Word: tokyo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...long ago, a small-time Tokyo businessman named Tadao Nakata hit upon an idea that he hoped would bring him, as he later put it, "tons of money for the future." He contracted with a California publisher to import 10,000 copies of a grossly prurient quarterly called Trio, which billed itself rather improbably as "a cultural, scientific and sociological publication." Yet even though Nakata had the printers take an air brush to some of the more explicit photographs, Japanese officialdom was outraged. First, customs authorities forced Nakata to have 37 "undesirable" spots in each copy daubed with ink before...
...magazine was blue enough to make a Times Square news dealer wince, but Japanese intellectuals have since made Nakata into a kind of Ginza Ginzburg. Critic Isamu Kurita, writing in the influential Tokyo daily Yomiuri Shimbun, warned that excessive official zeal in enforcing Japan's tough obscenity laws could lead to "the barbarization of our culture and civilization in its crudest form." Tokyo Psychology Professor Kazuo Shimada sputtered that Nakata's arrest was unfair because sex "is a personal and private matter." Mitsuo Takeya, a leading Japanese nuclear physicist, worried that government repression "could end up by distorting...
...splintering the family--and all of Japanese society. He directs transitions from one locale to another by introducing each new scene with a shot not only loaded with symbolism, but prolonged to the extent that it almost becomes a still. After the opening scene in Shimonoseki, the shift to Tokyo is indicated by the stark image of smokestacks against a smutty sky, and the title "an industrial neighborhood in Tokyo." Setting the mood for each episode with similarly fitting images, Ozu unrolls a cinematic parchment of Japanese prints, the black and white photography of the film heightening its formal links...
...oblivious tot, with a wistful but optimistic view of the future. Her strongest link with the future, although she successfully hides it from both children and husband alike, is a sure fore-knowledge of her own approaching death. This is to be her first and last visit to Tokyo. But she never lets her intuition become evident; she cannot lower herself by making her children feel guilty, though they have sinned against their parents by failing to show them the devotion traditionally due one's elders...
...weave by his story. The family never speaks of "dying"; the term they use is "not living". The old man speaks of his wife as if she were yet alive and watching over him at the remove of a distance much smaller than the trainride from Shimonoseki to Tokyo...