Tokyo Story Jasujiro Ozu (Jp; 1953)
Tokyo Story Jasujiro Ozu (Jp; 1953) Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama
viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 18 May 25; ticket: £7
the unsaid
In Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’ one event underlies the shape and design of his script. It’s never mentioned it is never summoned it never makes an appearance. It is submerged beneath the surface of scenario’s domesticity: Japan’s Pacific war. The shadow of death that it castes appears in a couple of scenes but there is never any direct mention or even allusion to the war waged by Japan from 1931 to 1945 which ended in complete capitulation.
Their defeat was a defining temporal event, scarring the Japanese psyche, a defining moment which marked out time as being divided between two epochs: pre and post defeat; pre and post the radical wash through of Western/ American socio cultural influences into traditional life styles.
And what do Ozu’s people see?
There are no point of view shots in Ozu’s ‘Tokyo Story’. But in specific scenes his characters look out at the world. As tourists his main characters, Ma and Pa visiting their children in Tokyo, gaze out at Japan’s capital city. This is a city that in 1945, some 8 years before their visit, had been razed to the ground by a huge fire storm following US incendiary bombing. After the fire there was nothing left of Tokyo, a city in the main constructed from wood was burnt to a cinder. As Ma and Pa gaze out either from the tour bus or from some vantage point what do they see?
There is one thing we know that they see: the ‘empty centre’ of Tokyo. This is the imperial palace and its extensive gardens which are located at the centre of the city. We get a brief glimpse from the tourist bus of this ‘empty centre’ which is remarked by the old couple. And of course what they see is that it is unchanged: the empty centre remains the empty centre. Almost alone it survived the devastation.
Looking at the empty centre it’s as if nothing has happened.
During their one trip out on foot to explore Tokyo, Ma and Pa look out on the city. But this city even though reconstruction had taken place at break neck speed must have still evidenced something of the conflagration that destroyed it. But Ma and Pa appear to see nothing disturbing or untoward in the presenting vista. Their response to seeing the city is that nothing’s changed since they last visited Tokyo.
As if time has stood still.
Why can’t they see what they’re looking at?
There’s a schizo perception at the core of Ozu’s movie: nothing looks like it has changed but everything has changed.
Shot from the angle of the fixed camera, each scene comprises more or less a single take. Ozu’s scenario is constructed upon quasi traditional ‘Noh’ classical precepts. The scenario is continuous taking place through a particular unified window of time, chronicling the visit and return of elderly parents to their children in Tokyo. The action is delivered as a series of continuous shots without reactive intercutting. There are no cuts no close up’s each scene locked into Ozu’s unhurried temporal rhythm. Without shot manipulation, time has an integrity in ‘Tokyo Story’ that embeds itself structurally into a scenario whose particular theme is the subjective perception of the signs of time and change. Schizo time.
Those who have too much time and those who have too little ‘time’.
Ozu’s script comprises in the main the ordinary interactions that fill out day to day life: comings and goings, domesticity and food, the routines of ritual interchanges. Through the mediated experience of Ma and Pa we understand that it is not just Tokyo that has an empty centre: following the defeat, the core expressive gestures of Japanese culture have also become emptied. The traditional tokens of respect for parents, the bowing the kneeling the bringing together of hands before one’s face, are now become form without meaning. They are simply gestures that sign an outer compliance to traditional values, gestures which in the new situation have ceased to make a claim upon the hierarchy of deference to parents. The children
hurried and scurried by the new reality simply want divest themselves of care and responsibility for Ma and Pa. Their key response is to pack them off out of the way to a spa: it would have been better for them not have come. Finally Ma and Pa understand this, get the message and leave. The outer forms signifying respect and honour which is their due in the traditional value system, simply flatter to deceive. The new reality is that the young have not got time to minister to the old.
‘Tokyo Story’ employing generational dimensions, comprises a narrative shaped around an event that never happened: a war. The younger generation overtaken by the press of American cultural influence, clinging to traditional outward forms, are overtaken by an invasive work ethos unable to see what has happened or pay attention to what is happening, as if nothing had changed. The older generation, unable to confront the actuality of the war, are trapped in the ethos of change in life that it has caused. At the heart of this society Ozu perceives a schizo seed.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk