Steven Okazaki in Person Kyoko, a young Japanese woman who speaks no English, has deserted her tour and now resides in a downtown San Francisco YWCA. With her visa about to expire, Kyoko (Minako Ohashi) is persuaded to marry a Japanese-American, Ken (Ken Nakagawa), in order to obtain a green card. Ken, as it turns out, also has little English, although it is his first and only language. His ambition to be a rock star is equal only to his lack of talent; he is known to his acquaintances as "that slug." A marriage of convenience, at first, seems made in heaven, but it only points out the black hole that his life is. Living on Tokyo Time is about language, its uses, abuses, and uselessness to the culturally uprooted individual. Okazaki heightens the film's low-budget qualities to both comic and poetic effect: the film is paced to its own jet lag. Against a background of garage-rock San Francisco, humorously portrayed, one senses, physically, the emigré experience as a disjuncture in timing, one that won't go away with time.