60 Fun Facts About Yasujirō Ozu

Which magazine's 2012 poll of film directors named Tokyo Story the greatest film of all time?

Sight & Sound asked 358 directors, and Ozu's film came first, though Japan's own exporters had long held it back from foreign screens as "too Japanese" to sell.

Ozu's trademark low camera position, roughly at the eye level of someone kneeling on the floor, is known as what?

The tatami shot often sat lower still, a foot or two off the floor, so Ozu's crew needed specially built squat tripods and sets raised on platforms.

Which studio hired Ozu as a cinematography assistant in 1923 and employed him for virtually his whole career?

Shochiku took him on at the word of an uncle who knew the studio's manager; his father disapproved of film work and had to be talked round.

After playing three women named Noriko for Ozu, Setsuko Hara played a widowed mother in which 1960 film?

Late Autumn turns Late Spring around: Hara, once the daughter who would not leave her widowed father, is now the widow whose daughter refuses to marry and leave her alone.

Which actor appeared in almost every Ozu film, including all of his post-war features?

Chishū Ryū was only 32 when Ozu cast him as a worn-out, middle-aged teacher in 1936, and he went on playing men far older than himself, most famously the grandfather of Tokyo Story.

What was Ozu's last film, released in 1962?

An Autumn Afternoon is The Taste of Sanma in Japan, named for an autumn fish; Ozu's mother, with whom he had always lived, died that year, and the film ends on a father left alone.

Ozu died in 1963 of throat cancer on which notable day?

His 60th birthday is kanreki in Japan, a day celebrated as completing one life cycle and beginning a second; Ozu, a heavy smoker ill since the spring, died on it instead.

The grave Ozu shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name, only a single character meaning what?

Nothingness is the usual rendering of mu, the one-word reply a Zen master gives in a famous koan when asked whether a dog has Buddha-nature; Engaku-ji is a Zen temple.

Who co-wrote Ozu's first film in 1927 and then thirteen of his fifteen post-war films?

Kōgo Noda rejoined him for Late Spring in 1949, and from then on the two wrote every script together, shutting themselves away for about four months each time.

Ozu and his co-writer famously measured the progress of a screenplay by counting what?

Bottles of sake drunk marked their progress: Ozu numbered each empty one, and his co-writer recalled a single script taking close to a hundred of the big bottles.

Ozu shot his films almost entirely with a single lens of which focal length?

50mm is the lens usually likened to human vision; Ozu was just as stubborn about the shape of the frame, refusing CinemaScope when the rest of the industry went wide.

When Ozu moved to colour, which process did he choose because he felt it captured reds better?

Agfacolor, a German stock, was his pick over the industry-standard Eastmancolor, and he showed off its reds at once with a scarlet teapot set in the family's living room.

What was Ozu's first colour film, released in 1958?

Equinox Flower went into colour at the studio's request, partly to show off a star borrowed from a rival company; Ozu had held out for seven years after Japan's first colour feature.

Asked why his films were all so alike, Ozu compared himself to a maker of which food?

Tofu was all he made, he said: at most he could manage a fried tofu fritter, and anyone who wanted pork cutlets or beefsteak should go to the people who specialised in them.

In Good Morning (1959), two boys go on a silence strike against adults because they want their parents to buy what?

A television set is the prize: told off for nagging, the brothers retort that grown-ups' own "good morning" chatter is empty, then refuse to speak to any adult until they get one.

Ozu remade his 1934 silent A Story of Floating Weeds in colour in 1959; both follow a travelling troupe of what?

Kabuki actors on a threadbare provincial tour: their ageing leader has come back to a town where he secretly has a grown son, who knows him only as an uncle.

Floating Weeds was Ozu's only film for which studio, made after Good Morning fulfilled his yearly obligation to his home studio?

Daiei got its one Ozu film from a script he had shelved when too little snow fell; he moved the story to a summer port.

Which cinematographer, famous for Rashomon, shot Floating Weeds in place of Ozu's regular cameraman Yuharu Atsuta?

Kazuo Miyagawa, who also shot Ugetsu and Yojimbo, worked with Ozu only this once, because the film was made away from Ozu's home studio and its regular crew.

Tokyo Story was loosely inspired by which 1937 American film directed by Leo McCarey?

Make Way for Tomorrow was a film Ozu had never seen: his co-writer remembered it from its Japanese release and suggested its story of elderly parents whose children have no room for them.

In Tokyo Story, the elderly Hirayama couple travel to Tokyo from which town in western Japan?

Onomichi is the quiet port they leave to visit a son with a suburban clinic and a daughter with a beauty salon, neither of whom can spare them much time.

