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Tokyo Sonata

Decent Essays

Introduction In the changing society, Japanese family is facing many challenges. Some of them are fail to adapt the changing environment. Tokyo Sonata portrays some problems in contemporary Japanese dysfunctional families such as communication problems. In this article, we are going to illustrate them one by one. Portrait of Japanese family To illustrate the dysfunctional families portrayed in Tokyo Sonata, we have to understand the traditional Japanese and how does it work functionally. Traditional Japanese family is a patriarchal family. Father is the head of the family and takes the superior power. Others in the family have to unconditionally follow the father in any circumstance. The support of father’s power not only come from …show more content…

The second problem is that there a huge hierarchy in the family. Fathers are at the top whereas sons are at the bottom in the hierarchy. In some situations, this hierarchy deters the relationship among the family members. For example, father with make any decision without discussion to other family members. Even there is a wrong decision, others cannot challenge him. And the father would stand to his decision even he know he did a wrong decision later in order to maintain his status. Therefore, the family cannot operate efficiently and sometimes make a wrong decision. Also, the family is lack of communication. In the film, we can see there is no discussion on the dining table in Sasaki’s family when they are having the dinner. Lacks of communication induce lack of understanding among family’s members. For examples, we can see that the father do not really know the needs of his sons. He did not know his biggest son want to be a solders and his smaller son want to learn piano. He just put his own value into two sons and request his son unconditionally follow father’s decision. Therefore, two sons are very unhappy. Direction on the dysfunctional family In the 21 century, traditional family structure is facing many challenges. In my opinion, the only solution is change. Every member should change their original mindset to meet the changing society. For the father, he should not establish his self esteem by using compressing

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