal landscape, the area by the port, and the grounds and interiors of the nearby Joˉdo-ji temple. While much of the action and conversation takes place inside, there is also an effervescent landscape of sound that interconnects domestic space with the natural and the modern world outside. The summertime sound of semi (cicadas), the chugging of the tugboats on the water and the whistle of a passing train all serve either to amplify or temper the emotional resonance of each moment. The spatial terrain of Onomichi may be one of consolidation, but Ozu’s temporal structure is more dynamic and fluid. The cinematic rendering of the time spent there is distinguished by elements of contraction, stillness, expansion and remembrance, along with the final uncovering of a new future emerging out of the present. During the final hours of Tomi’s life, it even seems the breath of the film itself is slowing as the duration of each shot lengthens, the framing tightens and the lighting darkens. The nocturnal silence is only broken by the sound of a fluttering moth drawn to a ceiling light. The moment that Shuˉkichi recognises he is now inhabiting the final hours of life with Tomi, his speech rhythm slows and a near stillness descends upon his fragile physical frame. We see him positioned in a tighly structured two-shot with Shige by his side

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weeping into her handkerchief. Gazing absently down at the floor, he sighs deeply at the realisation the time left is now so condensed that Keizoˉ will not make it back to see his mother alive. He rises and departs screen right, his features from the shoulders upwards remaining cropped because of Ozu’s habitual low and static camera position. Shuˉkichi re-enters the next shot from the same direction and joins the family grouped around the figure of Tomi lying on the floor. He slowly descends to the ground, able at last to rest and begin the wait. The final medium close-up of his now unmoving features, bar the gentle blinking of his eyes and the slow tightening of his neck muscles, is one of the most affecting images of the film. Ozu does not show Tomi’s actual death, which we later learn takes place in the early hours of the morning. Instead, he evokes the arrival of a new day with a succession of empty shots showing the Onomichi fish market and other waterside buildings. The distant boats on the sea register the everyday routine of the town, their gentle movement implicitly suggesting the inevitable passage of time. The final shot in this intermediary sequence is of the previously seen view down below to the railway line near the coast. We are, in other words, returning to Tokyo Story’s unforced noticing of the unfolding present. What follows initially is a further brief reordering of the film’s temporal elements as Ozu depicts a sense of both the time after The family mourning

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the death, with shots of the mourning family gathered in the room, and the time that has now been permanently missed. This occurs when Keizoˉ eventually turns up and reveals he could have made it to his mother’s side had he taken an earlier train from Kagoshima. At this point, the relatives suddenly notice the absence of Shuˉkichi, and Noriko leaves the room, with Kyoˉko immediately coming in and taking her place. This momentary exchange between the pair marks a further progression in the film’s alignment of the two women, something already signalled by Kyoˉko’s recent repetition in Onomichi of Noriko’s earlier gesture of retrieving Tomi’s forgotten umbrella in Tokyo. The full consequences of this connection will soon emerge. The next three shots encapsulate the heart of the Onomichi section and, in many ways, suggest a condensation of the film’s expressive method. Noriko finds Shuˉkichi outside in the grounds of the temple near his house. His decision to relinquish the emotional congestion of the place of Tomi’s passing is marked by a noticeable shift in visual style. This initially represents a sense of momentary stillness and then a decision to resume connection with the flow of ordinary life. In each shot, Ozu marries sound with picture in a deeply resonant way. It is not surprising that these images, or alternative versions of them not included in the final cut, featured so extensively in the original publicity materials for Tokyo Story. They also, of course, inform the cover design for this book. We see Noriko enter the mainly empty space of the first shot from screen left. She then moves forward to join Shuˉkichi in the distance as he gazes out across the town towards the sea. As the rhythm of her steps hastens, the monophonic putting of the tugboats is briefly amplified as if not only to bring the world of the present into sharper focus, but also densen her affective relationship with her father-in-law. Noriko’s footsteps come to a standstill when she reaches Shuˉkichi and this is followed by a cut to a closer two-shot of Noriko announcing Keizoˉ’s arrival. Shuˉkichi hardly listens. He is absorbed in a different, more observant, noticing of the time and space he occupies and comments on the beautiful quality of the dawn he has just witnessed. The two

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Noriko finds Shuˉkichi in the temple grounds

Shared silence

Time picks up again

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look out together at the world of Onomichi in shared silence, feeling the full pressure of the moment and all that it holds. After a pause, Shuˉkichi turns and remarks that it is going to be another hot day. This is the crucial moment in the film that time begins to pick up again and even gather apace as Shuˉkichi starts to walk back towards his family and the direction of his future life. There are no tugboats, just the purposeful sound of his geta (wooden sandals) on the ground beneath his feet. Tomi’s funeral represents a significant release for the film’s protagonists, with the occasion also providing the only chance to observe other multi-generational members of the Onomichi community. Judging by their faces, most appear not to be professional actors, but actual residents of the town. In this sense, the scene forms a suggestive parallel to the one in Tokyo station when the documentary real of contemporary Japan also bled into the narrative frame of the film. Each established fictional character in the drama is, however, allocated a close-up that expresses their private grief. Keizoˉ rises and momentarily leaves the assembly, unable to bear the relentless repetition of the drumming and chanting inside the temple. ‘It feels my mother is becoming smaller, bit by bit,’ he tells Noriko as she comes to his side. In Keizoˉ’s voiced recognition of disappearance comes an awareness of how loss is now inevitably being woven into the slow progression of ordinary time. Seen in this light, we might say that Tomi’s funeral is the most non-judgemental and compassionate section of the film. Having briefly evoked the social geography of present-day Onomichi, Ozu turns to the healing moment of remembrance that takes place as the children reminisce about the time they have shared as a family. This is not the first occasion that Tokyo Story has looked back to the past of Onomichi in this way. During Shuˉkichi’s visit to Hattori in Tokyo, for example, his hosts recall their personal memories of the town before the war and express gratitude it was not bombed. Hattori and his wife talk affectionately about their fondness for the view from Senkoˉ-ji temple and imagine that the area Shuˉkichi

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still lives in remains blessedly unchanged (a perspective that the film also validates). At this point, the echo of these words becomes part of the intensification of the film’s temporal vocabulary as it now continues to bring the past seamlessly into the present. Koˉichi, for instance, recalls the summertime firework displays the family watched from the room at the time of the town matsuri. Shige also ˉ mishima, an island near to Onomichi. mentions a springtime visit to O They remember this was the time that Tomi became seasick. Shige then turns to her father and wishes him a long life. With a deep sigh, Shuˉkichi thanks her, gets up and exits the room, thus leaving the remaining family members to gather their final thoughts and start anticipating the future in Tokyo that will now be theirs, a future that will likely not involve him. Noriko now takes on the important role of forming a new bridge connecting Tokyo and Onomichi. Her outpouring of emotion when Shuˉkichi reveals that Tomi’s time in the apartment was the highlight of her visit reveals how Noriko’s generous and perceptive discretion has already allowed each party to see and feel what they wanted (and needed) to. The burgeoning friendship between Noriko and Kyoˉko also enables a connection to form between the past and the future, not least because, for very different reasons, the two are now living separately from each other without a husband in their lives. Their final conversation is unspeakably frank. Following the children’s decision to return to Tokyo after their mother’s funeral, Kyoˉko is seen preparing for her working day, her finishing touch being a watch she picks up from the floor just as Noriko enters the room. Noriko then presents Kyoˉko with a wrapped bentoˉ (boxed lunch) and the two meet each other’s gaze on an equal horizontal level in the centre of the frame. As they begin to converse, Noriko smartens Kyoˉko’s dress in a gesture of affinity and care. Noriko knows, more than most, the importance of the presentation of self. She reveals that she too is leaving for Tokyo and the busy everyday modernity that this will entail. As the conversation develops by turning to the subject of Kyoˉko’s unhappiness with the behaviour