In Tokyo Story, the busy children pack their parents off to a hot-spring resort at which town?

Atami turns out to be a rowdy resort: kept awake by late-night revellers, the old couple come back early, to the annoyance of a daughter who wanted their room for a meeting.

At the end of Tokyo Story, what memento of his late wife does Shūkichi give to his daughter-in-law Noriko?

A watch that was his wife's is the gift, handed over after he tells Noriko she has treated them better than their own children; she holds it on the train back to Tokyo.

Tokyo Story finally won recognition abroad with the first Sutherland Trophy in 1958, an award presented in which city?

London's film institute gave it the prize for the most original and imaginative film shown at its National Film Theatre, yet the film did not open in New York until 1972.

Which actress played the sharp-tongued eldest daughter Shige in Tokyo Story and won a Mainichi award for it?

Haruko Sugimura was a leading stage actress who kept working into her eighties; in 1995 she turned down the Order of Culture, one of Japan's highest honours.

Late Spring (1949) was based on the short novel Father and Daughter by which writer?

Kazuo Hirotsu later spent a decade campaigning for the union workers condemned over the 1949 Matsukawa derailment, all of whom were finally acquitted.

In Late Spring, Aunt Masa says Noriko's proposed suitor Satake resembles which Hollywood star, a favourite of Noriko's?

Gary Cooper's name was struck from the script by Occupation censors, then restored once they saw that the comparison flattered the American star.

In Late Spring, Ozu twice cuts from Noriko's face to a lingering shot of what object at a Kyoto inn?

A vase stands in the half-dark as her father sleeps beside her: Noriko is smiling before the first cut to it and close to tears before the second, and the film never says why.

In the final scene of Late Spring, the newly alone father Shukichi sits down and slowly does what?

Peels an apple: the peel falls, his head sinks, and he is alone in the house, because his talk of remarrying was only a lie to push his daughter into a marriage of her own.

Late Spring opens with which traditional scene?

A tea ceremony opens the film among Kamakura's temples; the Noh performance comes later, when Noriko sees her father nod to a widow across the theatre and turns cold with jealousy.

In Early Summer (1951), Noriko surprises her family by agreeing to marry a widowed doctor being posted to which rural northern region?

Akita is so remote that, once she has agreed to go, Noriko and her friend Aya joke about it, mimicking its country accent.

Which 1936 film was Ozu's first with a dialogue soundtrack?

The Only Son came five years after Japan's first talkie because Ozu had promised to wait for a sound system his cameraman was building, and he kept making silents until it was ready.

What pen name did Ozu use for script and story credits on many of his early films?

James Maki was one of several joke bylines: another script was signed Winthat Monnet, a pun on "without money", written when Ozu and his co-writers were short of cash.

Ozu's lost 1927 debut as a director was the only time he worked in which of these genres?

Period films claimed him only once: called up for reserve duty mid-shoot, he left a colleague to finish Sword of Penitence and later said it never felt like his own work.

Ozu first lowered his camera on a 1928 set simply to keep what out of the picture?

Electrical cables on the floor were the nuisance: rather than clear them for each shot of Body Beautiful, he dropped the camera so the floor went unseen, liked the look, and kept going lower.

At the age of three Ozu fell into a coma for several days after developing which illness?

Meningitis left the three-year-old unconscious for days; his mother nursed him through it, and he went on to share a home with her until her death in 1962.

At 17, Ozu was thrown out of his school dormitory after being accused of doing what?

Writing a love letter to a boy in a lower year was the charge; Ozu never forgave the master who expelled him, and years later refused to attend a school reunion because the man would be there.

Which 1916 American film convinced the teenage Ozu that he wanted to be a director?

Civilization, Thomas Ince's pacifist war epic, reached Japan in 1917; Ozu, a boarder who kept playing truant to haunt the cinemas, came out of it knowing what he wanted to be.

Conscripted in 1937, Ozu fought in China for two years and came home with which army rank?

Sergeant from June 1938, he served in a poison-gas unit that used its weapons at a river crossing the following spring, as his own published diaries record.

Which fellow director met Ozu at the front in China in 1938, months before dying of illness in a field hospital?

Sadao Yamanaka was 28; his call-up papers had arrived on the very day his last film, Humanity and Paper Balloons, opened in Japanese cinemas.

In 1943 Ozu was sent to Singapore to make a propaganda documentary about which figure?

Chandra Bose's campaign for Indian independence was the subject, under the title To Delhi, To Delhi; the shoot stalled as the war turned, and Ozu burned the footage and script at the surrender.

Which American film became Ozu's favourite among the captured Hollywood prints he watched in wartime Singapore?

