studying "Tokyo Story"

Tokyo Story was clearly very different as a Japanese movie than as an American movie. It was about an old couple that went to Tokyo to visit their children. It chronicled their journeys to each child’s house and introduced the viewer to each of their children and the lives that they were living. The movie very well chronicled the way the Japanese view family and what values are placed on family: children are expected to become highly respected and worthy of praise for their parents. Japanese parents feel ashamed if their children do not live up to all that they planned for them. Children, in turn, must also give a lot of respect to their parents for all that they had done for them, although the contemporary society that was portrayed in Tokyo Story showed how children did not always fill out this part of their duty to the family.

But these problems were not highlighted the same way they would have been in an American movie on the same Japanese family. There is no heavy drama to move to story forward: no one gets in a fight during a road trip with a person they will be stuck with for the duration of the journey and there is no solution given at the end of the movie. From observation, most Americans in class seemed incredibly bored by the movie because nothing seemed to be happening. Without a problem that needed to be solved by the end of the movie, as Americans are used to, the audience was subjected to the events of a perfectly normal trip that could actually happen to a normal person during their normal lives. No fighting matches, no tears, no break-ups and reunions between characters, and no one taking sides on any issues. Tokyo Story could have actually happened, and that is boring to an American audience.

Not only was the pace and plot of the movie different, but there was almost no score added to the piece. This is the final piece of the movie that most Americans tend to take for granted, but miss when it’s taken out. Almost every emotional point (or even potential emotional point) in an American movie is highlighted with the appropriate music. Not so for Tokyo Story – other than dialogue and sound affects (the sound of a cup being placed on a table, for instance), there was no sound. This confused the American audience in class because they weren’t being told how a scene should make them feel. This also fed into the universal feeling the class seemed to have towards the movie: boredom. It can’t be said that a Japanese audiences are used to being expected to get their own messages out of movies or even that a Japanese audience wouldn’t also be bored from the movie, but it can be said that most Americans watch movies so they can turn off their brains and let themselves be taken away. It’s for the same reason that thoughtful movies make less money in the box office than mindless action flicks.