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Noriko and Kyoˉko: affinity and care

A sisterly gesture

of her older siblings, Noriko moves closer to her, crouching down, their spatial proximity now matching the intimacy of their communication. Noriko tells Kyoˉko she should understand that older people naturally move away from their parents, and she might end up one day like her older sister, Shige, despite herself. ‘Isn’t life disappointing?’ Kyoˉko asks. ‘Yes, nothing but disappointment’ comes the devastating reply.71 The two women rise and leave the room together. A shot by the doorway of the genkan re-establishes the same horizontal line marking their new relationship of equals. This time, however, Noriko

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reaches out and clasps Kyoˉko’s hands in a sisterly gesture so far unseen in the film. After Kyoˉko exits screen left, Noriko is briefly seen suspended in the now empty space of the film frame, her body crumpling slightly into a stilled pause as if her previous solitude has now been reawakened after the general bustle of the separation. But this is, in fact, the first of two departures. In the final affecting moments of Tokyo Story, we see Kyoˉko gazing out of her classroom window, her watch visible in the right-hand corner of the image. The film cuts to the object of her gaze: a long-distance view of Onomichi; the port and bay to the rear, and the residents’ homes Two watches

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in the foreground, both intersected by the film’s now familiar train track. A black steam locomotive enters screen right and moves across the frame, the sound of its engine working in rhythm to the sound of absent singing children on the soundtrack. There is a cut to a groundlevel shot of the tracks, the wheels and machinery now overwhelming the acoustics of the song.72 Noriko, alone again, is pictured seated centre frame in a carriage taking her away from the past of Onomichi and back towards the urban present of Tokyo and an unknown future of ‘waiting’, as she has just put it to Shuˉkichi. She looks down, opens her handbag and brings out Tomi’s watch that her fatherin-law has just presented to her. As she clasps it, she immediately activates all the temporal layers that this moment signifies for her and Kyoˉko, a figure whose own knowledge of when to look for Noriko’s train passing is determined by the timepiece that she too holds. In the extraordinary calibration of these final shots, Tokyo Story thus ends on a moment of profound reconciliation between three different generations of women. It is a gesture that incorporates the dynamic, unfinished, time and space now opening up between the worlds of Onomichi and Tokyo, thereby making it impossible to determine which location really marks the beginning or the end.

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5 Tokyo Story in Japan A film of the Japanese summer, Tokyo Story opened in the late autumn on 3 November 1953 and immediately performed well in many of the key commercial districts of the capital in which it was set.73 In Shoˉchiku’s central Shinjuku cinema, for example, it achieved 32,149 ticket receipts, a figure only exceeded by Daiei’s spectacular colour jidai-geki (historical drama), Jigokumon/Gate of Hell, directed by Kinugasa Teinosuke and released just a few days previously.74 This remained a pattern that was replicated in other areas of the city such as Asakusa, but in the Ginza it became the top-performing film of the first week of its release.75 The difference in character between the two districts suggests an interesting class dimension to Ozu’s core audience of the time, given the more metropolitan middle-class milieu of the latter and popular working-class setting of the former. Overall, Tokyo Story eventually became the studio’s fourth most lucrative film ˉ ba that year, with the phenomenal success of the first segment of O Hideo’s three-part romantic melodrama, Kimi no na wa/What Is Your Name?, leading the field.76 The film came eighth in the year’s total domestic box office with profits of 131.65 million Japanese yen.77 Tokyo Story was publicised widely in all aspects of Japan’s commercial print media, with sketches and photographs of key images from the film featuring in various articles and interviews. Press coverage was by no means restricted to the cultural pages of the popular and highbrow press. An article published in Shufu to seikatsu (Housewife’s Life), for example, discussed the role the film might serve in terms of educating children about their responsibilities towards their parents.78 In addition to photographs taken on location conveying the main intergenerational themes of the film’s narrative, Shoˉchiku also produced its now familiar kinen shashin (memorial photograph) of the Tokyo Story cast on set seated, smiling directly

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Shufu to seikatsu vol. 8, no. 12 (1953)

at the camera as if to convey the mutual synergy existing between the family of the studio, the family of the film and the wider national family of the film’s principal intended audience.79 These aspects predominated in the domestic reception of Tokyo Story, with writers choosing either to situate the film in relation to the wider trajectory of Ozu’s career or the film’s specific representation of the postwar Japanese family. Writing in Eiga no tomo, for example, ˉ guro Toyoshi noted that since 1949, Ozu had joined the first O rank of Japanese film directors capable of marrying critical success with high yields at the box office. In Tokyo Story, this was not just down to the attractive star power of its leading female actors, but the clarity of the film’s ‘comprehensible mise-en-scène’.80 Earlier on in a set report from the film’s shoot, the same critic had praised ‘the sophisticated elegance’81 of the directorial style. Several writers later commented on the remarkable ‘image quality’ of Atsuta’s camerawork.82 Many critics in established cinephile publications such as Kinema junpoˉ and Eiga hyoˉron also discussed the maturing

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of Ozu’s aesthetics to the extent that from both a compositional and tonal point of view, the film even showed evidence of an ‘older man’s style’.83 Writing in Eiga hyoˉron, for example, Kanda Teizoˉ reflected on how Ozu’s films were becoming increasingly stylised,84 while the evening edition of the Mainichi shimbun also noted Ozu’s ‘usual slow rhythm’,85 concluding that while younger audiences might still prefer Late Spring, its ‘appropriate balance of pathos and humour … will [nonetheless] appeal more to an older audience’.86 It is certainly true that by 1953, Ozu was viewed as a bankable and increasingly venerable figure in the pantheon of contemporary Japanese film directors and there was therefore considerable discussion in the press about the ways in which Tokyo Story related to both his recent and prewar work. Much of this coalesced around questions of class and generational change. Togawa Naoki’s review, published in Kinema junpoˉ, is instructive. Togawa initially sought to position Tokyo Story in relation to earlier films such as The Only Son and Shukujo wa nani o wasureta ka/What Did the Lady Forget? (1937), pointing out that the director’s work at this juncture marked an important distinction between ‘gazing at the pathos of the petit bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and viewing the lifestyle of the leisured middle class on the other’.87 In Togawa’s view, Ozu’s ‘tendency of expressing the emotions of the middle class … through his dextrous [film-making] method’88 continued to evolve and resurface in major postwar films such as Late Spring, Early Summer and Tokyo Story, even though Tomi and Shuˉkichi themselves occupied a lower class standing in Tokyo Story than the families of the two other titles. What also distinguished Tokyo Story from the likes of The Only Son was a thematic shift from the abstract ‘tragic destiny’89 of life to a more considered reflection of the constraining nature of the present day and the way parents and their children were now forced to interact with each other. Indeed, it is fascinating how many critics empathised with characters in the film such as Shige by arguing that Ozu’s method did not appear to offer any form of direct social criticism. Togawa’s view was typical in suggesting that ‘the eldest son and daughter do not have

