{ "id": "eptx5axgb1", "slug": "an-inn-in-tokyo", "title": "An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿)", "updated": "2026-11-01", "topic_path": [ { "id": "culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture" }, { "id": "culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films", "label": "Films and standalone screen works", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works", "label": "Individual films by title and year", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent", "label": "Early and silent cinema", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features", "label": "Silent feature films", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features" }, { "id": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1927-2012", "label": "Released 1927 to 2012", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/topics/culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1927-2012" } ], "geo": [ { "id": "geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Asia (other) · 1800 to 1945: Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance.screen", "path": [ { "id": "geo.asia", "label": "Asia (other)", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia" }, { "id": "geo.asia.t1800", "label": "Asia (other) · 1800 to 1945", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia.t1800" }, { "id": "geo.asia.t1800.culture", "label": "Arts and culture", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia.t1800.culture" }, { "id": "geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance", "label": "Screen and stage", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance" }, { "id": "geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance.screen", "label": "Film and television", "api_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/api/v1/geo/geo.asia.t1800.culture.performance.screen" } ] } ], "excerpt": "An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿, Tokyo no yado) is Yasujiro Ozu's 1935 silent drama, his final surviving silent and last Kihachi film, following an unemployed father and his two sons through Depression-era Tokyo, released by Shochiku on 21 November 1935.", "snippet": "An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿, Tokyo no yado) is Yasujiro Ozu's 1935 silent drama, his final surviving silent and last Kihachi film, following an unemployed father and his two sons through Depression-era Tokyo, released by Shochiku on 21 November 1935.", "node": "culture.performance.screen.films.films.individual-works.early-silent.silent-features.yr-1927-2012", "markdown": "# An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿)\n\n**An Inn in Tokyo** (東京の宿, *Tōkyō no yado*) is a 1935 Japanese silent drama directed by Ozu Yasujiro (小津安二郎), produced by Shochiku at its Kamata studio and released on 21 November 1935. Running 80 minutes in black and white, it follows an unemployed father and his two young sons through Depression-era Tokyo, and it is Ozu's final surviving silent film as well as the last of his series of films starring the character Kihachi.[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) • [2](https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-yasujiro-ozu/season%3A1/videos/an-inn-in-tokyo)\n\n| Key fact | Detail |\n|---|---|\n| Release | 21 November 1935, Shochiku; 80 minutes, black and white, 35 mm, standard 1.33:1 ratio[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) |\n| Director and studio | Ozu Yasujiro; Shochiku Kinema, Kamata studio[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) |\n| Screenplay | Original story credited to Uinzato Mone (ウィンザアト・モネ), a joint pseudonym of Ozu, Tadao Ikeda, and Masao Arata punning on \"Without Money\"[3](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/131588) |\n| Sound format | A late \"sound version\" of a silent film: recorded music but no spoken dialogue, with intertitles[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) |\n| Place in Ozu's work | Final surviving silent film and the last of the Kihachi series starring Sakamoto Takeshi[2](https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-yasujiro-ozu/season%3A1/videos/an-inn-in-tokyo) • [4](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2023-07/2) |\n| Contemporary reception | 9th place in Kinema Junpo's Best Ten critics' poll[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) |\n| Editing pace | Average shot length of 4.5 seconds, half the 9.1 seconds of Ozu's first sound film, *The Only Son* (1936)[5](https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/article/9deac7e2-4b7f-43cd-833d-18dfa261775f) |\n\n## Spoilers\n\n### Story\n\nKihachi (Sakamoto Takeshi), an unemployed laborer abandoned by his wife, drifts through Tokyo's industrial outskirts with his two young sons, Zenko and Masako (Tokkan Kozo and Suematsu Takayuki), sleeping in cheap inns and catching stray dogs for reward money. At a cheap boarding house the family meets Otaka (Okada Yoshiko), an unemployed mother, and her daughter Kimiko (Ojima Kazuko), and Kihachi grows attached to her. He finds work, but Otaka and her daughter disappear; the girl has fallen ill with dysentery, and Otaka has taken a job as a bar hostess to earn her hospital fees. When Kihachi encounters her there, he turns to theft to help the woman and her sick child, a tragic ending that Japanese sources describe as unusual for the Kihachi series.