It is here where I live that stairs constantly crash and outer face of apartment buildings is stained after a rainfall, it is here in our city that streets are cleaned and decorated before a special event takes place, like an APEC summit. In Japan everything is created with care and attention. All infrastructural objects are so durable they hardly need renovation. If any of them do, the new version does not differ very much from what was before. Why bother, if the usual variant proved to be good enough, the Japanese think.
That's why if you go to Japan right now, along with newly-built blue-glass skyscrapers like Abeno Harukas you'll find the same good old Tsutenkaku tower. Near Zepp Namba, which did not even appear on Google street view before 2014, between Imamiyaebisu and Shin-Imamiya stations you'll see the same brownish-grey concrete walls, with graffiti scribblings and garbage scattered. And though your tour operators will surely recommend you visiting Tokyo Sky Tree, there is Tokyo Tower, the same as 50 years ago, though with different illuminations.
Instead of Takahashi Mariko's 'Matsuribayashi ga owaru made', you'll probably hear some AKB or Arashi singing a theme song for a TV Drama, or at least some band like UNICORN or Elephant Kashimashi. But in the following ads the text will be read by the same sweet female voice.
The number of such people is falling down, but you'll still find guys in black leather jackets dancing in Yoyogi.
The same pachinko with new signboards, the same small houses for one family with new roofs, the same platforms for new bullet-trains. Lots of things unchanged and some things changing.
What Wim Wenders was trying to find is the Tokyo of the before- and after-war period. Two small black-and-white pictures in the beginning and in the end of the movie will show just how much the city had changed up to '83.
He was comparing two periods - the '83 version and the Ozu's version. Now we can compare 3 of them.
By the way, he did not convince me at all that I should watch any of Ozu's films. Though I surely understood how much a genius he was. What I was impressed with was just how much the angle and lens change the impression of the same street. For me this is sheer magic.
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