The nights are coming earlier, and the days are getting colder, with the promise of a few flurries falling on the concrete warrens of Tokyo. It can only mean one thing: Christmas is coming to the Japanese capital. A purely secular holiday for the vast majority in Japan, Christmas is nonetheless a prime day for celebration. (Even if mostly as an excuse to string up multi-colored lights, grab a cake from 7-11 and a bucket of chicken from KFC, and go out on expensive date nights.) And for those looking for a Japanese film to add to your seasonal rotation, one stands above them all: renowned director Kon Satoshi’s anime Christmas classic, Tokyo Godfathers.
Debuting in Japanese theaters in 2003, Tokyo Godfathers was a marked departure for Kon. An auteur of the highest order, his previous two films – Perfect Blue (1997) and Millenium Actress (2001) – were noted for their blending of the real and unreal, moving from grounded scenes to surrealistic, hallucinatory imagery, constantly asking the audience to decipher which was which. His future TV series, Paranoia Agent (2004), and final film, Paprika (2006), would take these mind-bending, often sinister flights of fantasy to new heights. Smack in the middle of these hallucinatory outings is Tokyo Godfathers: a comparatively grounded, hilarious, and even downright wholesome Christmas film.
(Well, it’s wholesome in outcome and message, if not even close to being a squeaky-clean Hallmark film. It’s a film about family, but it may not be fit the entire family.)
The Godfather of Anime Christmas Films
Tokyo Godfathers is the Christmas-set story of three homeless Tokyoites – middle-aged drunk Gin, trans woman Hana, and runaway Miyuki. The three struggle to get by, existing as a sort of dysfunctional found family, living out of cardboard shanties in a park in the shadow of Shinjuku’s Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. On Christmas Eve, while sifting through recycling, they chance upon an abandoned baby. Their journey to bring the baby back to its parents draws them into a series of semi-miraculous adventures through the Tokyo underworld and beyond.
The result is a bonafide Christmas classic. Tokyo Godfathers starts with a sermon half-heartedly attended by a group of the unhoused, and ends with salvation. It blends mediums and genres, creating one of Japan’s most unique films – and an excitingly atypical holiday tale from one of the greatest anime directors of all time.
In a 2002 interview, Kon said:
“It’s in different taste than my previous two movies. It doesn’t mix unreality and reality in the same way… I’d call it a ‘twisted tale of human empathy.'”
Kon served as director, creator, and co-scriptwriter. He was joined by screenwriter Nobumoto Keiko, notable for her roles as head writer on the anime classic Cowboy Bebop and as creator of Wolf’s Rain. Kon called Nobumoto his “drinking buddy,” and said she brought “a warm, kind lens when creating characters” to his “love of tricky, sneaky structures.” [1] The two of them set off to create a story combining elements of a shelved Kon concept called “Tokyo Ghost,” a supernatural mystery about a homeless man who meets the spirit of a deceased young woman, [2] and the Hollywood classic Three Godfathers. Kon read deeply on the topic of homelessness, adding elements of real stories he encountered.
Unlike his previous films, the main focus of this film would be “character.” Nobumoto would be invaluable in crafting the individualistic and deeply drawn personages in question. Meanwhile, Kon made the intial character designs himself; his goal was to make them as physically distinctive as possible. (He hated how similar many anime faces looked.) [3] He then set these characters within a living, breathing animated Tokyo.
Tokyo in the Spotlight
Having now lived in Tokyo for over five years total, it’s shocking how well this film inhabits the city. One can unironically use the cliche “New York was like a character in the film,” with NYC replaced by the Japanese capital. But Kon goes beyond the surface, showing us Tokyo on the fringes, by turns vibrant and dingey. This is the Tokyo the tourism board wants to draw you away from; of people teetering on the edge of poverty and living on the streets. It’s a Tokyo where the nightlife word of hostesses and drag bars intersect with organized crime and gambling; where the debt-hounded slip away into the night, disappearing to places where creditors can’t find them. This is all more appropriate for a film about the unhoused, who have to exist in the urban environment much more directly than most of us.
There are shades of more recent directors like Sean Baker, creator of films about people on the fringes like Tangerine (2015), The Florida Project (2017), and Red Rocket (2021). Baker’s films also contain honest and at times humorous depictions of poverty and intersections with nightlife and sex work; the difference with Tokyo Godfathers is the extremely optimistic view it takes. Godfathers shows a grimy reality twinned with a story of lucky breaks, found-family ties; even heroism. Kon perfectly meshes realism and surrealism, human tragedy and zany humor. The universe bends and contorts to draw our down-on-their-luck heroes towards the saving of a single baby, and the redemption of us all. Even the buildings of Tokyo seem to express pleasure and distress at the goings-on.
Gin, Hana, Miyuki, and baby Kiyoko journey from their humble homes in Shinjuku all the way across the Sumida River to Kinshicho. Back across the river, the orange glow of Tokyo Tower dominates. Scenes are set in convenience stores and family restaurants, snack bars, and unfinished high rises. Cardboard encampments become welcoming homes. It’s a Tokyo anyone who’s lived here can recognize. It’s also not the way the city is usually depicted.
