Yasujirō Ozu Trivia
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60 free Yasujirō Ozu trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Yasujirō Ozu trivia quiz covers the director whose films about parents, children and arranged marriages were once thought "too Japanese" to export and are now voted the greatest ever made. The easy questions are the ones any film-school student knows: the low camera, the studio he never left, the film that topped the directors' poll, the actress who played three different Norikos and the actor who appeared in more than thirty of his pictures. The harder end goes into the man himself: the meningitis he survived at three, the love-letter scandal that got him thrown out of a school dormitory, the two years he spent as a sergeant in China, the propaganda film he destroyed in Singapore, the pen name he used on scripts, why he chose German colour stock over Kodak, and what is carved on the grave he shares with his mother. There are also questions on the individual films, from I Was Born, But... to An Autumn Afternoon. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Ozu, his films and his collaborators, and each question links to the page that establishes it. Fifty questions, free, with an explanation after every answer.
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Q 01Which magazine's 2012 poll of film directors named Tokyo Story the greatest film of all time?
Sight & Sound
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.
Q 02Ozu's trademark low camera position, roughly at the eye level of someone kneeling on the floor, is known as what?
The tatami shot
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.
Q 03Which studio hired Ozu as a cinematography assistant in 1923 and employed him for virtually his whole career?
Shochiku
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.
Q 04After playing three women named Noriko for Ozu, Setsuko Hara played a widowed mother in which 1960 film?
Late Autumn
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.
Q 05Which actor appeared in almost every Ozu film, including all of his post-war features?
Chishū Ryū
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.
Q 06What was Ozu's last film, released in 1962?
An Autumn Afternoon
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.
Q 07Ozu died in 1963 of throat cancer on which notable day?
His 60th birthday
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.
Q 08The grave Ozu shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name, only a single character meaning what?
Nothingness
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.
Q 09Who co-wrote Ozu's first film in 1927 and then thirteen of his fifteen post-war films?
Kōgo Noda
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.
Q 10Ozu and his co-writer famously measured the progress of a screenplay by counting what?
Bottles of sake drunk
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.
Q 11Ozu shot his films almost entirely with a single lens of which focal length?
50mm
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.
Q 12When Ozu moved to colour, which process did he choose because he felt it captured reds better?
Agfacolor
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.
Q 13What was Ozu's first colour film, released in 1958?
Equinox Flower
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.
Q 21In Tokyo Story, the busy children pack their parents off to a hot-spring resort at which town?
Atami
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.
Q 22At the end of Tokyo Story, what memento of his late wife does Shūkichi give to his daughter-in-law Noriko?
A watch
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.
Q 23Tokyo Story finally won recognition abroad with the first Sutherland Trophy in 1958, an award presented in which city?
London
Q 14Asked why his films were all so alike, Ozu compared himself to a maker of which food?
Tofu
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.
Q 15In Good Morning (1959), two boys go on a silence strike against adults because they want their parents to buy what?
A television set
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.
Q 16Ozu remade his 1934 silent A Story of Floating Weeds in colour in 1959; both follow a travelling troupe of what?
Kabuki actors
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.
Q 17Floating Weeds was Ozu's only film for which studio, made after Good Morning fulfilled his yearly obligation to his home studio?
Daiei
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.
Q 18Which cinematographer, famous for Rashomon, shot Floating Weeds in place of Ozu's regular cameraman Yuharu Atsuta?
Kazuo Miyagawa
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.
Q 19Tokyo Story was loosely inspired by which 1937 American film directed by Leo McCarey?
Make Way for Tomorrow
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.
Q 20In Tokyo Story, the elderly Hirayama couple travel to Tokyo from which town in western Japan?
Onomichi
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.
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.
Q 24Which actress played the sharp-tongued eldest daughter Shige in Tokyo Story and won a Mainichi award for it?
Haruko Sugimura
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.
Q 25Late Spring (1949) was based on the short novel Father and Daughter by which writer?
Kazuo Hirotsu
Kazuo Hirotsu later spent a decade campaigning for the union workers condemned over the 1949 Matsukawa derailment, all of whom were finally acquitted.
Q 26In Late Spring, Aunt Masa says Noriko's proposed suitor Satake resembles which Hollywood star, a favourite of Noriko's?
Gary Cooper
Gary Cooper's name was struck from the script by Occupation censors, then restored once they saw that the comparison flattered the American star.
Q 27In Late Spring, Ozu twice cuts from Noriko's face to a lingering shot of what object at a Kyoto inn?
A vase
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.
Q 28In the final scene of Late Spring, the newly alone father Shukichi sits down and slowly does what?
Peels an apple
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.
Q 29Late Spring opens with which traditional scene?
A tea ceremony
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.
Q 30In Early Summer (1951), Noriko surprises her family by agreeing to marry a widowed doctor being posted to which rural northern region?
Akita
Akita is so remote that, once she has agreed to go, Noriko and her friend Aya joke about it, mimicking its country accent.