The elderly parents and youngest daughter journey to Tokyo to visit their doctor son and his brood but the children have little time for them.
15 February 1921, Tokyo, Japan
5 December 1931, Ibaraki, Japan
17 June 1920, Yokohama, Japan
6 January 1909, Hiroshima, Japan
13 May 1904, Kumamoto, Japan
28 March 1917, Fukuoka, Japan
24 February 1910, Tenri, Japan
14 February 1920, Noshiro, Akita, Japan
15 July 1903, Tokyo, Japan
8 September 1908, Koami-cho, Nihonbashi-ku, Tokyo, Japan [now Nihonbashi Koami-cho, Chuo-ku, Tokyo]
14 September 1908, Otaru, Hokkaido, Japan
12 January 1945, Tokyo, Japan
17 September 1907, Gunma, Japan
5 January 1908, Morioka, Iwate, Japan
30 September 1890, Chiba, Japan
17 September 1916, Saitama, Japan
April 07, 2015
It's entirely possible that Tokyo Story isn't the best movie ever made. But I suspect that it might be the most perfect.February 09, 2006
The way Ozu builds up emotional empathy for a sense of disappointment in its various characters is where his mastery lies.December 30, 2004
Ozu doesn't sentimentalize or condemn; he merely observes human nature with calm and clarity.November 23, 2010
Ozu's long shots, knee-high camera placement, and collapsed perspective -- as gorgeous and unsettling as a Cézanne -- gather power over the duration, but time itself is the master's most potent weapon.January 15, 2004
It ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections.July 19, 2012
With its debt to Leo McCarey's 'Make Way for Tomorrow,' Yasujiro Ozu's 'Tokyo Story' is no less true, shattering, and not for viewers fretting about unsympathetic grown-up children.November 24, 2010
In this exquisite merging of specific and universal, infinite and infinitesimal, Tokyo Story perhaps most clearly illuminates that Ozu is not the most Japanese of filmmakers, but the most human.December 19, 2013
It soon becomes clear that they have planned their trip at a bad time; it is equally clear that every time is a bad time.April 06, 2015
[VIDEO ESSAY] Yasujirô Ozu's beloved masterpiece of postwar Japanese cinema speaks to audiences from all backgrounds because of the cross-generational familial truths that the prolific director/co-writer lovingly metes out.September 01, 2010
Ozu has made a film as simple in form and complex in nature as life itself. Here, every viewer is cast as a tourist, and yet will feel right at home.January 05, 2010
This remains one of the most approachable and moving of all cinema's masterpieces.May 21, 2003
Luminous in its freedom from the sentimentality or the satire that so often obscure an artist's vision of normal living.