Cubs BCB After Dark: Who are you cheering for in the WBC?

It’s the end of another week here at BCB After Dark: the coolest club for night owls, early risers, new parents and Cubs fans abroad. We’re so glad you decided to stop in tonight. We’re waiving the cover charge for this evening. The show will start shortly. We’ve still got a few tables available. The hostess can seat you now. Bring your own beverage.

BCB After Dark is the place for you to talk baseball, music, movies, or anything else you need to get off your chest, as long as it is within the rules of the site. The late-nighters are encouraged to get the party started, but everyone else is invited to join in as you wake up the next morning and into the afternoon.

Last night I asked you who you thought would lead the Cubs in home runs in 2026. It was mostly a two-horse race as Michael Busch won the poll with 49 percent of the vote and Seiya Suzuki received 33 percent.

Here’s the part where we listen to jazz and talk movies. You can skip ahead if you want.

Tonight I’m featuring another one of those NPR Tiny Desk concerts. This one is a solo performance from guitarist Bill Frisell from 2012. Frisell plays three Beatles songs: “Nowhere Man”, “In My Life” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I know that at least some of you like it when I find jazz musicians playing Beatles music.

My plan is to spend the next few weeks going through the 2022 BFI Sight & Sound top ten films of all-time, now that I’ve seen them all. The idea was to do two short capsules on Monday and Wednesday. But this Monday, I got sidetracked with Citizen Kane and didn’t have enough room to give Tokyo Story the kind of respect it deserves.

So tonight I’m writing about Tokyo Story and I don’t have the space to go into In the Mood for Love (2000). Hopefully this feature doesn’t devolve into me writing full essays on each of the ten films, especially since I just wrote up one on the film that finished sixth in the BFI critics poll, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

4. Tokyo Story. (1953) Directed by Yasujirō Ozu. Starring Setsuka Hara, Chishū Ryū and Chieko Higashiyama.

The genius of Tokyo Story is that it’s both very, very Japanese and very, very universal. The universal part is easy to see. It’s about a family and the friction between parents and children. It’s about how change is the only thing that is eternal and how the old give way to the young. The film is loosely based on the 1937 Hollywood picture Make Way for Tomorrow, which similarly deals with an elderly couple who became a burden to their children. 

The very Japanese part comes in two forms. The first, and easiest for Westerners to grasp, is the way that Japan was quickly transforming itself into a modern, capitalist society after the war and how Japanese traditions were being pushed aside. The second way is how director Ozu approaches shooting the film. Tokyo Story is slow and meditative. There’s a certain zen about the whole thing. Not a lot happens and what does often seems trivial. Many important events take place off camera and are mostly elided to rather than explained. What is not being said is often more important than what is. 

Additionally, Ozu shoots the film in a style that is foreign to audiences used to Hollywood, or even European, pictures. While Ozu makes extensive use of hard cuts, he has just one short tracking shot in the entire film. In other words, the camera almost never moves except after a cut. Ozu also continually breaks the “180-degree rule” of film editing, which states that you don’t shoot a scene from one direction and then flip around to the back and shoot from there, which reverses the positions of the actors on the screen. The best way I can describe it is going from a proscenium stage, where the entire audience sees the play from one direction, to a theater in the round. Except that in Tokyo Story the audience is constantly jumping from a seat in one part of the theater in the round to the other.

The reason for the 180-degree rule in film editing is to keep the audience from becoming disoriented but somehow in Tokyo Stor, despite all these weird edits, I never really got lost in my point of view. Maybe the 180-degree rule isn’t as sared as we think. What did confuse me sometimes, however, was Ozu’s frequent use of time ellipses, where there is a time jump that accompanies a jump cut without any clear indication that time had passed. Ozu takes his own sweet time to fill you in on what has happened while you were gone and even then, it’s more implied than spoken of. A character will enter the screen and no one says “Hey, it’s our sister-in-law Noriko” because no one would ever say that in real life. They just say hello, start talking to her and eventually you are able to figure out who Noriko is, but it takes a while. This is a film that you have to pay attention to or you are going to get lost. 

I should also mention Ozu’s frequent use of “tatami” shots, or low-to-the-ground camera angles that give the audience an intimacy that they are sitting in the room with the characters. It also allows Ozu to have the actors stand up from a sitting or kneeling position and keep their heads in the screen without a cut. 