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any malicious feelings; rather they cannot offer proper hospitality to their parents as they are preoccupied with worrying about managing their lives’.90 Implicit in some of this commentary was also an important sense of loss. The review published in Sangyoˉ to keizai (Industry and Economy) noted, for example, that ‘while I am still moved by Ozu’s deliberate realism, and emotional atmosphere, I also can’t help feeling a huge gulf from my feelings towards his prewar work’.91 In this sense, the perceived stasis of the mise en scène, or what Tsumura Hideo termed ‘the unreal static atmosphere of Tokyo’ and the ‘old-fashioned Japanese beauty’ of the film, carried with it a doubleedged sword: it was cited, on the one hand, as the culmination of a significant directorial career and, on the other, as an indication that in its very subject matter of generational transition it was also drawing attention to emerging social currents that might require another type of film-making. It is therefore not surprising that another strand to the film’s critical reception focused not just on the star power of its leading actors, but the various questions of behavioural integrity that their performances articulated. Numerous reviews commented, for instance, on the decision to pair Hara Setsuko with Kagawa Kyoˉko in the film’s closing scenes,92 especially in the context of the connection between the two female characters not being determined by the question of blood relations. As Tsumura Hideo noted, Noriko’s counsel to Kyoˉko that once children leave their parents and start their own families ‘they begin to prioritise managing their own lives first and a growing distance from their parents [therefore] cannot be helped’ is especially tender because it is offered to a younger single woman from the vantage point of someone unencumbered by filial responsibility. Indeed, Sugiyama Heiichi went on to suggest in Eiga hyoˉron that ‘the theme of the indifference of blood relations and the kindness of obligation’ was perhaps ‘the most interesting part’ of the film.93 Seen in this way, Hara Setsuko’s performance as Noriko achieves a particular resonance that dispenses with one idea of duty

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Eiga fan vol. 13, no. 11 (1953)

and replaces it with another. Noriko does not act in the way she does because of what an older generation might expect of her as the widowed daughter of the visiting parents, but rather because of the certain pressure Noriko herself feels when the parents-in-law express gratitude for her initial kindness. As Sugiyama puts it, ‘treating the parents kindly is not the same as still romantically longing for their son’.94 Looked at in this way, Noriko’s exchange with Kyoˉko is about more than just a plea to recognise the circumstances of such family members as Shige. It also contains the suggestion that as an unencumbered member of the younger generation, one now most closely aligned to Noriko in terms of empathy and sentiment, Kyoˉko has the choice to behave differently than her older sister in more ways than one. On 19 December 1953, Shoˉchiku were given a prestigious Geijutsusai-shoˉ (Japanese government arts award) for Tokyo Story.

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On the same day, the studio received an Adolph Zukor award from the Tokyo branch of Paramount Studios.95 Sugimura Haruko also won the Best Supporting Actress prize at the 1953 Mainichi eiga konkuˉru (Mainichi Film Awards) for her roles in both Tokyo Story and Nigorie/An Inlet of Muddy Water (Imai Tadashi, 1953). These tributes helped consolidate Ozu’s position as an elder statesman of Japanese visual culture. The following spring, for example, he appeared in a prominent roundtable discussion of Japanese customs and fashions.96 Since his death in 1963, and especially since the increasingly prominent role that Tokyo Story has now assumed in terms of confirming his reputation in Japanese film history, Ozu’s voice has remained visible within Japanese film culture in the form of both an ever-growing slew of publications and DVD releases and an evolving commemorative presence. In 1995, Shoˉchiku briefly opened a memorial theme park, Kamakura Cinema World, in the grounds of its old studio complex at ˉ funa. The attraction included O a waxwork effigy of Ozu directing Ryuˉ Chishuˉ in the final scene of Tokyo Story. In his account of a visit that autumn, David Bordwell recalls the pleasure of seeing the director’s ‘pipes and sake bottles carefully arrayed on his work table’ and the unfortunate disappointment that the ‘effigy didn’t even look much like him’.97 The venue closed three years later. The centenary of Ozu’s birth in 2003 was marked by the Poster for the ‘Iconography of Yasujiroˉ printing of an anniversary Ozu’ exhibition at the National Film Centre

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stamp in Mie prefecture by Japan Post as part of its furosato (hometown) stamp series. Ten years later, an important exhibition took place in Tokyo that repositioned Ozu in relation to the vibrant graphic design culture and sensibility of the early years of his life, in which he found his metier as a calligrapher, designer, colourist and devotee of the forms of everyday material culture that populate his films. It underscored the director’s aphoristic metropolitan sensibility, something much commented on by his contemporaries, and presented a new way of thinking about the maturation of his individual understanding of spatial aesthetics. Today, the town of Matsusaka hosts a tourist information website that provides a detailed map and photographic guide to the remaining sites relevant to an understanding of the director’s upbringing.98 The Ozu Yasujiroˉ Memorial Museum in Matsusaka holds various significant artefacts, and one of the charming painted film images above its external doors features Tomi and Shuˉkichi sitting on the wall at Atami. A further display exists at the Kamakura Museum of Literature, featuring such important treasures as Atsuta’s kani (crab) and one of Ozu’s fabled white taupe hats. Tokyo Story is now considered to be one of the greatest Japanese films of all time and regularly comes top of various critics’ polls, including the most venerable of all published by Kinema junpoˉ.99 As such, it also continues to form a point of reference for other films, including several directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu such as Dare mo shiranai/Nobody Knows (2004) and Aruitemo aruitemo/ Still Walking (2008). As Alexander Jacoby neatly puts it in relation to Nobody Knows, if Tokyo Story ‘is about parents neglected by their children, Kore-eda’s is about children neglected by their parents’.100 Still Walking, meanwhile, offers a condensed portrait of intergenerational relationships within a single middle-class family and incorporates, or updates, several features of Ozu’s film, such as the provincial coastal setting, the figure of the missing son and an emphasis on the affective cost of the passing of time on those destined to outlive their parents. Its singular difference rests in the fact that

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the principal narrative journey is made in reverse, with the children making the visit to the family home.101 At the start of 2011, Ozu’s fellow Shoˉchiku director Yamada Yoˉji announced that he was going to film a remake of Tokyo Story to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of his career as a director in the Japanese film industry. Shooting was delayed because of the Toˉhoku earthquake and tsunami the same year and the film eventually premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in conjunction with a new restoration of the original title in 2013.102 On the surface, Toˉkyoˉ kazoku/Tokyo Family merely seems to offer a modern updating of the warm-hearted social realism that Shoˉchiku remains renowned for, except for minor points of difference such as Yokohama replacing Atami and Shoˉji now cast as a happy-go-lucky freelance stagehand. While the film may certainly lack the structural and compositional rigour of Ozu’s template, there are numerous forms of homage to the original, especially regarding various framing decisions and lines of dialogue. But the film is even more interesting in terms of how it repositions intergenerational relations and the material reality of everyday life in ways that specifically evoke the outcome of the Japanese modernity only just beginning to emerge at the time of Tokyo Story. To put it another way, the children of Ozu’s film have now become the grandparents in Yamada’s. We learn, for example, that Shoˉji (Tsumabuki Satoshi) and his girlfriend Noriko (Aoi Yuˉ) both met while volunteering after the nuclear reactor disaster at Fukushima and that the peaceful furosato of the Hirayama ˉ sakikami-jima, is now suffering from family on the Inland Sea, O devastating rural depopulation. One hears trains in the background, but also modern emergency vehicles and various digital devices. The only view offered from the hotel that the uncomplaining parents are dispatched to is of an eerily illuminated Ferris wheel and an endless horizon of featureless architecture stretching out into the distance of the urban night.103

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6 Tokyo Story in the World Tokyo Story’s current reputation as a film classic is such that several of its most affecting images now not only represent the aesthetic achievement of Ozu’s film, but also its capacity to serve as an enduring synecdoche for a certain kind of international postwar humanism. The widely circulated shot of Tomi and Shuˉkichi on the sea wall at Atami, for example, not only expresses a crucial moment in the film, it also exemplifies the sort of imaginative empathy for the human condition then in favour in liberal film circles. This was certainly part of the general cultural currency when, for the very first time, Japanese cinema began to circulate widely in the West within the new dispensation of international film festivals, specially created

An imaginative empathy for the human condition (© 1953 Shoˉchiku Co., Ltd)

