Tokyo Story (1953): Ozu's Camera Gives Two Parents All the Time Their Children Won't

Before you see a single face in Tokyo Story, you see a harbor. A small boat chugs across the water off Onomichi, a port town on Japan's Inland Sea, a train slides past above the rooftops, and soft music plays over a few still shots of the neighborhood. None of it matters to the plot. Yasujiro Ozu puts it there anyway, the way a sound outside your parents' window sticks with you on the morning you leave.

The story is about as small as stories get. Shukichi and Tomi Hirayama (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama), an elderly couple, take the train to Tokyo to visit their grown children, who are too busy to have them. Here is the reading to take away: the children keep passing their parents along, and Ozu's camera gives them all the time their kids won't. It waits in rooms after people leave. It lets every speaker finish. With the year-end travel season about to fill the trains, this 1953 film still knows something about the trip home, and about the one you keep putting off.

A Visit Nobody Has Room For

The couple arrive at the house of their eldest son, Koichi, a doctor on the edge of Tokyo, and the welcome is warm for about an evening. The grandsons sulk about losing their room. The next day's outing is cancelled for a house call. Their daughter Shige, who runs a beauty parlor, is kind in the way busy people are kind, which is to say briefly.

So the children do what children with no time do. They pass the parents along. First to each other, then to a hot-spring resort at Atami, a gift that is really an eviction. Younger guests play mahjong and sing late into the night, and the old couple lie awake in the noise. The next morning, sitting on the seawall, they decide to go home early, and Tomi stumbles a little as she stands up. It's the first warning, and nobody but the camera is there to see it.

The one person who makes time is the outsider. Noriko (Setsuko Hara) is the widow of their middle son, killed in the war, and she takes a day off work to show them the city. The BFI's Jasper Sharp, in his anatomy of the film, describes her as the only family member who "willingly devotes time and attention to them." She has little to give, and she gives it.

Shabby Corners of Tokyo

It's easy to watch Tokyo Story as a sermon about ungrateful kids. Look closer and it's a film about money and disappointment. Sharp points out that the parents come to see their children are "not quite the success stories they had been led to believe." Koichi's clinic and Shige's salon sit in a rundown part of the city. Shige scolds her husband for buying expensive treats for her parents when cheaper rice crackers would have done. Noriko keeps slipping across the hall to borrow sake from a neighbor because she can't afford to buy enough. These children aren't monsters. They're tired and stretched thin, in a country still rebuilding.

The parents never say any of this aloud. They talk in code. Over drinks with an old friend in Tokyo, Shukichi admits his children have turned out less than he hoped, then decides they're doing well enough. It's heartbreak with perfect manners, and Ryu plays it with a nod.

Ozu called it, Sharp writes, "one of my most melodramatic pictures." That sounds like a joke until you notice how little anyone raises their voice. The melodrama is all in the distances: between Tokyo and Onomichi, between what the children promised and what they became.

The Camera That Rides the Bus Once

Ozu's style is the argument. Sharp describes evenly lit, near-frontal compositions taken with a fixed 50mm lens from a low angle, with no fades or dissolves and almost no tracking shots. The camera sits near the height of someone kneeling on a tatami mat, and when someone talks, it lets them finish. In a film about people nobody has time for, that patience is the point.

Then, once, the camera moves. Sharp singles out the sightseeing bus Noriko takes the couple on, the exception to all that stillness. Watch for it. The only time the film travels with the old couple, gliding alongside them through the city, is the day someone has made time for them. It's as if Ozu's camera feels it too, and allows itself a little joy.

When the Lights Went Off for Chishu Ryu

A tender story about this film comes from the actor who plays the father. In a 1964 remembrance published by Sight and Sound, Chishu Ryu writes that "my clumsiness was well known throughout the studio." So whenever his scenes came up, "all the staff used to switch off the lights and go out." Ozu stayed behind. "Mr. Ozu and I were left alone on the set," Ryu writes, "and he would let me rehearse tirelessly" until he could manage the scene.

Ryu was in his late forties when he played Shukichi, a grandfather near the end of his life, and he and Ozu were, as he puts it, "of the same age." Yet offscreen, he writes, "he seemed to be my real father." Knowing that, his slow, nodding performance reads differently. It's a man playing old age under the eye of someone he thought of as a father, in a film about how little time children give their fathers. I can't watch the seawall scene now without picturing the dark studio and the two of them alone in it.

A Watch, a Keepsake, and a Boat on the Water

Spoiler warning: this part follows Tomi's illness, her funeral and the film's final scene in Onomichi.

Much of Ozu's power lies in what he leaves out. We never see the long train journeys. Tomi's illness begins offscreen, on the ride home, which Sharp sums up in a line: the children and Noriko rush to Onomichi in time for her death. A telegram arrives, a train is taken, and then the family is kneeling by her bed.

Then the children leave, almost at once. Shige, who cries real tears for her mother, soon asks for some of Tomi's clothes as keepsakes. The youngest daughter, Kyoko, who still lives at home, is furious at her siblings and asks Noriko whether life isn't disappointing. Noriko smiles and agrees. Before Noriko returns to Tokyo, Shukichi gives her Tomi's watch and tells her to remarry. On the train, she turns it over in her hands.

The last scene goes back to the house. A neighbor stops at the window and tells Shukichi he'll be lonely now. He answers that the days will be long. Sharp describes Noriko returning to Tokyo, "leaving the old man to face his future alone," and Ozu ends on the harbor again, with a boat moving across the water just as it did at the start. Onomichi hasn't changed. Shukichi has.

The Japan Times calls the film "a fascinating record of what the city looked like 70 years ago," and suggests watching it before visiting the hilltop temple of Jodo-ji, where trains still pass below the steps as they do on screen.

"Old-Fashioned and Dull"

This film nearly never left Japan. Sharp writes that Shochiku's studio head refused overseas screenings for years, fearing that "foreign audiences might not understand them." Its first international title was the far plainer Their First Trip to Tokyo. When it finally reached London in 1957, a preview screening drew what critic John Gillett called "violent disagreements" and "many walk-outs," and the film historian Paul Rotha dismissed it as "old-fashioned and dull." It then won the first Sutherland Trophy at the brand-new London Film Festival.

The verdict has been rising ever since. Sharp notes that in Sight and Sound's 2012 poll it ranked third overall, behind Vertigo and Citizen Kane, and that Japan's Kinema Junpo poll in 2009 crowned it the best Japanese film ever made. In the 2022 poll, the BFI's results put it fourth with both critics and directors. The Harvard Film Archive's programme note sums up its subject as "the slow fracturing of the contemporary Japanese family."

136 Minutes, and Then a Phone Call

Yes, if you have parents, or are one, and can give a film 136 patient minutes. If you need things to happen, the first hour will test you; the drama lives in pauses, a nod, a fan waving in the summer heat. The last half hour pays back every quiet minute. Watch it in Japanese with subtitles, with the phone in another room, and ideally with someone you'd be sad to lose.

What it does to me isn't the tears at the death. It's later: the watch, the keepsakes, the neighbor at the window, because I recognize the polite, loving ways families fail each other. Nobody is cruel. Everyone is busy until it's too late.

Afterward, if you want the other side of 1950s Japanese cinema, the side with swords and rain, our review of Seven Samurai is a good next step. Or skip the next film and make the call instead.