Happiness in Industrialized Tokyo (Danping Long)

 



Tokyo Story is a dirge about growing up. In this film, Ozu focuses on the dilemmas of growing up in three generations: adolescence, middle age, and old age, and the sadness embedded in the scenery shot is that all these dilemmas are subject to the growth of Tokyo as an industrialized city. 

At the beginning of the story we see a traditional filial family in which parents and children each have their place; smoke rises from the rooftop cooking and rises to the orderly shrine, and outside the window the neighbors are friendly enough to entrust the house to her care with confidence. But unlike a traditional countryside tale with the chickens crowing and the dogs barking, from the first second of the film, the train whistles throughout the township. 

03:18, the train looks so small comparing to the houses

Compared to the various concrete places in Onomichi, where Shukichi and Tomi live, the train occupies a small and insignificant part on the screen, as if it is no more than a passenger; but as soon as Shukichi and Tomi take the train to Tokyo, they lose all the traditional settings in which they are the head of the family and are forced to drift from one confined space to another, like moving from one railway wagon to another. 

03:23, looking from the other direction, the railway wagons look just like houses.

When they first arrived in Tokyo, Tomi exclaimed, "Tokyo is so close to us. Yesterday we were in Onomichi, and today we are sitting here talking with you (Noriko). Yes, growing up is such a one-way road: it takes one day for the train to take away Shukichi and Tomi from their home in Onomichi to Tokyo, yet if they ever want to return to their peacefully ordered home from the industrialized city, they have to face the insurmountable gap between the past and the future.

How should Shukichi and Tomi adapt to this unfamiliar world? Can they reestablish a harmony when the traditional roles of family are lost? In industrialized Tokyo, the head of the household is no longer determined by age, but by social productivity. According to this new standard, the grandparents, just as their grandchildren, are dependents who don't have their own time and space. 

The elders and the youngsters are constantly asked to step aside, lest they will hinder the operation of the hospital or the beauty salon. While Shukichi and Tomi worry about being "burdens" to the laborers, their grandchildren who are eager to be recognized as independents, fight constantly to replace their parents to make their own decisions. But there are hope for the youngsters, because sooner or later they are going to replace their parents, and in working establish a new family relation around their labors; but the grandparents are at the final stage of their life, they can be nothing more than dependents for their children. Would accept this secondary role (in comparison to the laborers) become their only choice, or would they be happier fighting and complaining like children? One way or another, there is no room for non-laborers in the industrialized Tokyo, and no home without train's whistling for them to return.

Comments

  1. Krishnan VenkateshNovember 3, 2021 at 10:25 PM

    Great points. The grandparents are redundant in Tokyo; the city is like a corrosive that eats away all bonds except the monetary bond. In a traditional community the grandparents would be central, a source of collective memory and wisdom. Here they are peripheral, dispensable, and can only be understood by Noriko, who feels herself to be peripheral and dispensable.

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