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film awards and regionally themed film weeks primarily established in the 1950s. The film was initially screened in Los Angeles between March and April 1956, under the title Their First Trip to Tokyo, as part of a small package of five recent Japanese films curated by Harold Leonard.104 Leonard had taken advice from Donald Richie about the choice of titles and Richie went on to serve as one of the most persuasive agents in the advancement of Tokyo Story’s reputation in other English-speaking territories. The film was also shown at the Cork International Film Festival in May 1957.105 According to the well-connected cultural ambassador for Japanese cinema, Kawakita Kashiko, or ‘Madame Kawakita’ as she was known within the international film community, Gavin Lambert, then editor of Sight & Sound, saw the film at UCLA and advocated for its inclusion in the groundbreaking retrospective of Japanese cinema held at the National Film Theatre (NFT) in London between 28 October 1957 and 19 January 1958.106 Programmed by Derek Prouse, ‘A Light in the Japanese Window’ introduced London critics and audiences to numerous key Japanese directors, genres and film titles that, with the usual caveats, still form part of the dominant Western canon of Japanese cinema. In the view of the British Film Institute’s John Gillett, the programme researcher and advisor who would also go on to co-edit an important early anthology of Ozu criticism,107 the inclusion of Tokyo Story was not a foregone conclusion. At a preparatory viewing session at the French Institute held that May, also attended by various film society secretaries, he noted a factional divide between those who considered it to be ‘a film to make one reconsider all pre-conceived attitudes towards the cinema’ and those who thought, inexplicably, that Tokyo Story was ‘simply not cinema’.108 The NFT season came immediately on the heels of the inaugural London Film Festival (16–27 October 1957) and at the second edition of the LFF the following year, partly thanks to Gillett’s continuing personal support, Tokyo Story was awarded the first Sutherland Award for ‘the maker of the most original first

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or second feature introduced at the National Film Theatre the previous year’.109 It was another five years before the reputation of Tokyo Story began to develop further, by which time Ozu was in the final year of his life and Shoˉchiku’s initial reluctance to promote the title had diminished. Why did the film not immediately become a success on the art-house cinema and film society circuit after winning the Sutherland Trophy? Many scholars have conventionally attributed this to Kido Shiroˉ, who, in his influential role as Shoˉchiku’s Head of Production, held the widely reported view that the general flavour of Ozu’s work was ‘too Japanese’ for overseas taste, especially in its attention to the drama of everyday domestic life.110 But there were perhaps two further important intersecting reasons. By 1958, Ozu’s own reputation in Japan was beginning to ossify, with the director increasingly being seen as old-fashioned in the context of a rising generation of young studio film-makers such as Imamura Shoˉhei and Masumura Yasuzoˉ, who were beginning to make their first features. The following year also marked the emergence of the French nouvelle vague, which immediately set the tone around the world, including Japan, for new forms of cinematic representation of the body, urban space, youth and sexuality that would make the world of Tokyo Story and its emphasis on parental disappointment seem demonstrably out of kilter with the times.111 The very first international retrospective of Ozu’s films, organised by Donald Richie, was held at the Berlinale in June 1963. This subsequently toured to several European capitals and was also shown at MOMA in New York the following year. Tokyo Story, along with ten other Ozu films, was screened at an important survey of Japanese cinema held at the Cinémathèque française in Paris between June and September 1963. The film was eventually released in the US in 1972 in conjunction with a further Ozu retrospective at the Japan Society in New York. In January and August 1976, the NFT also presented a major two-part survey of the director’s extant filmography titled simply ‘Early and Late Ozu’.

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Initial Western criticism of Tokyo Story married artistic value with liberal universalism – the unspoken goal being Japan’s incorporation into the humanist mosaic of international film culture. Writing in the New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt articulated this perfectly when claiming that ‘Even in subtitling, the lines of the script that he [Ozu] wrote with Kogo Noda have the weight of beautiful, strange coins that one wants to hold in the hand.’112 Richard Schickel, meanwhile, suggested that ‘Ozu’s microcosm may seem impossibly tiny, but it contains, I think, all we know, all we need to know, of the world.’113 In an important early article, revealingly titled ‘Two Inches Off the Ground’, the critic and film-maker Lindsay Anderson drew particular attention to Tokyo Story’s handling of narrative time: The tempo is all the way calm, leisurely, inevitable. … each transition is effected by a cut, to some view of the new setting, a rooftop, a wall, a harbour vista, which then cuts again directly to the scene where the characters are going on with their living. … it is a way of conveying the essential unity of existence, of matter and spirit, which is intrinsic to the film’s philosophy.114

Taking issue with an earlier review by John Gillett, published in Film, Anderson went on to present this philosophy in terms of a deliberate aesthetics of acceptance rather than lament.115 In so doing, he became one of the first of many who would see Ozu’s film-making practice through the ahistorical prism of what he called the ‘anti-conceptual’ and ‘anti-materialist’ tenets of Zen Buddhism.116 The relationship between a transcendental set of universal characteristics and an essentialised cultural specificity – what Donald Richie called ‘the Japanese flavour’117 – implied a clear contradiction. In the case of Paul Schrader’s influential essay in his book Transcendental Style in Film, this was resolved by arguing that while Ozu’s cinema certainly articulated a conflict in everyday life between the traditional and the modern (usually a synonym for ‘Westernisation’), films such as Tokyo Story did not settle on

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‘anything as artificial as plot’, but rather the metaphysical notion of ‘Oneness’ instead.118 In an important article published in Screen just four years later, David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson posited an alternative solution by explicitly positioning Ozu’s work in terms of its apparent modernist innovation and ‘use of specific spatial devices which challenge the supremacy of narrative causality’. A film like Tokyo Story, they argued, worked against the dominant paradigm of classical Hollywood cinema, meaning that ‘space as space is rendered subordinate to space as a site for action’.119 Bordwell later developed these research findings in his monumental monograph on the director, wherein he devised a more flexible working model for thinking through the discoveries of his intricate formal analysis in terms of their broader mediation of Japan’s historical social reality. By now, as Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto has noted, Ozu’s ‘canonical status’ was such that he occupied a ‘central position in the discussion of Japanese cinema’.120 If Tokyo Story spoke initially to the postwar cultural project of global recovery from the trauma of inter-regional conflict – something signalled within the film in both Noriko’s office and the bar conversation between Shuˉkichi and his fellow war veterans – it has, more recently, become incorporated into a wider discourse about world cinema and the place of cinema in the world. As the film has travelled in its various physical and digital incarnations via retrospectives, screenings, classroom curricula, symposia, VHS, DVD and Blu-ray releases, and now worldwide streaming platforms, its popularity has also shifted. Tokyo Story remains a film of its time, but it is also a film out of time, a marker of a certain form of worldly, cinephilic veneration that speaks to a globalised cosmopolitan film culture now proliferating with greater intensity than ever in the age of internet communication. Numerous international film-makers have also sought to harness their aesthetic reputation to the film over the years, including Claire Denis, Joanna Hogg, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Aki Kaurismäki and Abbas Kiarostami, to name but a few.121 The North American director Jim Jarmusch even named one of the racehorses in

