the dishes in the kitchen and I heard the front door open. Takako ran to see who it was, and didn’t come back for a while. I assumed it was the local store guy who always delivered food when the rations came in. I asked, ‘Ta-chan [Takako], who is it?’ But she didn’t say a word. Then Ryuji crawled over to the front door, and I heard him start to cry, really loudly. Surprised, I ran to see what was going on and saw a very gaunt soldier standing there, malnourished. That was Dad.
“To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I had waited so long for my husband, wondering where he was and if he was still alive. If I were an American, I guess I would have jumped into his arms with a big hug. But instead, I started stacking logs to prepare a hot bath for him. Thinking back now, I wonder what sort of emotions I was going through. I guess I wanted to clean him up and make him feel comfortable. Along with the smoke from the bath fire came many tears, flowing for the first time. I was then able to finally say to him, ‘Welcome home.’”
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For many Japanese soldiers, the return from the front was the last circle of hell. Demoralized and defeated, some bearing battle wounds or carrying diseases, the men spent weeks or even months at demobilization centers in China and the South Pacific, sleeping in cold, makeshift shelters as they awaited passage home. They were cramped together onto ships, often with insufficient food and drinking water for the journey and poor hygienic facilities. They slept in cramped bunks or on the floor, riding out the hunger and the stench, wondering what fate awaited back home. How would the Americans treat them? Would they be arrested and charged with war crimes? Were their homes still standing? Were their wives and children alive, or had they been killed by the firebombs? Had they been misinformed by the government—as many families of POWs were—that the soldier had died a “glorious death?” After landing in Japan, the men were given money for a train ticket home and rations for a few days’ travel. Those who were POWs exchanged their prison garb for old Japanese military uniforms, which many would wear for months because no other clothing was available.5 Like so much about his war experience, Honda never discussed this chapter of his story in detail.
He arrived home in March 1946. At nearly thirty-five years old, he was eager to start his life over.
———
The most remarkable aspect of the Honda-Kurosawa friendship may have been their diametrically opposed personality types, which would seem utterly incompatible yet proved the opposite. And there was no clearer illustration of their temperamental differences than each man’s response to the aftermath of a holocaust.
As a child, Kurosawa walked through the ruins of the Great Kanto Earthquake with his brother, which was “a terrifying experience for me, and also an extremely important one,” he recalled. In his autobiography, Kurosawa wrote viscerally, movingly about the episode: “Amid this expanse of nauseating redness lay every kind of corpse imaginable. I saw corpses charred black, half-burned corpses, corpses in gutters, corpses floating in rivers, corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at an intersection, and every manner of death possible to human beings … Even if I had tried to close my eyes, that scene had imprinted itself permanently onto the backs of my eyelids.”
The stoic, quiet Honda, by contrast, witnessed firsthand the damage caused by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and yet never once described the experience in any detail, though in interviews with writers and journalists he would cite his visit to ground zero as an inspiration for the antiwar subtext of Godzilla. This event, probably the most oft-repeated story about Honda’s life, has become something of a minor legend, largely because of Honda’s reticence. It’s not difficult to imagine a young Honda, rail thin and still wearing a soldier’s uniform, wandering the burned-out streets and being deeply moved.
The actual circumstances of Honda’s visit to Hiroshima were less dramatic, though equally important. Honda learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while being held captive in China. About seven months later he was aboard a train streaking home toward Tokyo. It passed through Hiroshima, stopped briefly at the station less than a kilometer from the city center, and then moved on.
Honda observed the city’s ruins from the window of a passenger car. That is, he observed what little he could view. He recalled, “They had boarded up the area, put a fence around it, so I really couldn’t see much of anything.”6
Over time, Honda said almost nothing more about the experience, not to his wife, family, or colleagues. One might conclude this silence was the result of emotional trauma, though there is no evidence that glimpsing Hiroshima’s ashes was more traumatic than the horrors witnessed during his years in China. The cumulative toll of fighting a war he was not passionate about, being separated from his family, losing prime years of his life and career, and returning to an utterly defeated country had tested Honda’s will to survive. Through it all, he was motivated by the desire to work.
“The eight years I spent at war … helped me grow as a director,” he said.7 “The war, meeting the people of the continent with whom we were fighting, the relationships I established with them, their daily lives. I experienced all of that, as a human being … These things made me grow tremendously. I lived and survived only by thinking, ‘When can I go home? When can I make movies again?’”
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Shortly after his arrival, he developed a horrible fever, a symptom of malaria. The military had given soldiers departing from China a supply of Atabrine tablets, a medication to treat the mosquito-borne disease, which was rampant in POW camps and spread rapidly on the overcrowded boats sailing home. Honda was laid up in bed for a short time, but once ambulatory he had only one destination in mind.
To the studio. Back to work.
He was eager to return. He had no bitterness about the years lost, no envy toward fellow rookies who had become directors while he struggled just to maintain a footing in the industry between tours of duty. No regret that he had spent more time on the battlefield than the back lot. All through the war, he was focused on this moment.
When he had returned to Tokyo in between tours, friends and colleagues urged him to quit the film industry, which many considered a frivolous line of work. Make yourself useful. Do something good for the country. Get a job at a war plant, they said. You’re getting older. You will probably never get a chance to become a director, so find another career. But he was resolute. On those lonely nights in China, he chased away doubts by recalling the musical sound of the camera rolling, the intoxicating scent of film stock, and the joy of sitting in a cinema, looking up at the big screen. This is what I live for.
At the Toho Studios gate, the guard stopped him: “Who are you?”
It was an abrupt reminder of how much time had passed and how far behind Honda had fallen. He kept his spirits, but others were concerned about him. Kajiro Yamamoto, ever the father figure, made arrangements for Honda to work in Toho’s administrative offices. With a university degree, a rare commodity then, the company will give you a secure career, Yamamoto told him. Honda needed a week to mull it over. “He always liked to take a week to think things through,” Kimi remembered. “But after much thinking, he said, ‘No, I do not want to leave the film studio, even if it means I starve.’ From that point, we went through a deep pit of hardship for a while.”
The film industry was in disarray. Work was infrequent and pay remained low. Kimi worried that the pressure might be too much, so she decided to put a firewall around her husband as best she could. “I thought, ‘This man has lost eight precious years, his peak years. What can I do to help him compensate for this lost time?’ He suddenly returned to a country that lost everything, had nothing. I decided to never bother him about materialistic or financial matters. And this lasted until the end of his life.” As in most traditional
