Another week is over BCB After Dark: The coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re glad you decided to come over tonight. We are waiving the service charge tonight. The show is about to begin. We still have a few tables available. The hostess can now seat you. Bring your own drinks.
After Dark BCB It’s your place to talk about baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to say freely, as long as it adheres to the site’s rules. Those who stay up late are encouraged to start partying, but others are invited to join when you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.
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I asked you last night who you thought would lead the Cubs in home runs in 2026. It was largely a two-horse race, with Michael Busch winning the vote with 49% and Seiya Suzuki taking 33%.
This is the part where we listen to jazz and talk movies. You can skip it if you want.
Tonight I’m going to highlight another NPR Tiny Desk concert. This is guitarist Bill Frisell’s 2012 solo performance. Frisell performed three Beatles songs: “Nowhere Man,” “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I know at least some of you enjoy my discovery of jazz musicians playing Beatles music.
My plan is to spend the next few weeks looking back at 2022 BFI audiovisual Top ten movies of all time and now I’ve watched them all. The idea is to take two short capsules on Monday and Wednesday. But this Monday, I went astray Citizen Kane and not enough room to give Tokyo Story It deserves the respect it deserves.
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So what I’m going to write about tonight is Tokyo Story I have no room to enter In the Mood for Love (2000). Hopefully this feature won’t make me write a full article for each of these ten movies, especially since I just wrote one for the one that ranks sixth among the movies BFI critics polls, 2001: A Space Odyssey.
4. Tokyo Story. (1953) Directed by Yasujiro Ozu. Starring Hara Setsuka, Long Zhizhou, and Higashiyama Chieko.
genius Tokyo Story It’s both very, very Japanese and very, very common. The general part is easy to see. It’s about a family and the friction between parents and children. It’s about how change is the only permanent thing, and how the old gives way to the new. The film is loosely based on the 1937 Hollywood film make way for tomorrowwhich also involves an elderly couple who become a burden to their children.
The very Japanese part comes in two forms. The first, and the easiest for Westerners to understand, is how Japan quickly transformed into a modern capitalist society after the war, and how Japanese traditions were cast aside. The second is director Ozu’s shooting method. Tokyo Story It’s slow and meditative. There’s a certain Zen quality to the whole thing. Not much happens, and what does happen often seems insignificant. Many important events occur off-camera and are mostly omitted rather than explained. What is not said is often more important than what is said.
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Furthermore, Ozu shot the film in a style that would be alien to audiences accustomed to Hollywood or even European cinema. Although Ozu makes extensive use of hard editing, there is only one brief tracking shot in the entire film. In other words, the camera almost never moves except after editing. Ozu also continually broke the “180-degree rule” of film editing, which states that you cannot shoot a scene from one direction and then flip it to the back and shoot it from there, thus reversing the actors’ positions on the screen. The best way I can describe it is from a proscenium stage where the entire audience is watching the play from one direction, to a theater in the round. except in Tokyo Story The audience was constantly jumping from one seat to another in the theater.
The reason for the 180 degree rule in film editing is so that the audience doesn’t get disoriented, but somehow Tokyo storedespite all these weird edits, I never really lost myself in my point of view. Maybe the 180-degree rule isn’t as serious a problem as we think. However, what confuses me at times is Ozu’s frequent use of time elision, where there is a jump in time accompanied by a jump cut but without any clear indication that time has passed. Ozu takes his own sweet time telling you what happened while you were away, and even then, it’s more subtle than stated. A character enters the screen and no one says “Hey, this is our sister-in-law Noriko” because in real life no one would say that. They just say hello, start talking to her, and eventually you figure out who Noriko is, but it takes a while. This is a movie you have to pay attention to, otherwise you’ll be lost.
I should also mention that Ozu often uses “tatami” shots, camera angles that are as low as the ground, giving the audience the intimacy of sitting in a room with the characters. It also allowed Ozu to have the actor stand up from a seated or kneeling position and keep his head on screen without being cut.