As far as the plot goes, Tokyo Story is thin and that drove me nuts for a while until I caught on to the rhythm of the film. (I’m told that Tokyo Story is actually comparatively plot-heavy for an Ozu film. Yikes.) Shūkichi (Ryū) and Tomi (Higashiyama) are a elderly couple who live traditional lives out in the countryside of Japan. They had five children. The youngest daughter still lives with them in the country and teaches school there. The youngest son lives in Osaka while the oldest son Kōichi (So Yamamura) and oldest daughter Shige (Haruko Sugimura)  live in Tokyo with their families. The old couple take a trip to Tokyo to visit with their children, see their grandchildren as well as daughter-in-law Noriko (Hara), who was married to their second son who never returned from the war and is presumed dead. It takes a while for us to learn that fact, of course.

It quickly becomes apparent that far from being prosperous like the Shūkichi and Tomi thought, their two children and daughter-in-law are actually struggling to make ends meet in an industrial suburb of Tokyo. They’re not poor, but certainly they don’t have much disposable income or free time. Their daughter Shige is a hairdresser and son Kōichi is a doctor with a small pediatric practice. It’s also clear far from being happy about seeing their parents, the two see them as a burden with Shige actually being passive-aggressively nasty to them. 

Despite not being a blood relative, Noriko is a saint to her in-laws, although she doesn’t really have the time or the money to spend with them as she’d like. Still, she makes the effort.

Eventually, the old couple realize that they are just a burden on their children and that neither they nor the new Japan really have any real use for them. 

I’m not going to say nothing happens in the movie beyond that because it does, but in Ozu’s fashion, it mostly happens off-screen and we only get filled in later. There is a kind of climax, but it’s not much of one. In typical American fashion, I kept expecting a big reveal to come from Noriko or someone else, but the actual reveal is really nothing big. You can look at Tokyo Story both from the point of view of “wow, did Ozu get a lot out of a little” or you can look at it and say “Is that all there is?”

I should mention that Setsuka Hara, who played Noriko, was called the Greta Garbo of Japan, both because she was the biggest film star in postwar Japan and because after she decided to retire in 1963, she went into seclusion, refusing all interviews, public appearances and even photographs until her death in 2015. Even that wasn’t announced until months after it happened. 

Would I put this in my top ten? This is tricky, because it’s easy to say that you’d put 40 films in your top ten films of all time. With that in mind, I probably wouldn’t, because I prefer something more plot-driven. I’m not sure I completely understand Tokyo Story either, although listening to the commentary track on the film helped a lot. Having said that, I am convinced that Tokyo Story is a great film and maybe if I watched it a few more times, I might change my mind. Maybe not my cup of tea, but still among the greats. I do recommend it, although maybe not as your first foray into Japanese cinema. 

Welcome back to everyone who skips the music and movies.

The World Baseball Classic is underway in Japan as we speak, and since Spring Training has been kind of quiet, I’m going to ask you again about the WBC.

Tonight’s question is, other than Team USA, which team are you cheering for in the 2026 WBC? I’m leaving Team USA out of this because I don’t think it is helpful to find out what the readers of a US-based site think of Team USA. In any way, as Cubs fans, I think we all want Pete Crow-Armstrong, Alex Bregman and Matthew Boyd to do well with Team USA.

But my approach to the FIFA World Cup, at least on the men’s side, is to have a team to pull for other than Team USA. I’ve always believed that every American should be able to cheer for the US and for whatever country you trace your origins to. But it could also be a country that you’ve visited. Maybe you want to cheer for Samurai Japan because of Seiya Suzuki. Or Team Venezuela for Daniel Palencia. Or maybe you love Miguel Amays and Panama. (And man, we all loved Amaya’s parents when they came to Wrigley with their little Panamanian flags.) Or maybe your just think Australia is cool.

So other than Team USA, who are you pulling for to do well in the WBC? Maybe not necessarily win it all—Czechia is very unlikely to win the tournament but they have a lot of fans with their plucky, mostly amateur character and you’d like them to win as much as possible.

If you only want the US to win, vote for the team you’d cheer for if Team USA were somehow disqualified. The point of the WBC is to make baseball more popular outside of the US anyways.

If you’re asking about me, you can check out my last name and discover that it’s of Dutch origin. So I’m cheering for the Netherlands. I always have.

Thank you for stopping by tonight and all week. Please get home safely. Tell your friends about us. Check around your table so you don’t forget anything. Recycle any cans and bottles. Tip your waitstaff. And join us again next week for more BCB After Dark.