Living on Tokyo Time

Steve Okazaki is a young director of documentary films, including Unfinished Business, a look at the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. That film garnered an Oscar nomination as best feature documentary.

For his first fictional feature, Okazaki has chosen material that is much lighter in tone. It’s called Living on Tokyo Time, and it’s a bittersweet little comedy about culture shock.

Kyoko (Minako Ohashi) is a Tokyo girl who has just learned that her fiancée is unfaithful. Without knowing quite what she’ll do, she flees to the wide-open promise of the United States, settling in San Francisco and working at a Japanese restaurant while she bones up on her English.

Ken (Ken Nakagawa) is all-American: He plays guitar in a basement rock band, supports his music habit with a janitorial job and consumes his weight in junk food daily. Only problem is, he’s got all the charisma of a cold bowl of noodles.

A mutual friend (Kate Connell) sees that Kyoko needs an extension for her green card, and Ken needs a jolt to rouse him from his lethargy. The obvious solution? Marry these two strangers.

So, Kyoko marries Ken. The remainder of the film allows them to get to know each other, in ways tentative and tender. Frankly, Kyoko can’t summon up much enthusiasm for Ken, though she repeatedly insists that he is “a really nice person.”

Okazaki keeps it all very low-key and droll, and doesn’t feel it necessary to force himself toward a happy ending. Some of the movie’s nicest moments come courtesy of the peripheral characters. Kyoko has her waitress friends; Ken has his janitorial buddies, and the members of his (admittedly dreadful) garage rock band.

The band leader (John McCormick, who also scripted with Okazaki), for instance, has some sage advice for Ken: no wives in the band – remember what broke up the Beatles. The band members, instead of rehearsing, sit around and wonder what they’ll do with all their money when they hit it big.

Okazaki finds little true scenes such as that, and they keep his film charming. In a way, Living on Tokyo Time is like the B-side of one of the traditional family comedies of Yasujiro Ozu, in which arranged marriages are performed and complications ensue. In this case, the marriage is utterly spontaneous – yet the same sorts of human problems do tend to turn up.

As the unpolished cinematography attests, Living on Tokyo Time wears its low-budget trappings openly. The acting suffers the most; while the performers are amiable enough, they’re clearly just this side of non-professionals. But even this element of roughness supports the film’s humble, friendly appeal.

First published in The Herald, circa August 1987

Okazaki would win an Oscar in 1991, for documentary short subject, for his film Days of Waiting. Most of his work has been in documentary since then, and I never saw his other fiction film, The Lisa Theory, the title of which sounds alarmingly like too many Sundance comedies of the 90s.