As if to affirm my entry on dreams and the cinema, Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story put me to sleep the first time around. The movie wasn’t boring (it’s one of my favorites from the cinmod archives), just peaceful. I’ve noticed other students have commented on the hypnotic/calming effect of this movie, and it’s nice to know that, even though I watched it alone, I was able to partake in what Jean Cocteau terms “collective hypnosis”.
Some of the best films are great to fall asleep to. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind. It was released in 1968, right in between Tokyo’s Japanese (1953) and American (1972) release. Maybe 2001 helped soften American audiences up with the awesome slowness of the final frontier, so that they could more readily recognize the sublime back home.
Ozu’s use of doorways to frame shots also reminds me of American frontier imagery, and how Japanese/American movies make different use of spatiality as idiom and metaphor. In the final scene of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), John Wayne walks out into the expansive Western landscape, which is highlighted by the underexposed interior of the house. There’s a similar nostalgia and ambiguity to it that is reflected slightly in the way Koichi walks out to go to work in Tokyo, leaving his parents behind. The fragments of Tokyo shown are quite different to the picturesque spaciousness of The Searchers - the simple wholeness of the domestic interior locates the frontier contrastingly within the home, where the effects of modernity are given sentimental meaning.
In one of my (many) favorite scenes in Tokyo, Shige wakes up to a knock on her door (a man bringing her drunken father home). Someone is outside, silhouetted by exterior light. After a moment she flicks the light switch, an action that turns the scene into a negative image of itself. The silhouette fades. The interior space is transformed, the relationship between the exterior and the interior re-negotiated. There’s a sense that the characters are trying to grapple with competing modes of existence. We flip from a conception of the interior as inseparable from or looking outward to the exterior, to the interior as a private space fragmented or penetrated by outer modernity, personified ironically as a very un-modern old man, driven to drunken disorientation by a very modern form of disappointment. 
I am reminded of Ayn Rand here, and the way she transforms Wynand’s glass room into a private, walled-in penthouse to show his moral evolution. But it would be a trap to get too allegorical or sociopolitical with Tokyo Story. It is contemplative rather than evaluative, ambiguous and not particularly judgmental. Tomi’s drunken bar conversation reveals that, while parents expect their children to accommodate them, they also expect them to be something other than a disappointment in the modern era. Maybe this is why we Ozu’s camera is always situated at child’s height… the innocence and omniscience of Ozu’s outlook balances the observation that “life is disappointing” in a way that makes disappointment part of life itself, and therefore beautiful.
Tokyo has the inviting stillness of a painting. I’m especially reminded of films that use painting as inspiration such as Manhatta or Bill Viola’s The Passions. Viola said that he was interested in the “moments between the paintings of the masters”. By cutting out some of the main events, such as Koichi’s death, Ozu similarly leaves us with the transitory nature of modern existence, symbolised in the recurring image of the train in the films we have studied.
Stillness is also achieved through both the lack of camera movement and distance – e.g., the distant sounds, the way words seem to reach Tomi a moment too long after they are spoken, and the distance of the camera from Shukichi and her grandson in the field, fore-grounded by the nostalgic symbol of the home. The temporal and spatial experience of modernity is thereby contemplated. The tragedy of Koichi’s death is blunted, rearranged and delayed by the telegram and the time it takes to arrive. It is appropriate that we, like the children, do not see the mother’s actual passing, obscured as it is by Ozu’s ellipsis in a manner similar to telegraphy. The observation that Koichi seems to be “becoming smaller” is thus emblematic of modernity. 
I like the comparison you've made between Tokyo Story and the imagery of the American Frontier Western - both have that central concern of the interior and exterior environment and have a definite sense of a nostalgia lingering between the two. I also never considered the height of Ozu's camera as relating to that of a child and I guess there are some interesting ramifications if you consider aptly adult scenes from this perspective - ie, the bar scene, the funeral and the banquet held as a kind of wake - considering the actual children are mostly absent from the film.
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