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.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Tokyo Story, voted the greatest film of all time by directors in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll, was released in which year?
1953
Japanese exporters judged it "too Japanese" to sell abroad, and it was not screened abroad until 1957.
Q 02Ozu's trademark low camera position, roughly at the eye level of someone kneeling on a mat, is known as what?
The tatami shot
His camera was often even lower, one or two feet off the floor, requiring special tripods and raised sets.
Q 03Which studio hired Ozu as a cinematography assistant in 1923 and employed him for virtually his whole career?
Shochiku
His uncle acted as go-between; his father was against it.
Q 04Setsuko Hara played a young woman named Noriko in three Ozu films. Which is NOT one of the so-called Noriko trilogy?
Late Autumn
The three Norikos are unrelated characters linked only by their status as single women in postwar Japan; in the fourth film Hara plays a widowed mother named Akiko.
Q 05Which actor appeared in at least 32 of Ozu's 54 films and shorts, including every one of his post-war features?
Chishū Ryū
He was only 32 when he played a failed middle-aged schoolteacher in his 1936 breakthrough, the first of many "elderly" roles.
Q 06What was Ozu's last film, released in 1962?
An Autumn Afternoon
The film's Japanese title means "The Taste of Sanma", a type of fish; Ozu died the following year.
Q 07Ozu died in 1963 of throat cancer on which notable day?
His 60th birthday
He was born on 12 December 1903 and was a heavy smoker.
Q 08The grave Ozu shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name, only a single character meaning what?
Nothingness
The character is mu, a key term in Zen Buddhism.
Q 09Who co-wrote Ozu's first film in 1927 and then thirteen of his fifteen post-war films?
Kōgo Noda
The pair reportedly measured a script's progress by how many bottles of sake they had emptied.
Q 10Ozu and his co-writer famously measured the progress of a screenplay by counting what?
Bottles of sake drunk
Ozu never married and lived with his mother until she died in 1961.
Q 11Which lens focal length did Ozu use throughout his career?
50mm
It is usually considered the lens closest to human vision.
Q 12When Ozu moved to colour, which process did he choose because he felt it captured reds better?
Agfacolor
He turned down Kodak and Fujifilm stock for the German product.
Q 13What was Ozu's first colour film, released in 1958?
Equinox Flower
Japan's first colour film, Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home, had come out seven years earlier.
Q 14Ozu's 1932 silent comedy about two brothers disillusioned with their father was later loosely remade in colour as Good Morning. What was the 1932 film?
Q 21In Tokyo Story, the busy children pack their parents off to a hot-spring resort at which town?
Atami
The nightlife keeps the old couple awake and they return early, to their daughter's annoyance.
Q 22At the end of Tokyo Story, what memento of his late wife does Shūkichi give to his daughter-in-law Noriko?
A watch
Noriko contemplates it on the train back to Tokyo in the film's closing scenes.
Q 23Tokyo Story finally gained international recognition when it won the inaugural Sutherland Trophy in 1958 at which festival?
London
American critics only caught up after a 1972 screening in New York.
I Was Born, But...
It was the first Ozu film to win the Kinema Junpo award for best film of the year.
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
They had been sneaking to a neighbour's house to watch televised sumo.
Q 16Ozu's 1959 colour film about a travelling kabuki troupe was a remake of which of his own 1934 silents?
A Story of Floating Weeds
The 1934 original follows a travelling kabuki troupe and won the Kinema Junpo best-film award.
Q 17Floating Weeds was Ozu's only film for which studio, made after Good Morning fulfilled his yearly obligation to his home studio?
Daiei
The cast was mostly Daiei contract players and the story was moved to a summer setting in seaside Wakayama.
Q 18Which cinematographer, famous for Rashomon, shot Floating Weeds in place of Ozu's regular cameraman Yuharu Atsuta?
Kazuo Miyagawa
Ozu said working with him taught him that different colours needed different amounts of light.
Q 19Tokyo Story was loosely inspired by which 1937 American film directed by Leo McCarey?
Make Way for Tomorrow
Both films follow elderly parents visiting grown children who have no time for them.
Q 20In Tokyo Story, the elderly Hirayama couple travel to Tokyo from which town in western Japan?
Onomichi
Their eldest son runs a suburban clinic and their eldest daughter a hair salon; neither has time for them.
Q 24Which actress played the sharp-tongued eldest daughter Shige in Tokyo Story and won a Mainichi award for it?
Haruko Sugimura
She was another Ozu regular, appearing in Late Spring, Early Summer and Floating Weeds among others.
Q 25Late Spring (1949) was based on the short novel Father and Daughter by which writer?
Kazuo Hirotsu
Ton Satomi supplied the source stories for two of Ozu's later colour films instead.
Q 26In Late Spring, Aunt Masa says Noriko's proposed suitor Satake resembles which Hollywood star, a favourite of Noriko's?
Gary Cooper
Occupation censors first cut the reference, then restored it once they realised the comparison was flattering.
Q 27The most-discussed "pillow shot" in all of Ozu is a lingering image in Late Spring of what object at a Kyoto inn?
A vase
It follows a night-time conversation between father and daughter and precedes a scene at the Ryōan-ji rock garden.
Q 28In the final scene of Late Spring, the newly alone father Shukichi sits down and slowly does what?
Peels an apple
The peel drops to the floor in one long ribbon; the shot is one of the most famous endings in cinema.
Q 29Late Spring opens with which traditional scene?
A tea ceremony
Father and daughter later attend a Noh play together, where Noriko's jealousy is triggered.
Q 30In Early Summer (1951), Noriko surprises her family by agreeing to marry a widowed doctor being posted to which rural northern region?
Akita
Noriko and her friend Aya had earlier mocked the region's accent.