Director: Yoji Yamada
Category: I (Japanese)
With directing credits for films including a 48-film series about Tora-san the travelling salesman, and the Oscarnominated 2002 feature The Twilight Samurai (which won the Japanese Academy Award for best picture), Yoji Yamada is one of Japan’s most revered filmmakers.
But in the minds of some people, the veteran auteur, 81, may have overreached by inviting comparisons between his latest film and the great Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story.
Released 60 years after Ozu’s masterpiece, Tokyo Family has a similar story: an elderly couple journey from their home in rural Japan to visit their grown-up children in the capital, only to find that their children are too busy.
While Ozu’s drama was set in a period when Japanese people could envision a brighter future for themselves, Yamada’s film shows a country where even doctors cannot afford to live in a central part of Tokyo – and where scars from the 2011earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster are still fresh in the national psyche.
Tokyo Family is not intended as a carbon copy – and in many ways is a distinctively Yoji Yamada work.