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his debut feature film, Stranger Than Paradise (1984), after the title of the film. Perhaps the most sustained intervention of this kind has been the cinematic and photographic work of Wim Wenders, someone whose own preoccupation with place and image comes closest to the concerns of this book. Wenders’ 1985 documentary journey to Japan, Tokyo-Ga, attempts to retrieve images from the films of Ozu Yasujiroˉ in the everyday reality of the capital, but ends in disenchantment as the director discovers Ozu’s Tokyo represents, for him, ‘a view that no longer’ exists. The film begins and ends with the opening and closing sequences of Tokyo Story as if to suggest both the primacy of Ozu’s fictional example, and the inability of the documentary to measure up to this. For Wenders, Ozu represented a way of seeing ‘that could render the world transparent’, whereas in his own touristic wanderings around the noisy pachinko parlours of Shinjuku and energetic rockabilly dance scene of Harajuku, he discovers a world of overwhelming image saturation, distraction and pastiche. In two important segments of the film, Wenders speculates on this culture via elements of the modernity already coming into view towards the end of Ozu’s career. Flicking through the television channels in his hotel room, for example, he finds footage of a John Wayne Western that ends with a cutaway to the ‘red ball’ of the Japanese flag. In a gesture of cinephilic lament for the passing of both Japanese and American classical cinema, Wenders mourns the way that the televisual image is now ‘the centre of the world’, with the whole planet merely watching recycled American content on television sets that have all been produced in Japan. On a trip to Tokyo Tower, built in 1958, Wenders meets his friend, the German director Werner Herzog, and they literally look down at the world below while musing on the lack of any authentic pictures left in the vast city stretched out in front of them. While this moment might recall the disposition of the department store sequence in Tokyo Story, thereby positioning Herzog and Wenders as the descendants of Shuˉkichi and Tomi, it’s a shame the two men never follow the example of Ozu and Atsuta

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Ryuˉ Chishuˉ: a longing for the time of Ozu the person (Tokyo-Ga, 1985)

Yuˉharu and wander the streets, lanes and alleyways of Tokyo at length on foot. Had they done so, they would have discovered how the vibrant social geography of the contemporary capital continues to exemplify Ozu’s interest in the everyday and the melding of the urban past within the ever-changing tempo of the city’s present. Tokyo-Ga nonetheless remains a profoundly beautiful film and its sense of colour, sound, framing and gesture are, in many ways, Ozu-esque. The two most moving and rewarding parts of the film’s discussion occur when the journey pauses and the camera simply watches Ryuˉ Chishuˉ and Atsuta Yuˉharu talk in situ about their respective professional relationships with Ozu. Listening to the two elderly men talk, Ryuˉ now the age of the character he plays in Tokyo Story, one witnesses a longing for the time of Ozu the person and not the places he filmed. They proudly recall their experiences and discuss the director’s rigorous but compassionate working method and abiding attention to cinematic detail. More than anything else, they express a love for the man over the images he made. Twenty-five years later, Wenders produced a parallel photographic project recording his visit to Onomichi, the town where both Tokyo Story and Tokyo-Ga begin and end. Here, he finds a place of trains and hills, somewhere ‘really … suspended in

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time’.122 ‘Onomichi showed me once again that we don’t just “see”. We recognise what we already “have in mind”,’ Wenders wrote.123 The photographs are striking. They record a gaze that belongs to him alone and have a sense of stillness, space and composition that is naturally more photographic than cinematic. Wenders certainly finds the decaying elements of Japan’s regional modernity, but he also captures the extraordinary light and beauty of the Inland Sea. In this sense, Journey to Onomichi has the feeling of a pilgrimage that has finally relinquished a longing for the past and is simply interested in noticing the ordinary details of the present. It is a document produced by a fellow film-maker who, like the elderly parents of Tokyo Story, has finally returned home after a disappointing trip to the distant capital.

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7 Coda In the balmy early autumn days of October 2017, I spent a magical week in Tokyo visiting various libraries and archives in search of Tokyo Story. At the Kawakita Memorial Film Institute, I was given precious access to one of Ozu’s original scripts for the film and I reflected on the director’s diary entry quoted at the beginning of this book. I tried not to covet its neat, methodical pages too much. In my spare time, I drank and ate and wandered the backstreets to sense the everyday vitality I love so much about the city. One sunny afternoon, I took a train and got off at KitaKamakura, the station where Hara Setsuko begins her journey to the capital in Ozu’s Late Spring. I wandered up to the tranquil, leafy grounds of Engaku-ji, the Zen Buddhist temple where Ozu now lies buried. It took some time to find his grave, but I located it in the recesses of the sloping grounds. The black stone marked by a single character, mu, was surrounded by flowers and offerings of small sake bottles.124 It had been raining and there was a shining pool of water on the top that reflected the tall sotoba (inscribed sticks of wood) gathered behind. In the sky above, a hawk circled. I moved on to visit Chigasaki-kan, the inn where Ozu and Noda wrote the Ozu’s grave at Engaku-ji in Kamakura script I had recently held in (author photograph)

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The window of Ozu’s room at Chigasaki-kan (author photograph)

my hands.125 The place is well kept and preserves an orderly and hospitable warmth. Ozu’s association with the inn is commemorated by various items of memorabilia, but the true potency of the place resides in the simplicity of the room in which he stayed. There was a beautiful seasonal flower arrangement by the window, a photograph of which has accompanied me while writing. On the wooden ceiling above, you can make out the stains from the cooking oil used in the preparation of the many meals that Ozu shared with Noda and his Kamakura kai. The pines and shrubs in the garden have now grown and you can no longer see the sea, but you can still smell it, fleetingly, in the breeze.

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Late that afternoon, I took another train to stay with friends in Osaka. I did not fall ill, like Tomi, and was able to resume my journey, a few days later, to Onomichi. There, I succumbed immediately to the town’s spell and finally felt able to understand Ozu’s remarkable choice of locale. Its hills are steep and the paths into them are winding and, at times, confusing. From Joˉdo-ji, I looked out at the town and coastal landscape below and was thrilled to see, and hear, the regular passage of the trains that still intersect the community. The atmospheric island geography of the Inland Sea is present from every vantage point. That evening, I stayed in an old sailors’ lodgings and ate fresh sushi in a restaurant near the waterside. I spent several days in Onomichi photographing different locations. One night, there was a festival and several streets in the main district were illuminated by lights and candles. Crowds of families and young children gathered to share the experience. I came to realise that Onomichi was a place in transition. The timeless tranquillity of the town conveyed in Tokyo Story had been a myth in the 1950s, one generated to manage the inherent duality of the film’s narrative. Onomichi was by then already playing a significant commercial role in the industrialisation of western Japan and there was still evidence of this in the rusting coastal infrastructure. Its heyday had clearly passed and there were signs of decline and depopulation in the back lanes of the town centre and the foothills above. To help regenerate the region, different kinds of businesses had come in to appeal to a burgeoning visitor trade. I visited a hipster cafe run by ex-city dwellers; a place that seemed doubly removed from the dusty local film museum commemorating the long-gone heyday of Japan’s popular cinema. On my final morning, I returned to the railway station from where Tomi and Shuˉkichi had once set out and met a group of young people asking questions of the passers-by. Why had I come to Onomichi? I told them I had wanted to explore the place where one of the greatest ever Japanese films, Tokyo Story, was shot. They had

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Onomichi today (author photograph)

never heard of it, but they were interested in my opinions about the town today. I told them I loved it, but I was puzzled why they wanted to know. They had come from Tokyo and were employed by an agency wishing to develop local tourism. They too, like me, had made the journey from the capital and were now seeking to find ways of getting others to do the same. I looked up at the station clock. It was sadly time to go and close the circle. I smiled and said goodbye and then, like Noriko, boarded the train to start my own long journey back along the tracks to the city that had once been Ozu’s home and hers.

