The train arrived with a screech of metal on metal. The doors slid open, and Kenji stepped inside, his shoes clicking against the floor.
The most obvious manifestation of uniform temptation appears in the film’s younger generation: the children living in the bustling capital. When the elderly parents, Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama, arrive from the provincial city of Onomichi, they are met not by the raw, unfiltered affection of blood relations, but by the polished, distracted courtesy of uniformed professionals. -ENG- Tokyo Story - The Temptation of Uniform -...
But Ozu complicates this. The elderly are not tempted by their uniform. They wear it out of habit, not ideology. They do not use their age as an excuse for selfishness. When Tomi dies suddenly at the end of the film, she is laid out in a funeral kimono—the final uniform, the one no one chooses. The temptation of uniform, Ozu suggests, is a disease of the living, the middle-aged, the ambitious. The old have already shed the need for costumes. The train arrived with a screech of metal on metal