stylistic:tone, structural:reformatting
Postwar

Ozu returned to Japan in February 1946, and moved back in with his mother, who had been staying with his sister in Noda in Chiba prefecture. He reported for work at the Ofuna studios on 18 February 1946. His first film released after the war was Record of a Tenement Gentleman in 1947. Around this time, the Chigasakikan Ryokan became Ozu's favoured location for scriptwriting.

Tokyo Story was the last script that Ozu wrote at Chigasakikan. In later years, Ozu and Noda used a small house in the mountains at Tateshina in Nagano Prefecture called Unkosō to write scripts, with Ozu staying in a nearby house called Mugeisō.

Ozu's films from the late 1940s onward were favourably received, and the entries in the so-called "Noriko trilogy" (starring Setsuko Hara) of Late Spring (1949), Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953) are among his most acclaimed works, with Tokyo Story widely considered his masterpiece. Late Spring, the first of these films, was the beginning of Ozu's commercial success and the development of his cinematography and storytelling style. These three films were followed by his first colour film, Equinox Flower, in 1958, Floating Weeds in 1959 and Late Autumn in 1960. In addition to Noda, other regular collaborators included cinematographer Yuharu Atsuta, along with the actors Chishū Ryū, Setsuko Hara and Haruko Sugimura.

His work was only rarely shown overseas before the 1960s; however, Tokyo Story gained recognition after winning the Sutherland Trophy at the 1958 London Film Festival. Ozu's last film was An Autumn Afternoon, which was released in 1962.

He served as president of the Directors Guild of Japan from 1955 until his death in 1963. In 1959 he became the first recipient from the field of cinema to win the Japan Art Academy Prize.

Ozu was known for his drinking. He and Noda measured the progression of their scripts by how many bottles of sake they had drunk. Ozu never married. He lived with his mother until she died in 1961.

A heavy smoker, Ozu died of throat cancer in 1963 on his sixtieth birthday. The grave he shares with his mother at Engaku-ji in Kamakura bears no name—just the character mu ("nothingness").