[3](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/131588) • [6](https://www.shochiku.co.jp/cinema/database/01793/)\n\nThe film also reunites Kihachi with Otsune (Iida Choko), a woman from his past whom he meets by chance at a cheap eatery, and Ryu Chishu appears as a policeman.[7](https://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/T/TokyoNoYado1935.html) • [8](https://soundtrack-of-ozu.info/movie/239)\n\n### The Kihachi series and its ending\n\nKihachi was Ozu's recurring working-class protagonist, always played by Sakamoto Takeshi, in *Passing Fancy* (1933), *A Story of Floating Weeds* (1934), *An Innocent Maid* (1935), and this film, which Japanese sources count as the fourth and final Kihachi picture.[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) • [11](https://www.kcf.or.jp/furuishiba/josetsu/ozu/) *An Inn in Tokyo* plays like a somber sequel to *Passing Fancy*: both Kihachis are laborers raising children and both become attached to women on the margins, but the Kihachi of *Passing Fancy* is employed, and the comic touches and the surrounding community that leaven the earlier film are gone here.[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) The tragic theft ending was singled out by Shochiku's own database as singular for the series, and the film's bleak mood reflects the [Depression](https://www.edgepedia.org/depression) years.[6](https://www.shochiku.co.jp/cinema/database/01793/)\n\n## Production and the coming of sound\n\nThe film sits at the end of Japan's long silent era. Sound films reached popular acceptance in Japan well into the 1930s, and Ozu held out until 1936's *The Only Son*, making more than twenty silents in just over five years.[9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/roots-neorealism) *An Inn in Tokyo* is a transitional \"sound version\": dialogue was not recorded, but a musical score by composer Ito Senji, performed by the Shochiku Kamata orchestra under music director Horiuchi Keizo, was recorded on the soundtrack.[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686)\n\nOzu's resistance to sound was personal as well as artistic. He had promised his cameraman Hideo Mohara (茂原英朗) to use only Mohara's proprietary recording system, while Shochiku held a contract with Tsuchihashi Sound; around the time of making the film he wrote in his diary, \"I made Mohara this long-held promise. If I want to keep this promise, I may have to quit directing. That would be fine with me too.\"[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) The studio pressed him to move to sound filmmaking, and he later stated that Shochiku made him direct *An Inn in Tokyo* as if it were a sound film.[4](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2023-07/2)\n\nThe original story credit, Uinzato Mone, was a joke by Ozu and his screenwriters on their own finances, a pun on \"without money\"; Ozu's diary from the period mentions his money worries repeatedly. The shoot was interrupted by army service, and the production took place amid upheaval: Ozu's father had died the previous year, and Shochiku was preparing to move its studio from Kamata to Ofuna.[3](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/131588) • [10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/)\n\n## Style and the industrial city\n\nRather than the bustling streets of central Tokyo, Kihachi and his sons roam a flat industrial landscape of giant spools, gasometers (huge cylindrical tanks storing town gas), telegraph poles, and smokestacks, filmed in Tokyo's reclaimed bay-side area. Ozu returns repeatedly to shots of the three characters dwarfed by these markers of modernity, and the Koto ward's local history notes the gas tank and the Aioi Bridge as recurring Ozu motifs of the downtown cityscape.[9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/roots-neorealism) • [11](https://www.kcf.or.jp/furuishiba/josetsu/ozu/)\n\nThe film is also an early showcase for Ozu's transition shots, the nearly abstract cutaways of smoke, sky, and fireworks later called \"pillow shots\" by critic Noël Burch. In this film they still draw attention to themselves, echoing the razzle-dazzle of Ozu's gangster pictures, and they interrupt the tunnel vision that poverty creates with a reminder of a wider world.[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) The cutting is fast by Ozu's later standards: the film's average shot length of 4.5 seconds is half that of *The Only Son*, and Ozu's cutting did not return to this speed in his sound career.