Tokyo Story was released on November 3, 1953, in Japan. The following year
Haruko Sugimura won the
Mainichi Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the eldest daughter Shige. It was screened at the
National Film Theatre in London in 1957. It is Ozu's best known film in both the East and the West. After the success of
Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon at the
1951 Venice Film Festival, Japanese films began getting international distribution. However, Japanese film exporters considered Ozu's work "too Japanese" and unmarketable. It was not until the 1960s that Ozu's films began to be screened in New York City at film festivals, museums, and theaters. In 1958, it was awarded the first
Sutherland Trophy for the most original and creative film. UK critic
Lindsay Anderson wrote that "It is a film about relationships, a film about time, and how it affects human beings (particularly parents and children) and how we must reconcile ourselves to its workings." After a screening at the
New Yorker Theatre in 1972, it received rave reviews from prominent critics who were unfamiliar with the film or Ozu. Charles Micherer of
Newsweek said it was "like a Japanese paper flower that is dropped into water and then swells to fill the entire container with its beauty."
Stanley Kauffmann put it on his 10 Best list of 1972 and wrote "Ozu, a lyrical poet, whose lyrics swell quietly into the epic."
Box office In Japan, it was the eighth
highest-grossing film of 1953 with in
distributor rental earnings. In France, the film sold 84,646 tickets upon release in 1978. In other European countries, the film sold 92,810 tickets between 1996 and 2021, for a combined tickets sold in Europe.
Critical reception It is also jointly ranked #1 on Metacritic's Filtered "Best Movies of All Time". John Walker, former editor of the ''
Halliwell's Film Guides, places Tokyo Story
at the top of his published list of the best 1000 films ever made. Tokyo Story'' is also included in film critic
Derek Malcolm's
The Century of Films, a list of films which he deems artistically or culturally important, and
Time magazine lists it among its
All-Time 100 Movies.
Roger Ebert of the
Chicago Sun-Times included it in his series of great movies,
Martin Scorsese included it on a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films for a Young Filmmaker." Arthur Nolletti Jr, writing an essay in the book titled ''Ozu's Tokyo Story'', compared the film to its USA predecessor film, McCarey's 1937
Make Way for Tomorrow, and indicated that: "David Bordwell sees Ozu as 'recasting' the American film – borrowing from it, adapting it – and briefly mentions that there are similarities in story, theme and plot structure. Indeed these similarities are striking. Both films focus on an elderly couple who discover that their grown children regard them as a burden; both films are structured as journeys in which the couple are shuffled from one household to another; both films explore much of the same thematic material (e.g., sibling self-centeredness and parental disillusionment); and both films are about the human condition – the cyclical pattern of life with its concomitant joys and sorrows – and the immediate social realities that affect and shape that condition: in McCarey's film,
The Great Depression; in Ozu's, the intensified postwar push toward industrialization. Primarily sober in tone but possessing rich and gentle humor, both films belong to a genre that in Japanese cinema is called
shomin-geki, films dealing with the everyday lives of the lower middle classes."
Tokyo Story is often admired as a work that achieves great emotional effect while avoiding
melodrama. Critic Wally Hammond stated that "the way Ozu builds up emotional empathy for a sense of disappointment in its various characters is where his mastery lies."
Roger Ebert wrote that the work "lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited. It doesn't want to force our emotions, but to share its understanding." In 2010,
David Thomson rhetorically asked whether any other family drama in cinematic history was more moving than
Tokyo Story. Ebert called Ozu "universal", reported having never heard more weeping in an audience than during its showing, and later stated that the work "ennobles the cinema. It says, yes, a movie can help us make small steps against our imperfections."
The Village Voice ranked the film at number 36 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.
Tokyo Story was voted at No. 14 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine
Cahiers du Cinéma in 2008. In 2009 the film was named
The Greatest Japanese Film of All Time by Japanese film magazine
Kinema Junpo.
Entertainment Weekly voted it the 95th Greatest film of all time. Since 1992, the film has appeared consistently in the
British Film Institute's "
polls of the greatest films" of directors and critics published in
Sight and Sound. On the critics' poll, it was third in 1992, fifth in 2002, and third again in 2012. On the directors' poll, it was 17th in 1992, tied at number 16 with
Psycho and
The Mirror in 2002, and in 2012 it topped the poll, receiving 48 votes out of the 358 directors polled. In 2022, it was fourth in both the critics' and directors' polls. In 2010,
The Guardian ranked the film fourth in its list of 25 greatest
arthouse films. ==Influence==