I don’t think you can call the passive form intransitive. After all, the passive form heavily implies an acting agent (attempt at translating Dutch grammar term ‘handelend object’ to English).
I.e. The cake was eaten (by somebody).
日本語：（だれかに）ケーキが食べられました。
The ‘eater/agent’ can be omitted, but definitely exists. This form allows you to shift the focus of the verb to the effect, instead of the action. Also handy if you don’t know (or don’t want to say) who did something.
Okay, then we’ll go ahead and say he was completely off not just partly off in trying to bring the passive into the discussion.
as per @Belthazar, you do not have to have an explicitly stated direct object.
Just a comment on the english usage. In english most verbs can be used either transitively or intransitively. But, because english is not pro-drop, that distinction is defined as whether or not there is an explicit direct object in the sentence.
So to this example:
I ate.
I ate a sandwich.
The first is an intransitive usage, the second is a transitive usage.
See (lists “to eat” as being both transitive and intransitive, with different definitions):
I haven’t read the rest of the discussion chain, but in Japanese a coherent sentence can be comprised solely of a verb.
For example, you can respond to 「あなたは食べたか」with a mere 「食べた」or 「うん、食べた」if you’re feeling loquacious.
Edit: Something that may help your intuitions re: transitive verbs is to look at the Japanese words for transitive (他動詞 - other move part of speech) and intransitive (自動詞 - self move part of speech). So a verb is serving a transitive function if the subject is “moving” something else, and it’s intransitive if the subject moves itself. So to expound upon my above example, the statement 「食べた」can be transitive OR intransitive depending on what you’re responding to.
For example, if you respond to 「あなたはお菓子をたべたか」(Did you eat the sweets?) then お菓子 is the implied direct object in your response 「たべた」(I ate (the sweets)) – you’ve ‘moved’ the sweets even though you don’t explicitly refer to them. To the simpler 「あなたはたべたか」, I believe that 「たべた」(I ate) serves an intransitive function because in this case you’re simply ‘moving’ yourself and there is no direct object.
The way I see it, the word 食べる operates very similarly to its English counterpart. Even in English, when you eat, you always eat something, even if you don’t specify what was eaten. The same is true of 食べる: even if you don’t specifically state what was eaten, you know something had to have been eaten. That’s the reason why there’s no intransitive version of 食べる, the action of eating requires something to eat something else, unlike a solely intransitive verb such as “to die” (死ぬ): it only requires something to die, you can’t have something “die” something else.
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