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Notes 1 Ozu Yasujiroˉ, Carnets, 1933–1963, trans. Josiane Pinon-Kawataké (Paris: Éditions Alive, 1996), p. 321. 2 Daisuke Miyao argues that the dramatic potential of Tokyo Story rests in the fact that ‘there was no discontinuity in Japanese people’s [everyday] conception of time’ between the wartime and postwar periods. See ‘The Melodrama of Ozu: Tokyo Story and Its Time’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema vol. 13, no. 2 (2021), p. 60. 3 Donald Richie, ‘Yasujiro Ozu: The Syntax of His Films’, Film Quarterly vol. 17, no. 2 (Winter 1963), p. 13. 4 See, for instance, Ryoko Misono, ‘Suspense and Border Crossing. Ozu Yasujiroˉ’s Crime Melodrama’, in Joanne Bernardi and Shota T. Ogawa (eds), Routledge Handbook of Japanese Cinema (Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 13–30. 5 Michael Raine, ‘A New Form of Silent Cinema: Intertitles and Interlocution in Ozu Yasujiro’s Late Silent Films’, in Jinhee Choi (ed.), Reorienting Ozu: A Master and His Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 102. For the definitive articulation of Ozu’s distinctive aesthetic principles, see David Bordwell’s magisterial account in Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema (London: British Film Institute/Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 6 See Robin Wood, ‘The “Noriko” Trilogy. Three Films of Ozu with Setsuko Hara’, CineAction nos. 26–7 (1992), pp. 60–81. 7 See, for example, Woojeong Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro: Histories of the Everyday (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016).

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8 Ozu quoted in Oˉguro Toyoshi, ‘Ozu Yasujiroˉ no enshutsu: Toˉkyoˉ monogatari no satsuei wo miru’, in Tanaka Masasumi (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei (Tokyo: Firumu Aˉtosha, 1989), p. 192 [original article published in Kinema junpoˉ no. 75 (October 1953)]. 9 See Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, p. 73. 10 Ozu quoted in Yoshida Kijuˉ , Ozu’s Anti-Cinema, trans. Daisuke Miyao and Kyoko Hirano (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), pp. 13–14. 11 Ibid., p. 14. 12 Donald Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 1. Richie might well have been thinking about Ozu’s own words – ‘through the growth of parents and children, I described [in Tokyo Story] how the Japanese family system began to disintegrate’ – later cited, for example, by David Bordwell. See Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 43. Bordwell, incidentally, also notes the popularity in early 1950s Japan of a book titled Children Who Do Not Look After Their Parents (p. 333). 13 Ozu Yasujiroˉ, ‘Tatoeba toˉfu no gotoku: Toˉkyoˉ monogatari no Ozu Yasujiroˉ kantoku dan’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, p. 202 [original article published in Toˉkyoˉ shimbun, 9 December 1953]. 14 Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, pp. 173–4. 15 Ozu Yasujiroˉ, ‘Eiga no aji, jinsei no aji’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, p. 379 [original article published in Kinema junpoˉ (December

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1960)]. For more on the question of melodrama, see Yoshida, Ozu’s AntiCinema, p. 123, and Daisuke Miyao’s brilliant, more historicised, discussion in ‘The Melodrama of Ozu’, pp. 58–79. 16 Donald Richie, ‘The Later Films of Yasujiro Ozu’, Film Quarterly vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1959), p. 23. 17 The producer Yamanouchi Shizuo, a later contemporary of Ozu’s at Shoˉchiku, and the son of the actor Satomi Ton, argues that the director’s respectful friendship with Shiga Naoya really helped ground and cement Ozu’s literary skills. See I Lived, But … (Inoue Kazuo, 1983). 18 Ozu quoted in author unknown, ‘Nikushin ai ni ireta mesu: Ozu kantoku Toˉkyoˉ monogatari no seisaku ito’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, p. 186 [original article published in Sangyoˉ keizai shimbun, 25 September 1953]. 19 Ozu quoted in Richie, ‘Later Films’, p. 23. 20 Ozu, Carnets, p. 329. 21 Ibid., p. 348. 22 Ibid., p. 354. 23 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 328. 24 Tony Rayns, ‘Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story)’, Sight & Sound vol. 63, no. 2 (February 1994), p. 63. 25 Yoshida Kijuˉ’s account of Ozu’s words, quoted by Daisuke Miyao in his ‘Translator’s Introduction’ to Yoshida, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema, p. xii. 26 David Bordwell, ‘A Modest Extravagance: Four Looks at Ozu’, in Cheuk-to Li and H. C. Li (eds), Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary

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(Hong Kong: Hong Kong Arts Development Council, 2003), p. 16. 27 Ozu Yasujiroˉ quoted in I Lived, But … 28 Ryuˉ Chishuˉ, ‘There Was a Father: Ryu Chishu Remembers Ozu Yasujiro’, Sight & Sound vol. 33, no. 2 (Spring 1964), p. 92. 29 Yamanouchi Shizuo quoted in Ozu’s Films Behind the Scenes (Shoˉchiku, 2004). 30 Kida Shoˉ, Ozu Yasujiro to Toˉkyoˉ monogatari (Tokyo: Chikuma Shoboˉ, 2013), pp. 84–105. 31 Atsuta Yuˉharu wrote, ‘On location in Tokyo, we walked and walked, from noon to evening, till our legs got stiff. Ozu was a good walker … He walked as far as he found an ideal place.’ See Atsuta Yuˉharu, ‘Quotes from Yuharu Atsuta’, in Ken Sakamura and Hasumi Shigehiko (eds), From Behind the Camera: A New Look at the World of Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo: Tokyo University Digital Museum, 1998), pp. 109–10. 32 Oˉguro, ‘Ozu Yasujiroˉ no enshutsu’, p. 192. 33 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 99. 34 Igarashi Taro, ‘Yasujiro Ozu as an Architect’, in Sakamura and Hasumi (eds), From Behind the Camera, p. 79. 35 Atsuta Yuˉharu, ‘The Secret of Ozu’s Low Camera Position’, in Li and Li (eds), Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary, p. 68. 36 Ibid., p. 69. 37 See Horike Yoshitsugu, ‘The Absent Present of Tokyo Story’, in Sakamura and Hasumi (eds), From Behind the Camera, pp. 44–65. 38 See Hori Junji, ‘Yuharu Atsuta’s Pocket Notebooks’, in Sakamura and Hasumi (eds), From Behind the Camera, pp. 66–77.

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39 Ozu Yasujiroˉ and Ishikawa Kinichi, ‘Karaˉ wa tendon, shirokuro wa ochazuke no aji’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, pp. 212–13 [original article published in Camera mainichi vol. 1, no. 1 (June 1954)]. 40 Ibid., p. 215. 41 Ozu Yasujiroˉ, ‘Seikaku to hyoˉjoˉ’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, pp. 40–1 [original article published in Kinema junpoˉ no. 24 (December 1947)]. 42 Kanda Teizoˉ, ‘Ozu Yasujiroˉ ron’, Eiga hyoˉron vol. 11, no. 6 (June 1954), pp. 78–9. 43 Ozu quoted in author unknown, ‘Hara Setsuko to Ozu no hatsu kaoawase: Banshun satsuei chuˉ Hara ga fushoˉ sawagi’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, pp. 66–7 [original article published in Toˉkyoˉ shimbun (21 August 1949)]. 44 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, pp. 83–4. 45 Author unknown, ‘Ozu kantoku no gei iro hige’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, pp. 193–202 [original article published in Maru vol. 6, no. 12 (December 1953)]. 46 Shigehiko Hasumi, Yasujiroˉ Ozu (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma, 1998), p. 120. The first day of shooting had initially been based around a location shot, but this was called off because of rain. See Kida, Ozu Yasujiro to Toˉkyoˉ monogatari, pp. 104–5. 47 Asahi shimbun, 25 August 1953. 48 Kida, Ozu Yasujiro to Toˉkyoˉ monogatari, p. 48. 49 Ryuˉ Chishuˉ quoted in Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films, p. 146.