Citizen Kane became his favourite foreign film; with his propaganda project stalled, Ozu spent his evenings watching and rewatching the American prints the army had confiscated.

Which seaside inn was Ozu's favoured place for writing scripts in the years after World War II?

Chigasakikan first put him up in 1937; after the war he came back year after year, staying for months at a time, and Tokyo Story was among the scripts written there.

Which star actress directed The Moon Has Risen (1955) from a script Ozu gave her?

Kinuyo Tanaka had Ozu's backing and a script he had written years before, but Kenji Mizoguchi, the director of her best-known films, opposed letting her direct; the directors' guild sided with her.

Wim Wenders's 1985 documentary about Ozu, which interviews Ozu's cameraman Yuharu Atsuta and his favourite actor, is titled what?

Tokyo-Ga finds little of Ozu's Tokyo left: between its interviews Wenders films pachinko parlours and a workshop making the wax food shown in restaurant windows.

Who directed Café Lumière, the homage to Tokyo Story that Ozu's home studio produced for his centenary in 2003?

Hou Hsiao-hsien, a Taiwanese director, shot it in Tokyo with an all-Japanese cast; a decade later Yoji Yamada remade Tokyo Story itself, in a modern setting, as Tokyo Family.

Setsuko Hara, the star of Late Spring and Tokyo Story, is known in Japan by what nickname?

The Eternal Virgin never married; she gave up acting in 1963, the year Ozu died, and lived out of public view in Kamakura for half a century, refusing interviews and photographs.

Which 1961 film was Setsuko Hara's last with Ozu?

The End of Summer was a debt repaid: Ozu had borrowed Hara and Yoko Tsukasa from a rival studio for his previous film, and in return he agreed to direct one picture for it.

Ozu's favourite actor, a priest's son, later played a Buddhist priest in dozens of films in which long-running series?

Tora-san's kindly neighbourhood priest was his role from 1969 until he died in 1993; in life he had briefly run his late father's temple before handing it to a brother and returning to acting.

Tokyo Twilight (1957), about two sisters and the mother who abandoned them, holds what place in Ozu's filmography?

His last black-and-white film ends in loss: the younger sister has an abortion and is fatally hit by a train, and the elder refuses to see their mother off at the station.

Which American critic's 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film set Ozu beside Bresson and Dreyer?

Paul Schrader was a young critic when it came out, the year Tokyo Story at last opened in New York; four years later he was the screenwriter of Taxi Driver.

Which Ozu film, first scripted in 1939, was shelved until 1952 after wartime censors demanded changes?

The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice first had a husband leaving for the front; censors said so plain a farewell meal should be festive red rice, and the 1952 film sends him abroad on business instead.

In Ozu's final film, which major family event is talked about but never shown on screen?

A wedding: we see the daughter dressed in her bridal kimono and then her father drinking afterwards, but never the groom or the ceremony, the kind of big scene Ozu liked to skip.

Ozu was born in 1903 in which old working-class district of Tokyo?

Fukagawa was levelled by the 1923 earthquake, which struck a month after Ozu started work in films and destroyed the family home; no one in the family was hurt.

Which future New Wave director learned his trade as Ozu's assistant on Early Summer and Tokyo Story?

Shohei Imamura was uneasy with the Japan his master's films showed and with his rigid direction of actors; he left to film rougher lives and later won the Palme d'Or at Cannes twice.

In 1913 Ozu's father sent the children from Tokyo to grow up in which Mie Prefecture town, the family's ancestral home?

Matsusaka is where he fell for films, playing truant to haunt its cinemas; he stayed ten years, the last of them teaching in a mountain village, and went back to Tokyo in 1923.

In which 1932 Ozu silent comedy do two brothers stage a hunger strike after seeing their father clown for his boss?

I Was Born, But... was loosely reworked by Ozu in 1959 as the colour comedy Good Morning, where two boys answer their parents with a vow of silence instead.

What was Ozu's first film released after the Second World War, in 1947?

Record of a Tenement Gentleman has a widow grudgingly take in a lost boy, only for his father to reappear just as she has grown ready to raise him.

Which honour did Ozu receive in 1959, before any other figure from cinema?

The Japan Art Academy Prize was only the start: the Academy later elected Ozu a member, again the first time it had chosen anyone from film.

Which novelist co-wrote Ozu's 1963 television drama After the End of Youth?

Ton Satomi shared the script with Ozu for NHK; the recording then dropped out of sight until it resurfaced and was broadcast again in 2013, about fifty years on.

In which highland resort did Ozu write his late scripts at a mountain villa called Unkosō?

Tateshina in Nagano charmed Ozu on a visit to his co-writer's villa, so he took a house nearby, and the local city of Chino has held a film festival in his name since 1998.