An Inn in Tokyo (Tokyo no yado)

Live Musical Accompaniment
Screening on Film

Directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
With Sakamoto Takeshi, Okada Yoshiko, Iida Choko.
Japan, 1933, 35mm, black & white, silent, 80 min.
Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

Ozu’s final silent and the last to feature the recurring character Kihachi as a protagonist, An Inn in Tokyo stars Sakamoto Takeshi as an unemployed father whose two sons join him as he wanders from one factory to another in search of a job. In their father’s absence, Zenko and Masako (Tokkan Kozou and Suematsu Takayuki) catch stray dogs for coins; unlike the boys in I Was Born, But …, the two are fully aware of their lot in life. At night Kihachi and his sons sleep in cheap inns. The three form a fortuitous bond with Otaka, an unemployed mother (Okada Yoshiko), and her daughter Kimiko (Ojima Kazuko). An Inn in Tokyo has drawn many comparisons to Italian neorealist cinema, as its subjects are similarly bound to dead time. Ozu’s observant details about the temporal effects of poverty have influenced films like Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs (2013). Ozu stated that Shochiku made him direct An Inn in Tokyo as if it were a sound film, against his reluctance to make talkies. Despite this request for change, An Inn in Tokyo proves that the silent years were integral for Ozu’s development of a singular style: the film’s low-angled and angular compositions, shots of cloudless skies and empty alleys, and graceful juxtapositions of flatness and depth, are the hard-earned achievements of a punctilious practice.
(Description by Kelley Dong)

For more information, please see Harvard Film Archive website.

~Preceded by~

A Straightforward Boy (Tokkan kozou)

Directed by Ozu Yasujiro.
Japan, 1929, 35mm, black & white, silent, 14 min.
Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

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