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50 A recording of the score was released by Victor in 1956. 51 Saitoˉ Takanobu quoted in ‘Saito Kojun on Ozu’s Use of Music’, in Li and Li (eds), Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary, p. 73. 52 Yoshitsugu, ‘The Absent Present of Tokyo Story’, p. 46. 53 For more on the figure of the train, see Linda C. Ehrlich, ‘Travel Toward and Away: Furosato and Journey in Tokyo Story’, in David Desser (ed.), Tokyo Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 53–75. 54 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 331. 55 Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, pp. 177–8. 56 See also Catherine Russell, ‘Three Japanese Actresses of the 1950s: Modernity, Femininity and the Performance of Everyday Life’, CineAction no. 60 (2003), pp. 34–44. 57 Joo contrasts this with the spirited authority of the two women, Taeko (Kogure Michiyo) and Aya (Awashima Chikage), who share a taxi ride in the same district in The Flavour of Green Tea Over Rice. See Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, p. 178. 58 Yoshida, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema, p. 9. Jasper Sharp refers to Yoshida’s argument that ‘Tokyo Story is not a story about Tokyo but … a portrait of the old couple from the perspective of Tokyo’. See Jasper Sharp, ‘Tokyo Story: Anatomy of a Classic’. Available at:

(accessed 12 December 2021). 59 Yoshida, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema, p. 9.

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60 Ibid., p. 10. 61 Ibid., p. 11. See also Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, pp. 178–9. 62 Daisuke Miyao elaborates further on Noriko’s embodiment of a historically layered temporality in opposition to the more unidirectional time occupied by her parents-in-law. See ‘The Melodrama of Ozu’, pp. 62–6. 63 Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, pp. 179–80. 64 Darrell William Davis, ‘Ozu’s Mother’, in Desser (ed.), Tokyo Story, p. 86. 65 Aaron Gerow, ‘Ozu to Asia Via Hasumi’, in Choi (ed.), Reorienting Ozu, p. 52. 66 I am grateful to Dogase Masato for informing me that these posters advertise two Shoˉchiku films of the same year as Tokyo Story: Kinpira sensei to ojoˉsan/Dr Kinpira and His Daughter (Nomura Yoshitaroˉ, 1953) and Shiminuki jinsei/The Life of a Stain Remover (Nozaki Masao, 1953). 67 Wood, ‘The “Noriko” Trilogy’, p. 78. 68 Ibid. 69 Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, p. 181. 70 Daisuke Miyao provides a rich analysis of the specific presence of multiple time devices in the film. See Miyao, ‘The Melodrama of Ozu’, pp. 62–6. 71 The articulation of moral sentiment found here lies at the heart of Ozu’s method. While Kyoˉko may express disdain about the ‘graceless’ behaviour of her siblings, the tone of Noriko’s reply in Japanese indicates an acceptance of the reality of the situation rather than critical judgement. Indeed, she does not actually use the word ‘disappointment’,

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stating instead that ‘life has many difficult aspects’. I am grateful to Lúcia Nagib and Hideaki Fujiki for their conversation about this matter. 72 For more on the significance of the song (‘Yuˉbe no kane’/‘The Evening Bell’), see Miyao, ‘The Melodrama of Ozu’, p. 66. 73 David Bordwell notes the way that Ozu’s films of the 1950s were regularly released in line with the same ‘seasonal rhythm’. See Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 49. 74 Kida, Ozu Yasujiro to Toˉkyoˉ monogatari, p. 205. 75 Ibid. 76 Joo, The Cinema of Ozu Yasujiro, p. 176. 77 H. C. Lee, ‘Tokyo Story Through Western Eyes: The Occidental Appreciation of Ozu’s Art’, in Li and Li (eds), Ozu Yasujiro: 100th Anniversary, p. 49. 78 Author unknown, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari (Shoˉchiku eiga)’, Shufu to seikatsu vol. 8, no. 12 (1953), pp. 296–7. 79 Bordwell, Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema, p. 118. 80 Oˉguro Toyoshi, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, Eiga no tomo vol. 22, no. 1 (January 1954), p. 60. 81 Oˉguro, ‘Ozu Yasujiroˉ no enshutsu’, p. 187. 82 For example, Tsumura Hideo, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, in Tsumura, Eiga to ningen zoˉ (Tokyo: Mikasa Shoboˉ, 1955). 83 Sugiyama Heiichi, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, Eiga hyoˉron vol. 11, no. 1 (January 1954), pp. 69–70. 84 Kanda, ‘Ozu Yasujiroˉ ron’, pp. 78–9. 85 Mainichi shimbun, 4 November 1953, p. 4.

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86 Ibid. 87 Togawa Naoki, ‘[Nihoneiga Hihyoˉ] Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, Kinema junpoˉ no. 78 (November 1953), pp. 67–8. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Author unknown, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, Sangyoˉ to keizai vol. 7, no. 12 (December 1953), p. 46. 92 Oˉguro, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, p. 60. 93 Sugiyama, ‘Toˉkyoˉ monogatari’, pp. 69–70. 94 Ibid. 95 Asahi shimbun, 19 December 1953, p. 7. 96 Ishikawa Kinichi, Togawa Ema, Ozu Yasujiroˉ, Matsushita Shoˉzoˉ, Takehara Han, Tatsuno Takashi, ‘Fuˉzoku to Ryuˉkoˉ’, in Tanaka (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei, pp. 204–12 [original article published in Kokoro vol. 7, no. 4 (April 1954), pp. 58–64. 97 David Bordwell, ‘Konban-wa, Ozusan’. Available at: (accessed 12 December 2021). 98 See (accessed 12 December 2021). 99 In the last iteration of the Kinema junpoˉ poll of the greatest Japanese films of all time, now dating back to 2009, Tokyo Story came first. 100 Alexander Jacoby, ‘Why Nobody Knows – Family and Society in Modern Japan’, Film Criticism vol. 35, nos. 2–3 (2011), p. 69. 101 See Jinhee Choi, ‘Ozuesque as a Sensibility: Or, on the Notion of Influence’, in Choi (ed.), Reorienting Ozu, p. 92.

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102 See Liz Shackleton, ‘Shochiku Plans Ozu 110th Anniversary Project’, Screen Daily (12 February 2013). Available at: (accessed 12 December 2021). 103 For an extended discussion of the film, see Adam Bingham, Contemporary Japanese Cinema Since Hana-bi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 99–101. 104 Lee, ‘Tokyo Story Through Western Eyes’, p. 49, and Abigail Deveney, ‘Influential Storytelling at Its Finest: Why the Postwar West Took Notice of Yasujiroˉ Ozu’s Tokyo Story’, Japanese Society and Culture vol. 3, nos. 1–2 (2020), p. 21. 105 Deveney, ‘Influential Storytelling’, p. 23. 106 Kawakita Kashiko, ‘Haka mo de’, in Ozu Yasujiroˉ hito to shigoto kankoˉkai (eds), Ozu Yasujiroˉ: hito to shigoto (Tokyo: Banyuˉsha, 1972), pp. 289–91. 107 John Gillett and David Wilson (eds), Ozu: A Critical Anthology (London: British Film Institute, 1976). 108 John Gillett, ‘Introduction’, in Gillett and Wilson (eds), Ozu: A Critical Anthology, p. 1. 109 See Nikki Baughan, ‘60 Years of Awards at the London Film Festival – A Brief History of the Competition’. Available at: (accessed 21 December 2021). According to Leslie Hardcastle, John Gillett’s advocacy for Tokyo Story played a substantial role in the final

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decision. See Deveney, ‘Influential Storytelling’, p. 27. 110 See, for example, Miyao, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xiii. 111 See, for example, David Desser, Eros Plus Massacre: An Introduction to the Japanese New Wave Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). The first commercial distribution of any Ozu film outside Japan was Sanma no aji/An Autumn Afternoon (1962), released in the US in 1964. 112 Penelope Gilliatt, ‘Sometimes the Twain’, in Desser (ed.), Ozu’s Tokyo Story, p. 159. 113 Richard Schickel, quoted by Lee in ‘Tokyo Story Through Western Eyes’, p. 50. 114 Lindsay Anderson, ‘Two Inches Off the Ground’, Sight & Sound vol. 27, no. 3 (Winter 1957), p. 132. 115 See John Gillett, ‘The Tokyo Story’, Film no. 13 (September–October 1957), page unknown. 116 Anderson, ‘Two Inches Off the Ground’, p. 160. 117 Richie, Ozu: His Life and Films, p. xv. 118 Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), p. 19. 119 Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell, ‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu’, Screen vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1976), p. 42 (emphasis in original). 120 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. 121 See several of the essays in Choi (ed.), Reorienting Ozu.

