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Due to various anniversaries – the 70th anniversary of its release, the 120th anniversary of the director’s birth, the 60th anniversary of his death – cinemas are showing tokyo story. I made a decision this winter that I regret, giving up a few hours of vitamin D sunshine to attend an afternoon screening.
Yasujiro Ozu’s glacial masterpiece tells the story of an elderly couple from the provinces who travel to the capital to visit their grown children. The reception they received was one of tense tolerance, not familial warmth. Feeling outdated in the modern world (their grandson is learning English even though General MacArthur has left town) Mom and Dad come home. You’ve been waiting for intergenerational finger pointing, but like those neglected parents, it’s the refusal to make a fuss that constitutes pathos.
tokyo story Possibly the most popular movie of all time. Although it took years to get a release outside of Japan, it’s unmistakably Shakespearean in its ubiquity. If only its view of city life—breaker of shackles, stainer of simple virtues—was not such a moral cliché.
The economic case for cities—benefits of agglomeration, and so on—is propagated so often that it crowds out the higher-minded. So be it.
The fact that big cities are not chaos is above all a moral achievement. It does not depend on coercion—no police force can make ten million people obey—but on trust and goodwill, or at least enlightened self-interest. This is a species that did not begin to settle until an hour or two earlier on the historical clock. Although the kinship that Ozu advocates is noble, it is, or is destined to be, deeply rooted. The millions of voluntary obligations that keep a city from disintegration are harder to fathom and slower to gain recognition.
The problem, in my experience, is that anti-urbanists don’t know how safe these places are. Their dissatisfaction with the city is not only its wealth and vain manners, but its opposite: its squalor and disorder. “How can you stand there?” someone will ask, from the abyss of deindustrialization or the best restaurant is a small town in Côte d’Ivoire. Even if some kind of rant is allowed (we all justify to ourselves our residential choices), I get their point. A place without a stable population, without a shared memory, should collapse.
This is the distrust of cities since ancient times. (I call it metrophobia, but that means fear of poetry.) Regardless of Newtonian mechanics, the Industrial Revolution was Britain’s crowning achievement. A graph of world living standards for the millennium before 1750 is a flat line. But the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics characterized it as an alien attack, turning Eden into Manchester. In the United States, France, and China during the Cultural Revolution, the “real” states were also considered provinces. “But we pay the bills,” I would have said not so long ago. I’m now more inclined to defend the honor of cities than just their productivity.
Growing up without losing your parents is a kind of pre-death before actually losing them. It is also a universal tax on upward mobility, levied in all jurisdictions. But what are the alternatives? Static community? Do you know where you are? It’s a strange moral vision, but one embraced by many on the anti-growth left and alt-right.Neither side sees that modernity has created different Connection and responsibility, because there is no blood or racial blood basis, is more touching, not less.
Except for one scene, Ozu’s shot, like a good son or daughter, never leaves its starting point.It is also set low, as if the viewer were a guest, kneeling tatami. This is how we should live, the screen suggests in silence.
Even the matriarch’s big, cheerful face is the visual code for the town’s innocence. There she was, smiling and enduring the little humiliation, too gentle to ask the children for some patience with her unimportant life. Eventually, the city took that too. It is a timeless work of art that derives its emotional power from its emotional restraint. It almost doesn’t matter, I suppose, that it’s wrong for us urbanites, as I stagger and blink into a city that shouldn’t hold together, but does.
Email Janan at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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