tokyo ga wim wenders — Tokyo-Ga│© Wim Wenders Foundation

“If there were still sanctuaries in our century, if there was something like a holy treasure of cinema, for me, that would be the work of Japanese director Yasujirou Ozu. He made fifty-four films. Silent movies in the 1920s, black-and-white films in the 1930s and 1940s, and finally color films until his death on the twelfth of December, 1963, on his sixtieth birthday. Although these films are distinctly Japanese, they are also global. In them I recognized all families, in all the countries in the world, as well as my own parents, my brother, and myself.

Never before and never again was film so close to its essence and its purpose: showing an image of the human in our century. A usable, true, and valid image, one in which he cannot only see himself but rather learn something about himself. Ozu’s work doesn’t need my appraisal. And such a ‘holy treasure of cinema’ is just imaginary. So my journey to Tokyo was no pilgrimage. I was curious to see if I could discover something from this time, whether something was left of his work, images, perhaps, or people, even… Or if in the twenty years since Ozu’s death so much had changed in Tokyo that there was nothing left to be found.” — Wim Wenders

Amid the neon glow and relentless motion of Tokyo, German filmmaker Wim Wenders set off on a three-week journey in the spring of 1983 that would become Tokyo-Ga (1985), a deeply personal essay film filmed in 16 mm, and later edited alongside his Palme d’Or winner Paris, Texas. Wenders arrived with a singular quest, to trace the legacy of Yasujirou Ozu, the Japanese master whose quiet formalism and intimate depictions of family life had profoundly influenced him.

Yet, as Wenders would recognise, Tokyo in the early 1980s was no longer the tranquil, tatami-framed city that Ozu portrayed. Instead it had become a roaring metropolis, layered with global brands and shimmering signs, neon and Coca-Cola replacing paper lanterns and cicadas. Confronted with this flux, Wenders does not seek to impose a narrative of loss or lamentation. Rather he wanders, camera in hand, investigating the tension between the stillness of Ozu’s vision and the kinetic urgency of 1980s Japan.

Tokyo-Ga opens with archival footage of Ozu’s Tokyo Story (1953), bookending Wenders’ journey through encounters with Ozu’s collaborators, such as actor Chishu Ryu and cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta, and surreal visits into the present: restaurants with plastic food displays, pachinko halls, a golf range clinging to the skyline. In this way, Tokyo itself becomes a character, a city caught between memory and reinvention, permanence and drift. At its heart, the film is a meditation on impermanence. The Japanese concept of mu, of “nothingness” or transience, echoes the ideogram on Ozu’s tomb. Wenders’ voice-over quietly asks whether the world Ozu captured even still exists, or whether it has been absorbed by the relentless onward motion of modernity. Through his wandering gaze, Wenders charts not just a city changed, but the fragility of cinema itself, the idea that images, once anchored in place and time, may dissolve as fast as they were formed.

Ozu’s Presence and Absence in Tokyo-Ga

In the early 1980s, Wim Wenders stood at a pivotal point in his career. Having emerged as one of the central figures of the New German Cinema alongside Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Werner Herzog, Wenders had already achieved international acclaim with Paris, Texas (1984), a poetic road movie that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and established him as a filmmaker of profound humanism and visual restraint. Between that film and his next masterpiece, Wings of Desire (1987), Wenders found himself drawn eastward, toward a Japan that existed, for him, as both myth and memory. This interlude would produce Tokyo-Ga, a meditative documentary that served less as a travelogue than as a cinematic pilgrimage to the spirit of Yasujiro Ozu, the Japanese director whom Wenders regarded as a moral and artistic compass in a rapidly modernizing world.

Ozu’s presence in Tokyo-Ga is paradoxically defined by absence. Wenders arrives in Tokyo more than twenty years after Ozu’s death in 1963, armed with the conviction that the director’s vision, his calm observation of life’s impermanence, had captured the essence of Japan. Yet what he finds is a city transformed, a neon labyrinth of pachinko parlors, television screens, and bullet trains. Through this visual cacophony, Wenders searches for traces of Ozu’s Japan, in the physical landmarks of Late Spring (1949) or Tokyo Story (1953), but also in gestures, faces, and fleeting moments that might still bear the imprint of his spirit.

In interviews, Wenders has described Ozu as “the most disciplined filmmaker” he ever encountered, one who “filmed life as it is lived, and in doing so, gave it dignity”. Tokyo-Ga pays homage to that discipline, yet it also reveals Wenders’ melancholy realization that such a worldview may no longer be possible. His camera roams through Tokyo with reverence but also disquiet, skyscrapers pierce the skyline where tatami rooms once grounded the rhythm of life; mass-produced entertainment replaces ritual; and the Japanese family, once Ozu’s moral nucleus, appears dispersed in the urban sprawl.