[5](https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/article/9deac7e2-4b7f-43cd-833d-18dfa261775f)\n\n## Reception and legacy\n\nKinema Junpo's critics ranked the film 9th in its Best Ten for 1935.[1](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686) Later criticism has centered on two points. First, its resemblance to [Italian neorealism](https://www.edgepedia.org/italian-neorealism): like De Sica's *Bicycle Thieves*, it observes the grinding details of poverty, and the film's most famous sequence, a starving family's imaginary picnic among smokestacks, anticipates the trattoria scene in De Sica's film. The film historian David Bordwell, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote that in its rigorous visual patterning and plaintive themes, \"An Inn in Tokyo constitutes a summary of Ozu's silent work.\"[12](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2004-04/1) • [9](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/roots-neorealism)\n\nSecond, its place in Ozu's development. The film combines silent-era melodrama with the formalism of his postwar style, and its low-angled compositions, shots of cloudless skies and empty alleys, and juxtapositions of flatness and depth are described by the Harvard Film Archive as hard-earned achievements of the silent years that carried into his later work.[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) • [4](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2023-07/2) A print survives and circulates through Janus Films; the film has been screened with live musical accompaniment at archives and festivals, including the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and Harvard Film Archive.[10](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/) • [4](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2023-07/2)\n\n## References\n\n1. [東京の宿, KINENOTE (Kinema Junpo)](https://www.kinenote.com/main/public/cinema/detail.aspx?cinema_id=65686)\n2. [An Inn in Tokyo, The Criterion Channel](https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-yasujiro-ozu/season%3A1/videos/an-inn-in-tokyo)\n3. [東京の宿 (1935), allcinema](https://www.allcinema.net/cinema/pdf/131588)\n4. [An Inn in Tokyo, Harvard Film Archive (2023)](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2023-07/2)\n5. [Cinemetrics article on Ozu's shot lengths, University of Chicago](https://cinemetrics.uchicago.edu/article/9deac7e2-4b7f-43cd-833d-18dfa261775f)\n6. [東京の宿, Shochiku film database](https://www.shochiku.co.jp/cinema/database/01793/)\n7. [Tôkyô no yado (1935), Silent Era Progressive Silent Film List](https://www.silentera.com/PSFL/data/T/TokyoNoYado1935.html)\n8. [東京の宿, Soundtrack of Ozu](https://soundtrack-of-ozu.info/movie/239)\n9. [The roots of neorealism, Sight and Sound (BFI)](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/features/roots-neorealism)\n10. [An Inn in Tokyo, essay by Monica Nolan, San Francisco Silent Film Festival](https://silentfilm.org/an-inn-in-tokyo/)\n11. [小津安二郎紹介展示コーナー, Koto City Culture and Community Foundation](https://www.kcf.or.jp/furuishiba/josetsu/ozu/)\n12. [An Inn in Tokyo, Harvard Film Archive (2004)](https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/an-inn-in-tokyo-2004-04/1)\n\n---\n*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1927 to 2012*\n\n*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*\n\n*Copyright 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI.*\n\nLicense: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license\n", "same_as": [], "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo", "markdown_url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo.md", "license": { "name": "Edgepedia Community License 1.0", "url": "https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license", "summary": "Free with credit, commercial use included. AI training is open to everyone. For other uses, organizations over USD 100M in revenue or 100M monthly users license separately.", "spdx": "LicenseRef-Edgepedia-Community-1.0" }, "credit": "\"An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "credit_md": "\"[An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿)](https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), [https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo](https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo). [Edgepedia Community License 1.0](https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license).", "credit_html": "\"An Inn in Tokyo (東京の宿)\", Edgepedia (EdgeChat), https://www.edgepedia.org/an-inn-in-tokyo. Edgepedia Community License 1.0.", "speakable": "An Inn in Tokyo is Yasujiro Ozu's 1935 silent drama, his final surviving silent and last Kihachi film, following an unemployed father and his two sons through Depression-era Tokyo, released by Shochiku on 21 November 1935." }