As far as the plot is concerned, Tokyo Story It’s very thin, which drove me crazy for a while until I caught the rhythm of the movie. (I was told Tokyo Story For an Ozu movie, the plot is actually quite heavy. oops. ) Shūkichi (Ryū) and Tomi (Higashiyama) are an elderly couple living a traditional life in rural Japan. They have five children. The younger daughter still lives with them in the country and teaches there. The younger son lives in Osaka, and the eldest son Koichi (played by Yamamura Mune) and eldest daughter Shigeru (played by Haruko Sugimura) live with their families in Tokyo. The elderly couple travel to Tokyo to visit their children, their grandson, and their daughter-in-law Noriko (Hara), who married their second son, but he never returned from the war and was presumed dead. Of course, it will take a while for us to understand this fact.
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It soon becomes apparent that their two children and daughter-in-law are far from being as well-off as Hideyoshi and Fumi imagined, and are actually struggling to make ends meet in the industrial suburbs of Tokyo. They weren’t poor, but they certainly didn’t have much disposable income or free time. Their daughter Shige is a hairdresser and their son Koichi is a doctor who owns a small pediatric practice. It’s clear that the two, far from being happy to see their parents, see them as a burden, with the senior actually being passive-aggressively bad towards them.
Although not a blood relative, Noriko is something of a saint to her in-laws, even though she doesn’t have the time or money to spend with them as she would like. Still, she made an effort.
Eventually, the old couple realizes that they are just a burden to the children and that neither they nor New Japan have any real use for them.
I won’t say that nothing else happens in the movie, because it does, but in Ozu fashion, it mostly happens off-screen and we’ll just fill it in later. There is a climax, but not much. In typical American fashion, I kept expecting a big reveal from Noriko or someone, but the actual reveal wasn’t that big of a deal. you can take a look Tokyo Story Both are looked at from the perspective of “Wow, does Ozu get a lot out of the little things” or you can look at it and say “Is this all there is?”
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It is worth mentioning that Setsuka Hara, who played Noriko, was called Japan’s Greta Garbo, partly because she was Japan’s most popular movie star after the war, and partly because she began to live in seclusion after she decided to retire in 1963, refusing to accept all interviews, public appearances, or even photos until her death in 2015. Even this news was announced months after the fact.
Would I put it in my top ten? This is tricky because it’s easy to say you have 40 movies in the top ten of all time. With that in mind, I probably wouldn’t, as I prefer things that are plot driven. I’m not sure I fully understand Tokyo Story Either that, although listening to the movie’s commentary track helps a lot. Having said that, I’m sure Tokyo Story It’s a great movie, maybe if I saw it a few more times I might change my mind. Maybe not my cup of tea, but still great. I do recommend it, although this may not be your first foray into Japanese cinema.
Welcome back to all those who skipped music and movies.
The World Baseball Classic is underway in Japan as we speak, and since spring training is a little quiet, I’ll ask you again about the WBC.
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Tonight’s question is, besides Team USA, which team are you rooting for in the 2026 WBC? I excluded Team USA because I don’t think it would be helpful to know what readers of US sites think about Team USA. Regardless, as Cubs fans, I think we all hope that Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman, and Matthew Boyd do well on Team USA.
But my approach to the FIFA World Cup, at least on the men’s side, is that there is a team that could play for a team other than Team USA. I have always believed that every American should be able to cheer for America as well as any country where you originate. But it could also be a country you’ve visited. Maybe you want to cheer for the Japanese Samurai because of Seiya Suzuki. Or Daniel Palencia’s Venezuela. Or maybe you like Miguel Armes and Panama. (Gosh, we loved Amaya’s parents when they came to Wrigley with their little Panamanian flags.) Or maybe you just think Australia is cool.
So besides Team USA, who else are you rooting for to do well in the WBC? Maybe not necessarily win it all – the chances of the Czechs winning the tournament are slim, but they have a lot of fans, a brave and mostly amateur character, and you want them to win as much as possible.
If you just want Team USA to win, vote for the team you would cheer for if Team USA was disqualified for some reason. Regardless, the purpose of the WBC is to make baseball more popular outside of the United States.
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If you ask me, you can look up my last name and see that it is of Dutch origin. So I’m rooting for the Dutch team. I always have.
Thank you for stopping by tonight and throughout the week. Please come home safely. Tell your friends about us. Check around the table so you don’t forget anything. Recycle all cans and bottles. Tip your waiter. Join us again next week to learn more BCB after dark.
