Tokyo Story (Japanese, 1953)

Tokyo Story, a classic of world cinema from Yasujiro Ozu, is a layered meditation on the disintegration of the nuclear family, told through the deceptively simple story of an elderly couple visiting their children in Tokyo.

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The plot

Shukichi Hirayama (played by Chishu Ryu) and Tomi (played by Chieko Higashiyama) are a retired couple living in the small town of Onomichi with their youngest daughter, Kyoko (played by Kyoko Kagawa). The film opens with the couple packing for a trip to Tokyo to visit their eldest son Koichi (played by So Yamamura) and eldest daughter Shige (played by Haruko Sugimura). On the way, another son, Keizo (played by Shiro Osaka), stops by to see them at the Osaka train station—though this is conveyed through conversation, and we do not actually see Keizo until their return journey. Their daughter-in-law, Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara)—widow of their second son, Shoji, who died in World War II—arrives late at the train station and hence, meets them at Koichi’s home, located in a Tokyo suburb.

The senior Hirayamas soon realize that their children, preoccupied with their own lives, see their visit is an imposition. Koichi, a doctor, cancels a planned sightseeing trip at the last minute to attend to a patient. Koichi's wife Fumiko (played by Kuniko Miyake) is well-meaning but her kindness cannot compensate for her husband’s detachment. The couple shift from Koichi's home to their daughters'. Shige, a hairdresser, not only avoids taking time off work for her parents but also discourages her husband, Kurazo Kaneko (played by Nobuo Nakamura), from spending any money on them. Ironically, the only person who shows them genuine warmth is Noriko, their daughter-in-law.

Unable to ask Noriko to entertain their parents a second time, Koichi and Shige send them to the Atami hot springs. Beyond relieving them of any time commitment, the scheme also has the virtue of being cheaper than entertaining their parents in Tokyo. However, after a sleepless night in the noisy, nightclub-like atmosphere of their Atami hotel, the Hirayamas cut their trip short. Hesitant to impose on Koichi again, they return to Shige’s home—only to find her displeased by their early arrival. She tells them her house is unavailable because she is hosting a beauticians’ meetup. Shukichi ruefully remarks to Tomi that they are now, in effect, homeless in Tokyo.

Tomi spends the night at Noriko's apartment, while Shukichi visits his old friend Hattori (played by Hisao Toake). When Hattori pointedly mentions the tenant occupying their spare room and his wife hints that guests are unwelcome, Shukichi abandons the idea of staying there. Instead, he and Hattori go to a bar, where they are joined by a mutual friend, Numata (played by Eijiro Tono). The three get drunk and share a candid conversation about their disappointments in their children. Late that night, a policeman drops the very drunk Shukichi and Hattori at a vexed Shige’s home.

The Hirayamas cannot return to Onomichi soon enough. On the train ride back, Tomi falls ill. They disembark at Osaka and spend a couple of nights at Keizo's apartment. Like his Tokyo siblings, Keizo sees the visit as a burden, complaining to a colleague about the inconvenience of arranging doctor visits and extra blankets. After the couple's return to Onomichi, Koichi and Shige receive telegrams informing them that Tomi is critically ill. The three siblings and Noriko travel to Onomichi, where Tomi lies on her deathbed.

True to form, Koichi, Shige, and Keizo leave promptly after the last rites, while Noriko stays behind to comfort Shukichi. Their youngest daughter, Kyoko, is appalled by her siblings’ selfishness—especially Shige, who is quick to claim some of their mother’s clothes that she covets. When Noriko prepares to return to Tokyo, Kyoko wants to see her off at the station, but her schedule as a schoolteacher prevents her. In one of the film’s final shots, the camera returns to the seating area by the window seen earlier with one poignant difference— now it is only Shukichi sitting there.

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Observations

The quiet unraveling

A couple marries and raises a family. As the children grow up and start families of their own, their primary attachment often—though not always—shifts from their family of origin to the one they create. Tokyo Story is Ozu’s rumination on this commonplace yet poignant reality: the quiet unraveling of the nuclear family. The change is gradual, but its impact is stark. As Tomi lies dying, the Hirayama children seem more inconvenienced than grief-stricken. Kyoko, who still lives with her parents and has yet to undergo this rite of passage, is dismayed by what she sees as the callousness of her siblings. But Noriko gently explains that this shift is simply the natural order of things.