The Christmas of it All
All this takes place within a snowy December backdrop. Christmas and the New Year season are the direct settings, referenced from the sermon that starts the film until the story’s conclusion on New Year’s Day. The imagery of angels – whether the angelic baby Kiyoko or a bewinged drag club host – is numerous. The movie’s themes include redemption, grace, salvation, and divine providence. With its constant background refrains of Ode to Joy and early rendition of Holy Night, the Christmas themeing is surprisingly deep. (And all this from a director not known to be Christian, working for a film audience that certainly wasn’t.)
Tokyo Godfathers is actually rather shockingly Christmas-oriented, and in a deeper way than the secularized Japanese Christmas usually allows for. Gin, Hana, and Miyuki are essentially the three Magi, trumpeting the birth of the “pure child,” Kiyoko. (This makes sense, given Kon’s inspiration from John Ford’s 1948 Three Godfathers. That film features three cowboys who rescue a newborn, with one of the lot self-comparing to the Three Wise Men.)
As an example of how far this version of Christmas is from the usual Japanese experience: Miyuki’s voice actress, Okamoto Aya, asked Kon about his own celebratory style for Christmas during a press interview. “Tokyo Godfathers depicts a snowy Christmas day in Tokyo, right? How do you spend your Christmas?” “I usually yell out ‘kampai!’ and throw back a bunch of drinks!”
Aya turned this around, intimating that Kon liked to be surrounded by people during the holiday. Kon, though, jokingly insisted his Christmas drinking style was more boisterous than sentimental. Aya, for her part, said she mostly worked on Christmas days. (A good example of how many people here spend the holiday – which, of course, is not a regular day off.)
A Wide Embrace
In a film full of warmly depicted characters, one stands out: Hana, a down-on-her-luck trans woman and former hostess. Hana is a particularly notable character for having emerged all the way back in 2003. Her depiction is sympathetic, theatrical, and funny; while other characters often say snide things about her, she emerges as the single most relatable, entertaining, and heroic person in the film. Her unflappable English-language rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” from The Sound of Music is iconic. No wonder Hana has become something of a cult film hero for many in the international trans community.
Hana’s tragic fall from nightlife personage (in a marginalized niche, at that) into homelessness is sadly believable. Tokyo Godfathers presents other pathways to homelessness in Japan; regretful Gin is a former gambler whose debts resulted in him abandoning his family. This type of sudden disappearance is known in Japanese as Johatsu (蒸発) – “evaporation.” Many of those living rough in Tokyo are people who’ve felt the need to disappear. Bad debts, criminal convictions, bankruptcies, domestic violence, or personal scandals – all can drive people to evaporate. An entire cottage industry exists around helping people disappear, assisting in moving house and identity in the dead of the night. (UJ regular contributor Jake Adelstein has a great podcast series on this very topic: “Evaporated: Gone with the Gods.”)
Tokyo Godfathers depicts additional marginalized Tokyo communities. One of the film’s many providential twists brings Miyuki to the home of Latino immigrants; foreigners, often portrayed as walking jokes or stereotypes, are instead here treated warmly. (Even if one is a paid mob assassin.) Both Latino characters even speak Spanish, dubbed in the Japanese version by native speakers. That Miyuki can only think to respond in her own broken English is hilarious, and very real.
Tokyo Godfathers is Just a Lot of Fun
I could keep heaping praise onto the themes and stylings of Tokyo Godfathers. Perhaps more importantly, though; the film is just fun. There’s never a dull moment here. Each scene sets up our characters, their dynamics, with plot threads primed for payoff. Scenes are deeply humorous or emotionally resonant. The pacing is immaculate, leading to a surprisingly thrilling story climax. All this is done within a context where the movie gets to have its cake and eat it too; it’s a film built around ridiculous coincidences, but this structure never feels cheap. It feels, instead, exciting.
I treasure Tokyo Godfathers all the more for being one of Kon Satoshi’s few films; he only completed four before his death at the all-too-young age of 46. With Perfect Blue debuting in 1997, and his last film, Paprika, in 2006, his directorial career was shockingly short. So, we only received nine years of Kon films. And yet, each of his four movies (and sole TV series) are classics. It’s hard to beat that batting average.
Tokyo Godfathers is a particularly Japanese film, a celebration of Tokyo, and yet also a gift to all film-going mankind. So, grab some eggnog – or, as Gin might prefer, sake – and sit back for a viewing. And thank Kon Satoshi for the enduring Christmas gift that is Tokyo Godfathers.
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Sources:
[1] “Interview 14 2002年3月 国内の雑誌から「千年女優」に関するインタビュー”. KON’S TONE. 今敏.
[2] 意味のある偶然の一致にあふれた世界. KON’S TONE. 今敏.
[3] Dec 13, 2021. The Magical Characters of ‘Tokyo Godfathers’. Animation Obsessive, Substack.
