The plan goes wrong when Setsuko visits her house unexpectedly, but Taeko substitutes the invalid with another friend, Takako, and obtains consent from her husband to go for a break.

At the spa, the four women drink sake and look at the koi in the pond, comparing a slow moving black one to Taeko's husband.

Taeko demands that Mokichi scold Setsuko for not showing up for the arranged marriage meeting, which he does as long as his wife is in earshot.

The two have an argument, when Mokichi tells her that he finds his old habits hard to break because smoking inferior cigarettes and traveling third-class on a train remind him of the simpler pleasures of life.

Not wishing to wake up their servant Fumi, the couple make their way to the unfamiliar to them kitchen where they prepare ochazuke, rice with green tea.

The script for the film was originally written by Yasujirō Ozu under the title "Kareshi Nankin e Iku" (彼氏南京へ行く, translation "Boyfriend is going to Nanjing") in 1939, with a story concerning a man about to be sent abroad on military service, rather than the business trip to Uruguay in the eventual film.

However, the military censors demanded that the script be completely rewritten, for example demanding that the humble "ochazuke" dish mentioned in the title be changed to the celebratory dish of red beans and rice, because the man was leaving to serve in the army.

[3] In 1973, Vincent Canby wrote that The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice "is not great Ozu.

When he does show us a man proceeding, say from one office to another, it becomes important, perhaps as an acknowledgment of time lost or as a sort of film equivalent to the white space between the chapters in a novel.

Praising Ozu's melodramas for "avoid[ing] any sense of cliché in their restrained, sometimes painfully subtle study of family relationships", Kehr argued Ozu's "lack of camera movement sometimes speaks more than the elaborate techniques of his contemporaries.