The system that Toho Studios (and other Japanese studios) operated under until it ended its contract system (ending the Japanese version of the studio system) was an apprenticeship system, so when someone got hired to be a director at the studio, they started as an assistant director to an established talent. Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi both went through this process, and one of Kurosawa’s assistant directors was Ishiro Honda. He worked on Kurosawa’s Stray Dog (for which Kurosawa credited him with capturing the heat of the Tokyo summer) before he got his first job directing melodramas and glorified tourist spots for remote Japanese regions in The Blue Pearl and The Skin of the South.
He continued working, grinding out solid, respectable films for several years until he and his writing partner, Takeo Murata, came up with the idea of a giant lizard monster attacking Japan as a result of H-bomb testing. That was, of course, Godzilla, and Honda’s career was set in stone. The wild, runaway success of Godzilla convinced Honda’s producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, that he should be the go-to guy for monster and science-fiction-inspired films from then on out. He made a handful of other kinds of films along the way (Come Marry Me and Be Happy, These Two Lovers, both written by Zenzo Matsuyama, are dramatic romances without a single monster), but it’s obvious that while he was a loyal studio cog, he itched to make more.
So many of his monster movies start out in completely different genres. The H-Man starts out as a mob film. Mothra vs. Godzilla is a corporate satire. King Kong vs. Godzilla is a television/media satire. And yet, because he was a cog in a machine, precious few of these films actually make it to the end in that genre they start in, the only exception being Dogora which starts as a heist film and ends as one with monster action happening around the characters doing and investigating the heisting.
So, with a career like that, who was Honda as an artist? Is it even possible to figure that out? Is it even worthwhile to dig any deeper than his kaiju creations?
Well, I went as far as I could. I couldn’t find a dozen of his films, all smaller melodramas, so my view is not as full as I normally like. By all accounts, the films do exist, but the studio, Toho, has no released them on home video here or anywhere else as far as I can tell while having precious little in terms of a streaming presence (just try and find Godzilla Minus Zero, for instance, which only came out last year and made a bunch of money). Still, with what I could find, I came away with thoughts.
The Japanese Identity
Yes, I will get to Godzilla, I promise, but what easily interested me more about Honda was those early films before the kaiju reared its head out of the sea. This was the sort of stuff that Masaki Kobayashi cut his teeth on in his early career at Shochiku Studios. They’re mostly accomplished, touching portraits of people in little love triangles and stuff. It crescendos with the last two films he made before Godzilla, Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell Rabaul.
What’s special about them, especially when combined with the implied message in Godzilla, is that they are portraits of a defeated people. Eagle of the Pacific is a biopic about Admiral Yamamoto in the years leading up to the outbreak of WWII, especially around the debate of the Tripartite Pact, and his loyal service to the emperor through the fight with America despite his own personal resistance to the war on more practical grounds regarding industrial capacity. Combine that with the portrait of the central character in Farewell Rabaul, a Japanese naval pilot based in Papua New Guinea who comes to the realization that his “superior” training and “superior” equipment in the form of the Zero is nothing compared to the American pilot who first learned to fly 18 months prior.
These two central characters show the Japanese soldier as loyal to the emperor, personally knowledgeable of the unwinnable nature of the war, dedicated to fighting cleanly, and aware of the doom awaiting the nation. So, you know, probably something of a total fiction when applied to the average Japanese soldier.
And then you read between the lines of Godzilla. In the original film, Godzilla attacks twice (replicating the two nuclear attacks). The destruction eerily recalls the sight of entire cities on fire like the fire-bombing. He’s awoken from his slumber by H-bomb testing. None of this is new from me. It’s well-accepted and acknowledged that Godzilla is a nuclear-age warning. Where I seem to separate from others is in my interpretation of how the Japanese defeat Godzilla. Some may not recall, but the Japanese scientists actually develop a super-weapon called the Oxygen Destroyer and use it to kill Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla dies at the end. If you take the whole series as connected and flowing from one to the nest, the Godzilla we all know and love is actually the second who appears at the start of Godzilla Raids Again.
Anyway. The Oxygen Destroyer is developed by a reclusive Japanese scientist who refuses to share the secret of its creation with the world, using the only working prototype (and destroying his notes) to kill Godzilla once and for all. So, if Godzilla is commonly accepted as a nuclear age warning, are we allowed to interpret the solution to it? The solution is that the Japanese are smart enough to make an even bigger and more destructive weapon of mass destruction but have the self-control to die with the weapon, only using it one time out of necessity and never again. Combine that with the sanded over portrait of the Japanese people in the middle of a losing war in the previous two films, and you’ve got a very…glorified view of the Japanese people less than a decade after their leaders and many soldiers were convicted of war crimes at the Tokyo Trials.
