Tokyo Story is about the gap between generations in a typical Japanese family. It tells a simple, sad story of an elderly couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their two married children, only to find themselves politely ushered off to a hot springs resort. Ozu's technique, as spare and concentrated as a Haiku master's verse, transforms the very banalities of the subject into moments of intimacy and beauty seldom captured on film.
The foundation for Tokyo Story was Leo McCarey's Make Way for Tomorrow. In his introduction to the Japan Society's recent Ozu retrospective, Japanese film scholar Tadao Sato discussed the influence of this and other American films on Ozu's work: “(Ozu) began making films by applying to Japanese situations the images he had stored up of American films...something he later admitted quite openly.... For the most part, what Ozu added to these American originals were, first, a systematic style of composition that made each of his scenes like a still life...and second, an overall unified appearance of tranquility.... But looking at his various themes--the love between parent and child, sorrow over the dimming of human affection, loneliness at the parting of loved ones...all qualities which are mentioned as making his works particularly Japanese--we can say that they were copied almost whole from the American films which Ozu used as a foundation for his own work.”