Since reading this piece at the end of last year, Tokyo Godfathers has stayed in my mind, even as spring approaches Tokyo. Before winter ends, I wanted to note something.

This article taught me how Satoshi Kon and his team made use of emerging tools like digital photography, yet always under a firm artistic will. An unreal city that nevertheless feels real. A living Tokyo, shaped into a character through meticulous technique, cinematic imagination, and immense experimental labor.

Looking back, the Tokyo in this film is now being made invisible. In the name of “welcoming guests from abroad” for the Olympic Games planned for 2020, many homeless people, recalling the protagonists of the film, who had been living in parks were pushed out as the city advanced gentrification in the 2010s. After the pandemic, that direction has only grown stronger.

In today’s Tokyo, the unhoused people we used to see when we were kids are far less visible. But human beings do not vanish like vapor. Considering how fragile Japan’s support systems are, it is hard to believe they were properly cared for. They have been pushed somewhere else and rendered invisible.

I am truly grateful to Kon. By placing homeless people at the center of a story that even children could embrace, he infused entertainment with this kind of imagination. Tokyo Godfathers was released in 2003, and I have almost no memory of Tokyo from that time. I will probably watch this film again next winter, searching for an imagination that may already be getting lost.

I really appreciated this piece.