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122 Wim Wenders, ‘Onomichi, really’, in Wenders, Journey to Onomichi (Berlin: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009), p. 61. 123 Ibid., p. 62. 124 The question of this character has been the subject of much conjecture. It is frequently, and misleadingly, translated as ‘nothingness’, thereby inferring a radical existential gesture in keeping with the ascetic stringency of Ozu’s early Western persona. We may, of course, never know what mu precisely meant to the film director, but he was offered a version in calligraphic form at Jiming temple during the time he was stationed as a soldier in Nanjing in 1939. Engaku-ji belongs to the Rinzaishuˉ, one of three schools of Japanese Zen Buddhism established during the Kamakura period (1192–1333). Mu is best understood in this context as the state of being free from adherence to one thing or another in either an affirmative or a negative way. Rather than meaning ‘nothingness’ per se, it therefore signifies an acceptance of the eternal present outside any dualistic restriction. The version at his grave is certainly elegant and simple and entirely in keeping with the director’s well-honed graphic sensibilities. I am grateful to Hideaki Fujiki for his discussion of these various points with me. 125 Chigasaki-kan was established by Mori Shinjiroˉ in 1899. The original building was badly damaged in the Great Kantoˉ Earthquake of 1923 and then rebuilt. It remains open for business to this day.

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Credits Toˉkyoˉ monogatari/ Tokyo Story 東京物語 Japan 1953 Production Company Shoˉchiku Director Ozu Yasujiroˉ Screenplay Noda Koˉgo and Ozu Yasujiroˉ Producer Yamamoto Takeshi Production Manager Shimizu Tomiji Assistant Directors Yamamoto Koˉzoˉ Takahashi Osamu Director of Photography Atsuta Yuˉharu Assistant Cinematographer Kawamata Takashi Lighting Technician Takashita Itsuo Lighting Assistant Yakuwa Takeshi Editor Hamamura Yoshiyasu Art Director Hamada Tatsuo Set Designer Takahashi Toshio Set Decorator Moriya Setsutaroˉ Costume Designer Saitoˉ Taizoˉ

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Music Saitoˉ Takanobu Sound Engineer Kaneko Mitsuru Sound Assistant Hori Yoshiomi Sound Recording Senoˉ Yoshisaburoˉ Film Development Hayashi Ryuˉji uncredited Second Assistant Director Imamura Shoˉhei CAST Ryuˉ Chishuˉ Hirayama Shuˉkichi Higashiyama Chieko Hirayama Tomi Hara Setsuko Hirayama Noriko Sugimura Haruko Kaneko Shige Yamamura Soˉ Hirayama Koˉichi Miyake Kuniko Hirayama Fumiko Kagawa Kyoˉko Hirayama Kyoˉko Toˉno Eijiroˉ Numata Sanpei Nakamura Nobuo Kaneko Kurazo ˉ saka Shiroˉ O Hirayama Keizoˉ Toake Hisao Hattori Osamu Nagaoka Teruko Hattori Yone

Sakura Mutsuko bar hostess Takahashi Toyo neighbour in Onomichi Abe Toˉru railway clerk Mitani Sachiko woman at Noriko’s apartment Murase Zen Hirayama Minoru Mori Mitsuhiro Hirayama Isamu Anan Junko Kiyo, beauty salon assistant Mizuki Ryoˉko beauty salon customer Togawa Yoshiko beauty salon customer Itokawa Kazuhiro tenant at the Hattori household Toyama Fumio patient Morozumi Keijiroˉ police officer Niijima Tsutomu company section chief at Noriko’s office Suzuki Shoˉzoˉ clerk at Noriko’s office Tashiro Yoshiko maid at inn Chichibu Haruko maid at inn Miki Takashi singer at inn Nagao Toshinosuke doctor

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Production Details Filmed on location in Onomichi, Tokyo, Atami and Osaka and in Shoˉchiku’s studios at Oˉfuna, July to October 1953. 35mm Black and white Mono 1:37:1 Running time: 136 minutes Release Details Japan theatrical release 3 November 1953 by Shoˉchiku UK theatrical release 1965 by Contemporary Films

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(Abingdon, Oxon, and New York: Routledge, 2021), pp. 13–30.  Miyao, Daisuke, ‘Translator’s Introduction’, in Yoshida Kijuˉ, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), pp. ix–xx. Miyao, Daisuke, ‘The Melodrama of Ozu: Tokyo Story and Its Time’, Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema vol. 13, no. 2 (2021), pp. 58–79. Ono, Shuntaroˉ, Toˉkyoˉ monogatari to Nihonjin (Tokyo: Shoˉhakusha, 2015). Ozu Yasujiroˉ hito to shigoto kankoˉkai (eds), Ozu Yasujiroˉ: hito to shigoto (Tokyo: Banyuˉsha, 1972). Ozu, Yasujiroˉ, Carnets, 1933–1963, trans. Josiane Pinon-Kawataké (Paris: Éditions Alive, 1996). Ozu, Yasujiroˉ and Koˉgo Noda, Tokyo Story: The Ozu/Noda Screenplay, trans. Eric Klestadt (Albany, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2003). Phillips, Alastair, ‘Pictures of the Past in the Present: Modernity, Femininity and Stardom in the Postwar Films of Ozu Yasujiro’, Screen vol. 44, no. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 154–66. Rayns, Tony, ‘Tokyo Monogatari (Tokyo Story)’, Sight & Sound vol. 63, no. 2 (February 1994), p. 63. Richie, Donald, ‘The Later Films of Yasujiro Ozu’, Film Quarterly vol. 13, no. 1 (Autumn 1959), pp. 18–25. Richie, Donald, ‘Yasujiro Ozu: The Syntax of His Films’, Film Quarterly vol. 17, no. 2 (Winter 1963), pp. 11–16. Richie, Donald, Ozu: His Life and Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

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Stein, Wayne and Marc DiPaolo (eds), Ozu International: Essays on the Global Influences of a Japanese Auteur (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015). Stephens, Chuck, ‘The Director’s Studio’, Film Comment (September–October 2005), pp. 39–41. Tanaka, Masasumi (ed.), Ozu Yasujiroˉ sengo goroku shuˉsei (Tokyo: Firumu Aˉtosha, 1989). Thompson, Kristin and David Bordwell, ‘Space and Narrative in the Films of Ozu’, Screen vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 41–73. Tsumura, Hideo, Eiga to ningen zoˉ (Tokyo: Mikasa Shoboˉ, 1955). Wenders, Wim, Journey to Onomichi (Berlin: Schirmer/Mosel, 2009). Willis, Don, ‘Yasujiro Ozu: Emotion and Contemplation’, Sight & Sound vol. 48, no. 1 (Winter 1978/9), pp. 44–9. Wood, Robin, ‘Tokyo Story’, Movie no. 13 (Summer 1965), pp. 32–3. Wood, Robin, ‘The “Noriko” Trilogy. Three Films of Ozu with Setsuko Hara’, CineAction nos. 26–7 (1992), pp. 60–81. Yoshida, Kijuˉ, Ozu’s Anti-Cinema, trans. Daisuke Miyao and Kyoko Hirano (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003). Yoshimoto, Mitsuhiro, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

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