The gulf between generations repeats itself—between parents and children, and again between grandparents and grandchildren. The alienation Shukichi and Tomi experience with their son Koichi is mirrored in their relationship with their two grandsons. The boys are clearly not excited about the visit, and we see little of the affection one might expect from young children toward doting grandparents. At Keizo’s apartment, the elderly couple wonder aloud whether it is true, as some say, that people love their grandchildren more than their children. They conclude that it doesn’t hold for them. Left unspoken is the deeper sadness: they don't much like what their children have become either.

Maternal attachment in animals varies widely by species—from a few days in insects to several years in primates and elephants. These bonds serve essential functions: providing nourishment, protection, and opportunities for learning through maternal imitation. Generally, the longer the attachment, the more complex the survival skills the offspring must acquire—enhancing both the young's chances of survival and the mother's reproductive success. Humans are a striking exception. Attachment to one’s parents can last a lifetime, far exceeding what can be explained purely through an evolutionary lens.

While certain animals—such as elephants, orca whales, and orangutans—show lifelong matrilineal attachment, humans stand apart in the cultural value attributed to filial piety. Across civilizations, honoring one’s parents has been idealized: from the Biblical commandment “Honor thy father and mother,” to the tale of Shravan Kumar in the Ramayana, to the Twenty-Four Filial Exemplars of Confucian tradition. Yet, like many ideals, this one often clashes with human nature. In fact, much of religious teachings are an attempt to regulate unbridled human desire.

This tension between cultural expectations and individual desires creates cognitive dissonance. Western societies have addressed this by chipping away at the ideals themselves. It would be unusual, for instance, to find a Western film that earnestly celebrates love for one’s parents. While romantic comedies do brisk business in the west, there is no comparable celebration of companionate love. In such highly individualistic cultures, social expectations exert little pressure on the ingrate child or the philandering spouse.

In contrast, in societies still undergoing industrialization—such as Ozu’s post-war Japan or present-day India and China—people wrestle between the pull of obligation and their desire for personal freedom. This dissonance is clearly visible in Koichi, Shige, and Keizo. All three siblings are conscious of the cultural norms relating to what they owe their parents. For Koichi and Shige, the trip to Atami is a way to pay their way out of their obligations. Keizo, after his mother's death admits to not being a good son and even quotes the aphorism "you cannot serve your parents beyond the grave".

There are three modes in which adult children relate to their aging parents.

The first is through genuine affection, where children willingly make personal sacrifices of time and money. Noriko, though not their biological child, acts from genuine affection for Shukichi and Tomi.

The second is a sense of obligation without emotional connection. Here, acts of support are offered grudgingly and often with festering resentment. This is evident in the behavior of Koichi and Keizo, whose hospitality is begrudging and perfunctory.

The third is marked by active disregard or cruelty. Shige falls into this category. Her chiding her husband for buying an expensive cake for her parents is petty; sending them out into Tokyo without shelter for the night borders on elder abuse.

While Ozu does not condone the behavior of the three elder Hirayama siblings, he does offer some nuance that could explain—though not exculpate—their conduct. He suggests that the children may carry a quiet resentment toward the unspoken expectations of their parents, ones they feel ill-equipped to meet. Though the Hirayamas' parenting style does not appear to be anywhere close to the modern day Tiger Mom's , Shukichi, in a moment of drunken candor, confesses his disappointment that Koichi is “merely” a neighborhood doctor. This undercurrent of letdown is present from the couple’s arrival at Koichi’s home, when they discover that he lives in a distant Tokyo suburb— presumably unable to afford a more centrally located residence.

In another allusion to parental shortcoming, there are references to Shukichi's past alcoholism, which resurfaces on his night-out with friends. Shige remarks that their father’s drinking problem lasted until Kyoko was born—suggesting that Kyoko, the youngest, may have grown up with a different, perhaps gentler, version of their father. Her stronger attachment to her parents, then, can be partly understood as the common phenomenon of siblings experiencing the same parent in markedly different ways.

