Love in Tokyo was shot on location in Japan shortly after the 1964 Olympics. The story starts off in India where Ashok (Joy Mukherji) is being pressured to marry a woman he doesn't love. His elderly mother asks him to travel to Tokyo to pick up his eight year old nephew, a recently orphaned boy named Chikoo whom Ashok has never met because his family disowned his older brother after he married a Japanese woman.
Ashok arrives in Tokyo only to discover that Chikoo has no intention of going to India, a country he has never seen before. Ashok hopes to win his nephew over by taking him on an expensive shopping trip, but the boy escapes when his attention is diverted by a beautiful woman named Asha (Asha Parekh), whom he sees performing a traditional Indian dance on television. Asha was also orphaned as a child and raised by her uncle in the Indian community of Tokyo. Asha's uncle wants her to marry a man she despises, a boorish, chain smoking airline pilot named Pran. Asha runs away after she discovers that the two men have cooked up a fiendish plot to get their hands on her sizable inheritance.
Chikoo and Asha both end up in the same hiding place and form an alliance against their uncles. Asha protects the boy by posing as a bearded Sikh until she realizes that she has fallen in love with Ashok. She later pretends to be Chikoo's Japanese aunt in order to win Ashok's heart without being discovered. The movie has subplot involving a friend of Ashok's named Mahesh (popular comedian Mehmood) who comes to Tokyo to marry a woman from a higher class. There's a hilarious scene where Mehmood fools his potential father-in-law by posing as an "international geisha" who just happens to speak Hindi fluently.
Love in Tokyo contains the fast paced witty dialog found in many Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn romantic comedies. It would have made an excellent 90 minute film but the actual length is almost twice that. The second half contains enough melodrama to fill a season of General Hospital and the ending is straight out of a James Bond movie. However it's important to remember that Bollywood is not Hollywood and moviegoers in each country have different expectations.
The film contains two of the most beloved songs from Indian cinema: "Love in Tokyo" by Rafi Mohamed and "Sayonara" by Lata Mangeshkar. The latter is the reason that Japanese tourists in India are often greeted with a cheery "sayonara sayonara".
