Tokyo Chorus (Shochiku, 1931)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (Sunday, July 9) Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” was of a 1931 Japanese film called Tokyo Chorus, directed by Yasujirô Ozu (who had the reputation of being the go-to guy for films set in 20th-century Japan the way Akira Kurosawa was known as the samurai director – though about half of Kurosawa’s films took place in the Japan of his own time) from a script by Komatsu Kitamura and Kôgo Noda based on a novel called Tokyo no Gassho by Kitamura. The one-line synopsis on imdb.com, “A married Tokyo man faces unemployment after standing up for an older colleague,” sounded suspiciously familiar, so I did a search on the moviemagg blog for “Japanese silents” and came up with a listing for a 1935 film called An Inn in Tokyo, also directed by Ozu and also about a young Japanese man who loses his job and struggles to keep his kids alive, fed and healthy (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/an-inn-in-tokyo-shochiku-1935.html). There are differences between the two films: in Tokyo Chorus the man, Shinji Okajima (Tokihiko Okada, who’s strikingly handsome and projects star charisma), is still married to his children’s mother, while the protagonist of An Inn in Tokyo is raising them as a single father. Also there are three kids in Tokyo Chorus (a son, a daughter, and another son, in that order), while there are only two (both boys) in An Inn in Tokyo. But the biggest difference between the two movies is that Tokyo Chorus is actually presented as a comedy.

The version shown on TCM was accompanied by a solo piano playing light-hearted cues that might have made Ozu’s film seem even lighter than he intended, but “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart stressed that Ozu had been strongly influenced by Hollywood in general and Harold Lloyd in particular. In fact, it’s easy enough to imagine Lloyd starring in an American remake of this film, though in both Tokyo Chorus and An Inn in Tokyo there are also clear borrowings from Charlie Chaplin in general and his 1931 film City Lights in particular. Tokyo Chorus opens with a prologue set seven years before the main action, in which Shinji is a student in a physical-education class in college (though both Charles and I thought it looked like military boot camp) whose teacher, Omura Sensei (Tatsuo Saitô), gives him a hard time. When he orders the students to take off their jackets, Shinji is embarrassed because, unlike the rest, he wasn’t wearing a shirt underneath. Eventually the film flashes forward to seven years later, when Shinji has got married, had three kids, and is working for an insurance company. An older worker, Rou-Shain Yamada (Takeshi Sakamoto), is fired, partly because of his age and partly because he had the bad luck to sell two life insurance policies to people who died almost immediately, one in a car accident and one from typhus. This happens on the day the workers are scheduled to get their annual bonus payments from the boss, and Shinji already has plans for what he’s going to do with the money: a bicycle for his older son (Hideo Sugawara), a parasol for his wife and a new necktie for himself. Only his plans are sidetracked when he tries to convince the boss not to fire Yamada, and he ends up being fired himself. Shinji brings home a toy scooter for his son instead of a bike, and the kid rudely rejects it. Then their daughter (Hideko Takamine) gets deathly ill from eating a bad piece of arrowroot cake her mom bought her as a treat, and Shinji has to sell virtually all his wife’s kimonos to pay for the hospital and doctor bills.

But the fortunes of Shinji and his family are saved by a chance encounter with his old college teacher Omura, who along with his wife (Chokô Iida) has opened a new restaurant called “The Calorie Café” (I guess all the good names for Japanese restaurants were taken). The Calorie Café specializes in curry dishes (like the one my husband Charles and I had had for dinner, though ours had been Thai instead of Japanese) and roast pork, and the couple are desperate to promote it. Omura offers Shinji a job, though to Shinji’s disappointment it’s not being a waiter or cook. Instead, it’s carrying a huge banner advertising the restaurant and passing out leaflets promoting it. Shinji’s wife sees him doing this from a bus and chews him out later for having sunk so low as to be passing out advertising flyers on the street. Shinji protests that he’s only doing this temporarily until Omura can find him a permanent job, and in the end Omura comes through with an offer for Shinji to teach English as a second language to Japanese high-school students. The only down side is it’s in another part of Japan, and that means Shinji and his family will have to leave Tokyo, but eventually they do so. A Japanese magazine called Kinema Junpo rated Tokyo Chorus as one of the 10 best Japanese films of 1931, and while I have no idea what the competition was like, it’s certainly a quite charming and entertaining film.

Incidentally, Ozu was the Chaplin of Japan in more ways than just his penchant for combining comedy and pathos; he held out against dialogue longer than any other Japanese director, not making his first talkie until 1936 (the same year Chaplin made his last silent, Modern Times), though An Inn in Tokyo was conceived as an Eisensteinian “sound film,” with a synchronized music and sound-effects track but no dialogue. Like An Inn in Tokyo, Tokyo Chorus survived in abysmal print quality, replete with nitrate burns; of Ozu’s 30 or so silent films, only 10 survive at all and, if Tokyo Chorus and An Inn in Tokyo are any indication, the Ozu silents that did survive did so barely. One thing that surprised us was how many signs in Tokyo Chorus were in Roman lettering, including the English word “PRIVATE” on the door of Shinji’s boss. Apparently British and/or American culture had far more of an impact on pre-World War II Japan than either Charles or I had thought all these years; there’s even a reference to “Hoover’s policies” not having helped Japan yet, as if the Japanese were expecting to be bailed out by the U.S. government. (In 1931 Herbert Hoover was still President, and in a misguided attempt to deal with the Depression in the U.S. he agreed to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which jacked up taxes on imports and thereby, in the opinion of most modern economists, helped prolong the Depression and make it worldwide.) There are also some anachronisms in the subtitles – this print retained the original Japanese intertitles and ran English translations as subtitles under them – including terms like “wrongful termination” and “overqualified” (a reference to Shinji being told that because of his college degree, no one will hire him as a factory worker) that I doubt were current on either side of the Pacific in 1931.