Ozu highlights another discomfiting truth: children often have unequal attachments to their parents. In many Asian cultures, the father is a distant figure, so when the mother dies first, he is left isolated—the main line of connection with the children is lost. At one point, Shige expresses surprise that Tomi is dying instead of her father, barely concealing that she might have preferred it. Later, she says that if Shukichi had died, they could have cared for their mother in Tokyo—implying she is not willing to extend the same care to her father and finds the situation inconvenient.

The word estrangement is defined as the state of being separated or alienated in feeling or affection from someone. Cinema often depicts its more dramatic forms—divorce, breakups, siblings cutting ties for years. Ozu, however, portrays a subtler, more pervasive kind of estrangement: one where people let each other down yet continue to observe the outward rituals of their relationships.

Tokyo Story alludes to the reality that all human relationships, no matter how intimate, carry an undercurrent of disappointment. This idea echoes Rainer Maria Rilke’s observation that “even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist.”  Ozu suggests that relationships weighed down by expectations are inherently fraught, because such expectations clash with human nature. People pursue their own goals and hence, cannot live up to the hopes others project onto them. Expectations breed resentment. Perhaps that is why all three children-in-law—Fumiko, Kurazo, and Noriko—treat Shukichi and Tomi with more kindness than their own children do.

The calm that conceals

Noriko appears to float through life with a quiet smile, always tending to others with gentle grace, as if she has no desires or will of her own. It has been nearly a decade since her husband died, yet she shows no interest in remarrying, living modestly and toiling away at her job. The fact that she borrows cups from a neighbor just to host two guests suggests that Noriko rarely entertains visitors. Though she never complains, a brief conversation with Tomi hints at a difficult marriage—her husband may have been an alcoholic. As is often the case, those who seem calm on the surface may carry just as much inner turmoil as those who are more outwardly excitable.

Noriko offers a glimpse into her inner emotional landscape when, in response to Shukichi's expression of gratitude, she admits she is not as good as she seems. She describes the anguish of living a groundhog day existence while her heart yearns for something amorphous. Her emotional state echoes Henry David Thoreau’s observation that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." A gentler, and perhaps more accurate, description of Noriko’s condition might be captured by Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb.

Set in the 1950s—a period when Japan was undergoing rapid industrialization and urbanization—Tokyo Story reveals the psychological cost of this transformation. Noriko’s inconsolable reaction on being gifted Tomi's watch hints to a source of a deeper despair than the demise of Tomi. The alienation she feels is a byproduct of a process that uproots people from their communities and leaves them adrift in increasingly atomized lives.

Noriko’s calm that conceals is emblematic of the broader Japanese culture portrayed in the film—one where emotions are expressed with subtlety and restraint, shaped by a formality that values harmony, composure, and indirectness. Shukichi and Tomi do not openly voice their disappointment in their children; instead, their dismay is couched in language that seeks to absolve their behavior. Likewise, the children maintain a veneer of respect while quietly resenting the inconvenience of their parents’ visit. In a charming moment, Tomi agrees with her husband that their children are above average, even as her hand absentmindedly touches her face—betraying the lie.

Emotional restraint is conveyed through masterful acting. When Tomi gently encourages her daughter-in-law to remarry, noting that loneliness will become harder with age, Noriko responds playfully that she will not get old—but her smile falters, and her face quietly falls. Later in the film, when Koichi declares that Tomi will not survive the night, we see Shukichi’s throat constrict as he struggles to hold back tears. The emotions are powerful, but always just beneath the surface.

A delightful facet of Tokyo Story are the atypical moments of candor that emerge towards the second half. In the waiting room of the Tokyo station, Tomi tells her children not to bother coming to Onomichi if something were to happen to their parents—a sharp comment lost on Koichi and Shige. Later at Keizo’s apartment, she bluntly remarks that Shige used to be much nicer. After Tomi’s death, Keizo confesses he was a bad son. Noriko tells Shukichi how desperately unhappy she is as a lonely single woman in Tokyo. Kyoko openly criticizes her siblings as selfish in front of Noriko. And Shukichi expresses gratitude that, despite having children of their own, it is Noriko—unrelated by blood—who treats them with the most kindness.

The first noble truth

The first noble truth of Buddhism— life is suffering—can sound bleak because the Pali word dukkha doesn’t translate neatly into English. While dukkha does include suffering in the conventional sense, it more broadly refers to the lingering dissatisfaction even after we have enjoyed pleasures or achieved long-held goals. This idea finds its most direct expression in Tokyo Story, when Noriko quietly agrees with Kyoko’s lament: “Isn’t life disappointing?”