Why focus on these three films? (As a side note, I think there’s a fourth that falls into this WWII retrospective from Honda, Lovetide about the home-front experience, but it’s one of those dozen I couldn’t find.) Because the uniformity of the thematic content and the distance into his directing career indicate to me that this was Honda effectively at the height of his artistic powers within the Toho system. And, it’s a portrait of a nationalist apologist afraid of nuclear power. If he hadn’t been sucked into the kaiju vortex, would he have gotten more didactic? Impossible to say, but I suspect it might be the closest we have to who he was as an artist at his core. It should also be noted that Farewell Rabaul is easily my favorite of his films, would make a marvelous companion piece with John Ford’s They Were Expendable, and is great.
Kaiju and Tsuburaya
So, Honda got trapped making science fiction films when it was obvious he wanted to make more. How did he do? Well, it’s impossible to talk about Honda’s body of work, especially his monster movies, without talking at decent length about Eiji Tsuburaya, Toho’s chief special effects supervisor who has credits on every film with special effects Honda made from The Skin of the South (overseeing the late landslide effects) to All Monsters Attack, which is really just a credit out of respect since Tsuburaya had grown ill and was near death during the film’s production. He spearheaded every advance in special effects of the era at Toho from the use of miniatures to what became known as suit-mation and the combination of those effects with real-life photography through compositing at increasingly complex scales. A lot of the appeal of these films, from Godzilla stomping to Rodan flying to Mothra covering Ghidorah with silk to trap him to Kumonga really looking like its legs actually support its weight, comes from Tsuburaya and his team (of whom I must note Sadamasa Arikawa who took over from Tsuburaya on day to day functions by the late-60s).
That being said, I want to take a bit to talk about believability. Precious little of these special effects are believable. I find them effective and entertaining, but that’s not the same thing. For many people, though, it is. They must see giant monsters and believe them to be real. I do think, though, that there were tools at Tsuburaya’s disposal at the time that he could have used to enhance the believability, and it all has to do with scale.
Essentially, Tsuburaya filmed the sequences like anyone might shoot two people fighting: with regular lenses at regular speeds from regular heights. Essentially, 40mm lenses at 24 frames per second at about chest height. If you’re trying to sell giant monsters stomping as real, you don’t film like that. You use wider lenses (10mm, I would guess), slower framerates (50-60 per second), and lower angles (building the sets on raised platforms so you can get the camera as low as possible). That makes the depth of field more accurately reflect things at that scale, the subjects move slower like they’re much heavier, and tower over the audience. The only thing done with anything like consistency was the framerate, but it really wasn’t consistent at all. Even within individual sequences, shots at completely different framerates will be right next to each other in the edit.
So, I enjoy the special effects. I find them fun. But, they’re not realistic, and I think Tsuburaya had to tools to make them more realistic from 1954 on. I mean, building the set on a platform is not the most expensive thing in the world.
I should also note that Tsuburaya and Honda often butted heads about the silliness of the special effects, Tsuburaya pushing them sillier while Honda wanted them pulled back to more seriousness. The most potent example I’ve found is a miniature horse in War of the Gargantuas, obviously fake and on screen for only about a second. Tsuburaya reportedly loved it for its fakeness. Honda hated it for its fakeness. So, it’s still on screen, but only for a moment. It is also interesting to note that after Tsuburaya’s death, the special effects became generally darker and more serious and more believable.
Studio Man
One thing about film discourse that I kind of hate is the use of the word auteur. It’s elitist gatekeeping most of the time I see it used. People use it to create this barrier between directors and their works that should be paid attention to and the rest of the dreck that is beneath them. I saw this once trying to take down a very popular film because the director hadn’t made anything else good. It wasn’t directed by an auteur, you see, so it couldn’t be very good.
Ishiro Honda would not fit under that label, and it’s true that he has less of an authorial stamp across his films than someone like a Kubrick who maintained nearly complete control over his films from the start. Honda really was a cog in a larger machine, negotiating between the assignments from his producer Tanaka while sharing responsibility with his special effects director for large chunks of most of his films. It makes it harder to pinpoint who he was as an artist because filmmaking is an artistic medium done by committee. However, I think there’s still worth in trying to figure him out. Across all of his films (that I could track down…gosh darn it), I saw a talented filmmaker. I saw a man who knew how to frame shots consistently. I saw a filmmaker who wanted to tell more stories. I saw a filmmaker, when given the space, could tell stories well. I also saw a highly constrained filmmakers working against his own artistic interests to operate well within a studio system that pigeonholed him for decades.
When he left Toho after Toho ended its contract system, he went to television for about a decade before one final feature film (the last of the Godzilla films of the Showa Era) and essentially became Akira Kurosawa’s assistant director in Kurosawa’s final years, helping on Kagemusha, Ran, Dreams, and Madayayo, a key helping hand since Kurasawa was effectively blind by the time he made Ran.
So, Honda ended his career in much the same way that he spent most of it: as a supporting player in someone else’s machine. He had spent so much time pushing aside his own creative impulses, and the man who had made more singular visions like Eagle of the Pacific or Farewell Rabaul was simply never going to come back. It’s sad, I think. He could have been more than just monster movies. He was more than just monster movies. However, that’s really his legacy, and it’s pretty accurate. Heck, it’s not like the monster movies were a drag. There was a lot of fun to be had. That’s not nothing.
David Vining, Author 