Retired couple Shūkichi and Tomi Hirayama live in Onomichi in western Japan with their daughter Kyōko, a primary school teacher.

Only their widowed daughter-in-law, Noriko, the wife of their middle son Shōji, who was missing in action and presumed dead during the Pacific War, goes out of her way to entertain them.

Feeling conflicted that they do not have time to entertain them, Kōichi and Shige pay for their parents to stay at a hot spring spa at Atami, but they return early because the nightlife disturbs their sleep.

Upon returning, a frustrated Shige explains she sent them to Atami because she wanted to use their bedroom for a meeting; the elderly couple has to leave for the evening.

The couple remarks on how their children have changed, returning home earlier than planned, intending to see their younger son Keizō when the train stops in Osaka.

Noriko travels from Onomichi back to Tokyo, contemplating the watch, while Shūkichi remains behind, resigned to the solitude he must endure.

Tokyo Story was inspired by the 1937 American film Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey, which it loosely adapts to the Japanese context and Ozu’s style.

[6] The script was developed by Ozu and Noda over a period of 103 days in a ryokan called Chigasakikan in Chigasaki, Kanagawa.

[7] Ozu, Noda and cinematographer Yūharu Atsuta scouted locations in Tokyo and Onomichi for another month before shooting started.

All indoor scenes, except those at the Tokyo Station waiting area and in a passenger car, were shot at the Shochiku Ōfuna Studio in Kamakura, Kanagawa.

"[12][13] In his narrative storytelling, Ozu often had certain key scenes take place off camera, with the viewer only learning about them through the characters' dialogue.

[22] David Desser has compared the film's style and "de-emphasized plot" to Zen Buddhism and the modern world's fascination with surface value and materialism.

[24] Themes in the film include the break-up and Westernization of the traditional Japanese family after World War II and the inevitability of children growing apart from their parents.

[13] The film takes place in 1953 post-war Japan, a few years after the new Civil Code of 1948 stimulated the country's rapid re-growth and embraced Western capitalist ideals, while simultaneously destroying older traditions such as the Japanese family and its values.

The following year Haruko Sugimura won the Mainichi Film Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the eldest daughter Shige.

"[32] 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.

[33] 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.

The website's consensus reads: "Tokyo Story is a Yasujiro Ozu masterpiece whose rewarding complexity has lost none of its power more than half a century on.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times included it in his series of great movies,[18] and Paul Schrader placed it in the "Gold" section of his Film Canon.

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.

"[47] Roger Ebert wrote that the work "lacks sentimental triggers and contrived emotion; it looks away from moments a lesser movie would have exploited.

"[48] In 2010, David Thomson rhetorically asked whether any other family drama in cinematic history was more moving than Tokyo Story.

[49] 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.

[59] German director Doris Dörrie drew inspiration from Tokyo Story for her 2008 film Cherry Blossoms, which follows a similar storyline.