recalled tragic stories: a girl who had been sold into prostitution by her parents; a prostitute who had hitchhiked for five days through a war zone in order to find a soldier she’d fallen in love with, only to be rejected; the women’s lost dreams of marriage, family, and happiness. And he told of the emotional and physical toll they endured:
“[T]hey sent us a report every day. ‘Umeko: 12 soldiers; 2 junior officers; 3 senior officers.’ That was the number of men that this one girl serviced in a day … Whenever the army would move, whether to the war front or the rear lines, the street with all the [brothels] was like a festival. The next day, my daily report would say that some girls took as many as 30 or 40 men in one night. One girl from Manchuria, a little over 30 years old, told me, ‘Back then, I took more than 83 … that was the number I could remember up to. After that, I fainted. I don’t know how many there were after that.’ Whenever a new girl arrived they would come to see us at headquarters. There were some really pretty ones, but after a half year, they all looked like a different person … The girls [clung] to their dreams of the future [to survive]. No matter how dirty they felt physically, they tried to stay mentally clean.”
Honda recalled one distraught woman who turned to drugs in order to cope and serviced as many soldiers as possible in order to support her habit. “[She] was completely destroyed by this war. War is evil. Once it starts, no one can stop it.”
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The atrocities in China resulted from the indoctrination and brutal training of Japanese soldiers, which intensified as the country plunged into World War II. The Bushido code, the “way of the warrior” practiced by the chivalrous samurai, was now corrupted into “victory by any means.” Honorable rules of war no longer applied. Hatred of the enemy and cruel discipline reigned. Recruits were taught that the Chinese, a people Japan had long revered, were now a nation of subhuman weaklings, easily and justly conquered. War required ruthless killing, and not even civilians were to be spared. Officers became so authoritarian that soldiers learned to hate them. Troops were beaten, cursed, and humiliated at the slightest hint of insubordination. Surrender was not an option. Death was an honor. No less than absolute loyalty to the emperor, commander-in-chief of the military, was expected.4
Honda recorded the madness in his journals. “My superior officer killed a young Korean today with his bayonet,” he once wrote. Another entry read, “I’m trying to adjust to the environment around me, but if you are a normal person in this place you’d either kill yourself or go crazy.”
He hated the way superiors shouted at their subordinates, and especially how they struck them as punishment. “I could not agree with that at all. I tried to avoid getting hit as much as possible … I myself never struck anyone.”5 Somehow he salvaged his humanity. He vowed to treat the Chinese, his fellow soldiers, and himself humanely. He was now a low-level officer, participating in the basic training of new arrivals. He taught them the fundamentals: how to line up, how to salute. Most important, he taught them about survival. When you run, run to live. Respect your body; stay healthy. The alternatives were to get shot and die or get sick and die.
He cooked, cleaned, polished shoes, and distributed uniforms and name tags to new recruits, always burying his bitterness, knowing he’d suffer if it showed. He was, he said, “not a professional military person,” uninterested in getting promoted through the ranks. He simply worked hard because it was his nature and focused on the task before him rather than dwell on his situation. “I didn’t like the war, but that didn’t mean you should do a mediocre job,” he would say.6 Kimi wrote daily, and he stayed grounded by reading her letters and writing back. With the exception of one furlough home, this dangerous and dull routine lasted three years. Losing the prime of his life was tortuous, what with a young daughter growing up and a career that might be slipping away.
At the time he was recalled to active duty, Honda had been working on Kajiro Yamamoto’s Horse (Uma), the story of a poor farm girl (Hideko Takamine) and her relationship with a colt she raises from birth. In order to depict the changing seasons, Yamamoto spent two years completing the film, and it was during this time that Akira Kurosawa’s stock rose rapidly at Toho. When Yamamoto had to return to Tokyo to begin another project, he left Kurosawa in charge of Horse, supervising a lengthy location shoot in northeast Japan.7 Released in March 1941, Horse was a major box-office hit in Japan and the occupied territories—Honda would see it while away at the front—and Toho subsequently made Kurosawa a director, a promotion that followed Satsuo Yamamoto, Tadashi Imai, and a few other assistant directors, all of whom had, like Kurosawa, arrived at the studio after Honda.
In a letter dated August 29, 1942, Kurosawa told Honda the news: “I’m going to direct a film in October. [I’ll] write the original story, the screenplay, and direct. Even if things go wrong, there won’t be anybody to complain to but myself.” Kurosawa expressed sympathy for his friend at the front and wished him well. Honda pressed on, convinced his time would eventually come.
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Japan’s runaway militarism led to a government takeover of the film industry. Censorship was enforced during the invasion of China, but the passage of the Motion Picture Law in 1939, modeled after Nazi policy, brought more severe authoritarian controls. Scripts and films were reviewed to ensure they supported the war effort; filmmakers and studios deemed noncompliant could be punished by firing, harassment, or worse. Under this framework, the government and the army subsidized the industry. Toho was considered the most compliant of the studios—the Information Bureau’s offices were located in a theater owned by studio founder Ichizo Kobayashi—and so the company greatly benefited from wartime policies.8
Honda returned to Tokyo in December 1942, but now the war was inescapable, even at the studio. Kajiro Yamamoto’s latest film, The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (Hawai mare oki kaisen, 1942), was a big-budget, docudrama-style propaganda piece glorifying the Pearl Harbor attack and commemorating its first anniversary. Made with government support and featuring Japan’s most ambitious special-effects work to date, the film was the year’s biggest box-office hit, and Toho claimed it was seen by one hundred million people in Japan and the wartime territories.9 Its popularity launched a slate of war movies exalting the military. Thus, Honda spent much of 1943 working as first assistant on Yamamoto’s follow-up project, Col. Kato’s Flying Falcons (Kato hayabusa sento-tai, 1944), a biopic of World War II ace aviator Tateo Kato (Susumu Fujita). It was a lengthy production, and Honda oversaw major action sequences with two captured US P-40 fighters, shot on location at a military aviation school. More significant, though, was Honda’s first meeting with Eiji Tsuburaya, the technician hailed as “the god of special effects” for his convincing re-creation of the Pearl Harbor attack, which was credited with making The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya such a success.10
It was an inauspicious encounter, portending nothing of their eventual partnership. Honda, in his usual hands-on fashion, was prepping a scene wherein a squadron of model fighters would fly over a bank of clouds made of white cotton. When Tsuburaya inspected the shot, he complained to Yamamoto about it. “I could tell Eiji was not happy with the width of the stage, the cloud material, or the method used to operate the model [plane],” Honda wrote in 1983. “I could not help feeling like a failure, but Yamamoto was very reassuring and helped smooth my feelings.”11
He also settled back into family life. On January 31, 1944, Kimi gave birth to a son, Ryuji. But the war’s shadow still loomed. Now Japan was fighting America. Shortages of food and supplies were common. The military was overextended by its conquest of Asia, which now encircled a vast area from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific. The fighting was bloody; warm bodies were needed. Soldiers in their thirties and forties were pressed into service again.
In March 1944, another draft card was delivered. Kimi was in the kitchen making doughnuts,