The documentary finds fragments of continuity in the delicate hands of Chishu Ryu, Ozu’s longtime actor, now aged and contemplative, in the craft of Shochiku’s veteran cameraman Yuharu Atsuta, who still maintains Ozu’s minimalist shooting techniques, and in the meticulous construction of wax food replicas, an art form Wenders films with quiet fascination, perhaps recognizing in it the same aesthetic devotion that defined Ozu’s cinema. Through these encounters, Tokyo-Ga becomes a meditation on artistic inheritance, the persistence of form and meaning in a world bent on erasure. The film’s tone oscillates between elegy and inquiry. Wenders narrates in voiceover with restrained emotion, his words tinged with the sadness of someone witnessing the disappearance of a world he never truly knew. The Tokyo of Tokyo-Ga is both real and spectral, a landscape haunted by cinema, memory, and the modern condition. In this sense, Ozu’s “presence” in the film transcends biography. He becomes an emblem of integrity and slowness, an antidote to the visual noise of contemporary life.

Ultimately, the film is less about Ozu as a historical figure than about the possibility of seeing, and living, as Ozu did. Through Wenders’ lens, Ozu’s spirit becomes a question: how can one still find beauty, humility, and order in a world that has forgotten how to pause? The film does not answer, but in its lingering silences and patient observation, it gestures toward the same moral clarity that defined Ozu’s cinema. In doing so, Wenders not only mourns a vanished Tokyo but also reaffirms the enduring presence of a filmmaker who, in absence, remains more visible than ever.

Tokyo as a Character

Wim Wenders transforms the city itself into a character, restless, hypnotic, and disorienting. The Tokyo he discovers in the mid-1980s is not the serene, tatami-lined world of Yasujiro Ozu, but a sprawling, vertical organism pulsing with light and noise. Through Wenders’ wandering lens, Tokyo becomes both subject and metaphor, a city in perpetual flux, where tradition has dissolved into surfaces, and where the rhythm of daily life has been subsumed by the hum of modernity.

The film’s images of pachinko parlors epitomize this transformation. Shot in long, unbroken takes, the camera glides through rows of gleaming machines and faces bathed in fluorescent light. The clattering of the steel balls replaces the quiet of family conversations that once defined Ozu’s domestic interiors. Wenders observes these scenes with anthropological detachment and poetic melancholy, capturing the hypnotic trance of mass entertainment. Here, leisure has become mechanical, ritual emptied of meaning. The pachinko hall, in Wenders’ view, is a symptom of a broader cultural amnesia, a Japan fascinated by repetition yet disconnected from reflection.

Equally striking are the rooftop golf ranges, hovering above the metropolis like surreal playgrounds. Wenders films these spaces with the same fascination Ozu reserved for trains and smokestacks, emblems of progress and human adaptability. The golfers, silhouetted against a hazy skyline, swing endlessly into the void, their movements precise but purposeless. The image becomes a metaphor for urban life itself. Beneath the humor of these scenes lies a quiet despair, the realization that modern Tokyo, for all its vitality, is haunted by the loss of stillness and interiority.

In contrast, Wenders’ visit to a sampuru (from English “sample”) factory, where artisans craft lifelike wax replicas of food, offers a rare glimpse of continuity amid the flux. The meticulous artisanship, with its devotion to detail and illusion, evokes Ozu’s own cinematic precision. Each model dish, suspended in time, becomes a symbol of Japan’s ambiguous relationship with impermanence (mu). The sampuru artisans freeze what must vanish, transforming the ephemerality of meals into eternal simulacra. Wenders’ camera lingers on their gestures with tenderness, as if to suggest that even imitation can hold a trace of reverence when guided by care. Through these vignettes, Tokyo-Ga articulates a meditation on mu and memory, or more precisely, on their erosion. Wenders, as both observer and pilgrim, perceives a society caught between reverence for the past and obsession with novelty. The Tokyo he films is one where cultural symbols persist only as aesthetic ghosts. The film’s subdued narration crystallizes the feeling of a filmmaker mourning an entire way of seeing: “If there were still any images in the world that could make me happy, then they would be those of Ozu,” Wenders confides.

In the filmmaker’s Tokyo, movement is constant but memory falters. The city breathes, expands, and forgets, and in doing so, embodies the paradox of modern Japan. Tokyo-Ga refuses nostalgia, yet it cannot escape the gravity of loss. Tokyo is a mirror of the global condition, a metropolis where the sacred has become synthetic, and where beauty flickers, briefly and uncertainly, amid the hum of pachinko machines and the humdrum of progress. By turning Tokyo into a living metaphor for mu, Wenders extends Ozu’s legacy beyond imitation. His camera finds poetry in the ordinary, but it also bears witness to the fragility of cultural memory. The city, in all its shimmering impermanence, becomes both subject and warning. In the rush toward the future, the act of seeing, and remembering, may be the first thing to disappear.

Sébastien Raineri