the group might collaborate on a screenplay, but mostly they socialized and drank. He also attended an occasional salon of film critics and students, though he rarely participated. “I couldn’t pound others with my opinion, so I just quietly listened … I was the type of student who didn’t stand out at all,” he later recalled.2 Still, even if school was not all he’d hoped, it introduced Honda to Iwao Mori, an executive in charge of production for an upstart studio called Photographic Chemical Laboratories, or PCL. Mori would become an influential figure in Honda’s life.
Born in 1899, Mori was a film critic and screenwriter who emerged in the 1920s as a leading advocate for the improvement of Japanese films, which he considered far behind those produced in the West. Mori had entered the movie business in 1926 at Nikkatsu Studios, where he formed the Nikkatsu Kinyokai (Friday Party), a think tank of executives, producers, writers, directors, advertising staff, theater operators, and so on. Young and hungry, they discussed how to make better films and run a better operation, and were credited with helping reestablish Nikkatsu’s Tokyo studio after the earthquake had crippled it. Mori would become known as an innovator, collecting ideas from his travels to Hollywood and Europe.
Mori taught a class at Nihon University called “Creating Movies,” but he was too busy to show up often. His main interest lay in recruiting young talent for PCL; so in September 1932 he created a new Friday Party with about ten promising students from various colleges, and paid them a small stipend as an incentive to attend. Honda was one of just two Nihon University students accepted. The group also included Senkichi Taniguchi, an ambitious young man who’d just quit Waseda University to join the film industry and who would become Honda’s close friend. The group’s discussions might focus on critiquing a particular film or on the montage theory of Russian directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Not one to stand out from the crowd, Honda wondered why Mori had included him in the group. Honda later learned that he was recommended by Hiroshi Nakane, a Russian music scholar who had befriended him; Nakane was impressed by Honda’s curiosity about classical music and his interest in how music might enhance motion pictures in the coming age of sound film.
PCL was founded in 1929 as a film laboratory, but with the arrival of talkies it began providing state-of-the-art recording services to the big studios. Soon it moved into film production, starting with musical advertising shorts for beer, candy, and record companies. PCL made just two films in 1933, then quickly expanded production and released fifty-one features from 1934 to 1936.3
In August 1933, Mori offered entry-level jobs at PCL to a select few members of the Friday Party, including Honda and Taniguchi. It was a tremendous opportunity; industry jobs, even bottom-rung positions, were highly coveted, and it was nigh impossible to get hired without an inside connection. For roughly a year, Honda simultaneously completed his college studies while working at the studio.
PCL’s innovative business model, largely Mori’s creation, introduced a Hollywood-style, producer-centered system. It was markedly different from other studios, where production was a big bureaucracy run by an executive and built on the star power of famous directors and actors. Instead, PCL emphasized quality filmmaking and the latest technological advances. It abolished the feudal system of lifetime contracts and hired filmmakers, actors, and other personnel on short-term deals that could be renewed or canceled as warranted. Mori put producers in charge of individual projects, leaving directors free to concentrate on the work.
“PCL was just a dream place for young people who were aiming for the movie world,” Honda recalled.4 After some basic training, the young recruits were put on different tracks—management, screenwriter, cameraman, sound, and other business and technical areas. Honda became a jokantoku (assistant director) trainee, and his first jobs involved working as a scripter in the editing department, which required logging and memorizing every cut, arduous tasks for an absolute beginner. Finally, Honda made his debut on a film set, working at the bottom rung as a third assistant director—or kachinko (clapperboard), as they were nicknamed—on director Sotoji Kimura’s The Elderly Commoner’s Life Study (Tadano bonji jinsei benkyo, 1934).
Then, suddenly, good fortune ran out. Immediately after the film was completed, Honda received a red postcard calling on him to serve his country and his emperor. A draft notice.
4
A RELUCTANT SOLDIER
From the 1890s to the 1920s, Japan was governed under a hybrid system of democracy and imperialism. The British-style constitutional monarchy and the newly established parliamentary system fostered an era of social and economic plurality, which flourished during the reign of Emperor Taisho (1912–26). Simultaneously, a fast-burgeoning military was expanding Japan’s reach across Asia, pursuing international influence and economic gains. In 1895, the armed forces counted seventy thousand men; a decade later, in the Russo-Japanese War, it had surpassed one million.
Victory over Russia created a foothold in Manchuria, rich in natural resources such as iron, coking coal, soybeans, salt, and developable land, which was in short supply within the Japanese empire. Factories were opened, and people migrated in search of prosperous new beginnings. In 1906 Japan began work on the massive South Manchuria Railroad, which forged the route for Japanese colonization across the province and fomented the Chinese nationalist resistance to it.
The reign of Emperor Hirohito, known as the Showa period (1926–89) or the “period of enlightened peace,” began rather ironically with domestic and international upheavals threatening Japan’s delicate balance of liberal democracy and rising military power. The 1929 US stock market crash and ensuing global depression pinched international trade and highlighted Japan’s lack of territory and resources compared to the Western powers. The pretext for a full-blown invasion of China was fabricated on September 18, 1931, when Japanese soldiers bombed a railroad they were purportedly guarding, and blamed Chinese nationalists. This staged provocation enabled the Japanese army to invade the northeast provinces of China and Inner Mongolia, establishing the puppet state of Manchukuo in February 1932, which became the Empire of Manchukuo (Manshu Teikoku) from 1934 to 1945. Japan’s civilian government couldn’t stop the generals for fear of a coup d’etat, and Hirohito proved unable to restrain the armed forces. Public euphoria over annexing Manchuria further cemented the military’s political power, and condemnation from the West only fed rising nationalism. Thus began the period known as the Fifteen Years’ War, encompassing the Manchurian Incident (1931–32), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and the Pacific War against the Anglo-American powers (1941–45).
Honda (right) with a fellow army recruit, mid-1930s.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.
Japan’s Kwantung Army in Manchukuo needed able-bodied young men, and so Honda was drafted in the fall of 1934. He was twenty-three years old. “It was only a year after I had entered PCL, and it was the saddest thing for me. I heard some people drank a whole bottle of soy sauce to raise their blood pressure in order to avoid serving, but I gave up on that.”1
Honda received an “A” grade on his physical examination, but was not required to report for duty immediately. Several months passed while he waited for his call-up, during which he continued working at PCL. His ascension through the assistant director ranks began, and he had been promoted to second assistant director by the time he worked on Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (1935), a technically sophisticated early talkie from Mikio Naruse, who was emerging as a major talent.
Duty called in January 1935. Honda was enlisted in the Dai-ichi rentai (First Division, First Infantry Regiment), which was garrisoned in Tokyo and was one of the oldest divisions of the Imperial Japanese Army. He began his military training at the entry-level rank of ippeisotsu, the rough equivalent of petty officer first class.
