alone, but he often did anyway, usually sneaking away to the nearby Nikkatsu theater in the Sangenjaya neighborhood of Setagaya Ward. Japan’s silent-movie cinemas, unlike those in the West, did not employ screen titles; instead there were benshi, narrators who stood beside the movie screen and provided live running commentary. Some benshi were such great orators that they were considered artists, as popular as movie stars. “I was more interested in them than what was happening on screen,” Honda later recalled.4 After spending an afternoon at the cinema, he would often visit the nearby home of a young male cousin, who was blind. Honda recounted each movie for the boy, acting out the story and describing the actors, the action scenes, even the backgrounds and sets; it was his first real experience as a storyteller. Sometimes he’d perform this routine for his father.
One of the benshi whom Honda admired was Musei Tokugawa, among the most famous in Tokyo, known for his erudite delivery and for working in finer movie houses where foreign films played. It was at the high-class Musashinokan cinema in Shinjuku, during a showing of F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte mann, 1924) narrated by Tokugawa, that young Honda experienced a small epiphany that helped him begin to understand how films were created. The Last Laugh follows an old doorman at a fancy hotel, who is demoted to washroom attendant. Ashamed, the man hides his plight from family and friends, but soon everyone finds out and he is ridiculed. In the surprise happy ending, the doorman inherits a fortune from a hotel patron. Explaining this turn of events to the audience, the benshi Tokugawa said the filmmaker, Murnau, had taken pity on the protagonist.
At that, Honda’s brother Ryuzo, sitting next to him, remarked, “Wow, I’m really impressed by this director.” That word—director, kantoku—immediately grabbed Honda’s attention. He knew directors were important because their names were prominent in the credits; he enjoyed the comedies of director Yutaka Abe or the action films of directors Yoshiro Tsuji and Minoru Murata, but he didn’t know what these people did. He’d always thought movies were made by the actors, but now he began to understand there was someone else offscreen.5 (The benshi Musei Tokugawa would go on to become one of Japan’s most famous actors of the 1930s; Honda, perhaps recalling this pivotal childhood moment, years later would choose Tokugawa to narrate his documentary film Ise-Shima.)
After his father transferred to another temple, Honda enrolled in Tachibana Elementary School in Kawasaki, just southwest of Tokyo, and then Kogyokusha Junior High School, later a prestigious prep school for the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy. Athletically inclined, he studied kendo and archery and became an accomplished swimmer, but quit the swim team after tearing his Achilles tendon. Around this time, his brother Takamoto completed his service as a military physician and settled in Tokyo with plans to open a clinic, hoping Honda would become a dentist and join him there. Honda half-heartedly promised to attend dental college, but soon witnessed something that changed his mind.
High school portrait, c. 1927.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.
Kendo training, late 1920s.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.
One day Honda was walking down a neighborhood street frequently used by filmmakers for location shooting when he saw a crew from Shochiku Kinema Kamata, predecessor of the modern Shochiku Studios. Tadamoto Okubo, mentor of Yasujiro Ozu, was directing action star Goro Morino in a jidai-geki (period drama) film.6 Honda would always remember the scene: Morino stood atop a cliff, threw a rope, and captured the bad guy. Okubo, the man barking out orders, was addressed by a familiar word: kantoku. Little by little, Honda’s understanding of the filmmaking process was growing. “That was a big deal for me, to see a location shoot,” he recalled. “I realized that the true author of the movie is the director. Watching this … really made me want to enter the world of cinema.”7
“The most attractive part of movies was that they engaged entire audiences,” Honda later said. “It was not just one-to-one, artist to viewer, like ordinary art before it. For example, you could show paintings in an exhibition, but the experience is personal, one-to-one. Stage plays and concerts play to an audience, but even then, the audience is limited to the venue. Movies play on a much bigger scale … and this was when they began to appear before many people.”8
There was no clear path to a career in film. Formal education in the field was nonexistent. Then, just before graduating high school, Honda learned that the art department of Nihon University (Nihon Daigaku, often abbreviated as “Nichidai”) had recently established a film major program. It needed warm bodies; there were no entrance requirements. Instead of dental college, after graduating from middle school, Honda secretly applied to Nihon University and was accepted. Despite the broken promise, and even if Honda was opting for a nontraditional career path in a young, unstable industry, his family was not upset.
“My father never told me [what to do with my life]. My brother was much older, and he told me to do whatever I wanted, but he also said I must be responsible for whatever I chose. Back then, most people looked down on [working in the movie business], but my family was never like that.”9
“[So] I thought, OK, let me try studying this thing called the cinema. That was when I bet my life on this field,” Honda said.10 As more and more new cinemas were built and traditional theaters were converted into movie houses, young Honda saw Tokyo entering a cinematic boom. “I realized there could be a pretty well paying future for me in the business. It all came together: I enjoyed telling stories and could find work in an industry that was financially successful and artistic to boot.”11
3
FILM SCHOOL LESSONS
Honda entered Nihon University in 1931 with dreams of a career in the cinematic arts, but he was confronted with some rather unpleasant realities. If he was betting his life on a movie career, the odds didn’t look good.
“Nothing [at the school] was well prepared,” he remembered. “It was all brand new … The classes were not really that good, and there was not enough equipment. There was not even an actual campus … they rented space in a nearby school building and held classes there. A lot of the professors were well-known, good teachers, although they canceled classes all the time.”1
The film department was a pilot program and, as such, it was disorganized and erratically run. The school’s administration wasn’t fully convinced that film could be taught at a university, thus there were no studio facilities or practical training. Many of the two hundred students in the inaugural class got frustrated and quit.
Still, when class was canceled, Honda had time to visit local cinemas, many in converted kabuki theaters and Buddhist temples (and some still bearing signs of earthquake damage), and there his education continued. He took copious notes on silents such as Edward Sloman’s adventure The Foreign Legion (1928) and early talkies such as René Clair’s classic romantic comedy Under the Roofs of Paris (Sous les toits de Paris, 1930). He watched Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) more than ten times, noting all its cuts and dialogue for further study; the wartime romance between a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) and a cabaret girl (Marlene Dietrich) may have influenced Honda’s Farewell Rabaul two decades later. He was impressed by Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932), admired Frank Capra, and watched as many Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton films as he could.
Early on, Honda and four classmates rented a room in Shinbashi, a neighborhood south of Ginza and a few kilometers from the university. It was a place to hang out after school, talk movies, and discuss the latest issue of Kinema