The comparing mind is wired to envy those we believe have a better life, yet even those who seem to have it all are not immune to dukkha. Ozu captures this dynamic in a conversation between the three friends: Shukichi, Hattori, and Numata. Hattori, who has lost all his children, longs for the privilege of having even one child still alive. Numata replies that while losing a child is painful, living with one can be just as hard—his own son, he grumbles, is henpecked. He then turns to Shukichi, calling him the luckiest of the three for having well-established children, perhaps fishing for signs of discontent to reassure himself that he is not alone in his disappointment. Shukichi obliges, voicing his quiet anguish over his son’s modest circumstances.

The theme of disappointment—and the stoic acceptance of it—runs quietly through the film. Noriko is lonely in widowhood, but her marriage, we learn, was not especially happy either. Still, she carries on with as much cheerfulness as she can summon. Shukichi and Tomi, too, smile through the neglect they face from their children. It is only the young who complain: the grandson, upset over the cancelled day trip, and Kyoko, who openly disapproves of her siblings’ behavior. Ozu seems to suggest that acceptance is the rite of passage into adulthood.

The rhythms of Tokyo Story

Just as a poetic refrain evokes emotion and meaning through repetition, Tokyo Story uses recurring visual motifs to create rhythm and resonance. The following refrain-like elements lend the film its quiet, lyrical power.

One is the deliberate composition of characters within the frame. Most iconic are the symmetrical shots of Shukichi and Tomi sitting side by side—packing for their trip, or in matching gowns by the beach—capturing a companionate intimacy shaped by years of marriage. Throughout the film, characters are arranged in geometric groupings, such as the Hirayamas gathered around the dying matriarch and later around the dining table after the memorial. These arrangements subtly shift, echoing the Buddhist idea of impermanence. For example, when the parents first arrive in Tokyo, they sit with Koichi; the geometry evolves as Shige, Fumiko, and finally Noriko join them.

A second motif involves physical objects—hand fans, drying clothes—that recur across scenes. These items do more than provide visual continuity; they evoke the slower rhythms of an analog era.

Third is Ozu’s use of cinematic ellipses, where key events occur off-screen and must be inferred. At the Osaka train station, Keizo meets his parents on their way to Tokyo, and later, they disembark there for an unplanned visit to his apartment—yet neither scene is shown. The symmetry of these two unseen encounters—one outbound, one return—quietly mirrors the film’s larger theme of life's cyclicality. Ellipses are peppered through the film. For instance, the Hiryamas' move from Koichi’s to Shige’s home is skipped. These omissions streamline the narrative and invite viewers to actively piece together the story.

Fourth are the pillow shots, a term coined by critic Noël Burch to describe Ozu’s cutaways to landscapes, buildings, and objects that precede character scenes. The film opens with shots of Onomichi before settling on the Hirayama home and finally zeroing in on the iconic image of Shukichi and Tomi. This technique recurs throughout, evoking déjà vu—such as the factory chimney, clothesline, and the signboard of Koichi's medical practice preceding Fumiko tidying the house.

Fifth is the neighbor who chats with the Hirayamas from the window—once at the beginning and again toward the end, now without Tomi. The earlier scene shows a visual triangle formed by husband, wife, and neighbor; in the latter, the triangle is broken, underscoring the loss. These two scenes form yet another quiet circle in the film’s structure.

Sixth is Kyoko’s repeated but unseen visits to the train station—another instance of Ozu’s use of ellipses. Early on, she mentions seeing off her parents at Onomichi station during her lunch break. Later, she walks to receive her siblings arriving from Tokyo. Finally, though unable to accompany Noriko’s departure because of class, she quietly watches the departing train from her window.

Together, these elements evoke life’s cyclical nature—captured poignantly in a long-distance shot of Tomi and her grandson as Shukichi and Fumiko look on. Ozu seems to suggest that the parent-child dynamic endlessly repeats. Fittingly, the film opens and closes with scenes of Onomichi, reinforcing life’s circular flow.

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Watching Tokyo Story is like walking through a gentle mist—you do not notice it at first, but by the end, you find yourself quietly drenched in feeling.