and I never saw him get mad. His facial expression and manner was gentle and calm … He was that kind of director … He made each film as he wanted, like rolling the actors around in the palm of his hand.”
“[Honda] never forced anything on the actors,” said actor Hiroshi Koizumi. “If there was something he didn’t like or that needed to be changed, he had this soft manner to let us know what he really wanted. He didn’t like it when there was a prearranged result … he always wanted to discuss things and then decide how to do something.”
To those who worked for him, he was Honda-san—literally, Mr. Honda; to those who knew him well, he was the more familiar Ino-san (derived from inoshishi, the first Kanji in his name), or Honda-kun. Whether on the film set, out in public, or at home, he treated everyone as equals, just as his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto had taught him.
“Everything I do is based on humanism, or love towards people,” Honda would say. “My way of life is all about love towards people. I look at others that way … what is their idea of human love? When I make films, it is the same thing …
“Making people obey me is not my idea [of directing]. The entire staff understands what we are doing, and they direct all their energy and skill towards the screen. The director should put all those people together … that is how a good film [is made]. I really believe that my Honda group had lots of fun, always. When people have fun, they enjoy their work. When they enjoy their work … they try their best. I think my workplace was always that way. Maybe each person had personal likes and dislikes each time, but once the camera started rolling, everybody tried their best. There may be some other directors who have a really strong personality and show that through their films … That’s why all movies come out differently … That’s the process of creation.”11
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Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay “The Imagination of Disaster” brought science fiction cinema to the intellectual fore, and was one of the first American writings to critique Honda’s body of work in a serious manner. Sontag wrote, “Science fiction films are not about science. They are about disaster, which is one of the oldest subjects of art. In science fiction films disaster is rarely viewed intensively; it is always extensive. It is a matter of quantity and ingenuity. If you will, it is a question of scale. But the scale, particularly in the widescreen color films (of which the ones by the Japanese director Inoshiro [sic] Honda and the American director George Pal are technically the most convincing and visually the most exciting), does raise the matter to another level.”12
In surveying the genre, Sontag identified recurring motifs, citing Rodan, The Mysterians and Battle in Outer Space as displays of “the aesthetics of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc [that are] the core of a good science fiction film.” Sontag also noted themes that Honda’s work shares with American genre films of the period: concern about the ethical pursuit of science; radiation casualties and mutations resulting from nuclear testing; moral oversimplification; a “U.N. fantasy” of united international warfare, with science as “the great unifier”; war imagery; and the depiction of mass destruction from an external and impersonal point of view, showing the audience the thrilling awe of cities crumbling but not the death and suffering that result.
Sontag failed, however, to detect the culturally specific subtleties that separate Japanese science fiction films, informed by the atomic bombings, from American ones, influenced by fears of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Perhaps the lone Western scholar to define this difference was Donald Richie, the distinguished historian of Japanese cinema, who saw Godzilla, Rodan, et al., not simply as a Cold War–era phenomenon but part of a unique film cycle that expressed the prevailing national attitude regarding the bomb in the 1950s: a lamentation for the tragedy of Hiroshima, an acceptance of its inevitability, and an awareness that the sense of melancholy would pass. Richie identified this feeling as mono no aware (roughly translated as “sympathetic sadness”).
Richie wrote, “This is the authentic Japanese attitude toward death and disaster … which the West has never understood. The bomb, like the war, like death itself, was something over which no one had any control; something which could not be helped; what we mean by an ‘act of God.’ The Japanese, in moments of stress if not habitually, regard life as the period of complete insecurity that it is; and the truth of this observation is graphically illustrated in a land yearly ravaged by typhoons, a country where the very earth quakes daily. The bomb, at first, was thought of as just another catastrophe in a land already overwhelmed with them.”13
Richie’s analogy helps explain why the arrival of Godzilla, Honda’s monster manifestation of the bomb, resembles both a war and one of Japan’s extreme weather events; indeed, when it first comes ashore, Godzilla is obscured by a fierce storm. No one questions why the monster attacks Tokyo, though it has no apparent purpose other than destruction, nor why it returns again, just as typhoons predictably hit Japan’s capital every summer. It also explains why people respond as they would to a natural disaster. An electrical barrier is built around the city, like sandbags against a flood, and citizens seek safety at high ground, as if fleeing a tsunami. Similarly, Rodan creates a metaphorical hurricane, and the Mysterians cause a giant forest fire and landslide. Sometimes, like a sudden earthquake, Honda’s monsters disrupt the humdrum of everyday life: Godzilla’s footfalls come while a family idly passes time in the living room, a giant insect bursts into a home and frightens a young mother, or a woman taking a bath spies a giant robot outside the window.
For Honda, the monsters’ suggestion of natural disaster was also rooted in things he witnessed on the battlefront. “During the war, the Chinese people did not run away when there was shooting between soldiers near their fields,” Honda said. “To them, we were just like a storm. They thought of us as [like] a natural disaster, otherwise they would not have continued living there in such a dangerous place … For me, the monsters were like that. Just [like] a natural disaster.”14
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“I am responsible for tying Honda to special effects movies,” producer Tomoyuki Tanaka once confessed. “If I hadn’t, he might have become a director just like [Mikio] Naruse.”15
Like the respected Naruse, and like all fine directors, Honda made films chronicling his time and place. Postwar Japan was a crucible of social, political, and economic change, as the veneer of Westernization continued to obscure centuries-old culture. Honda’s early work followed what scholar Joan Mellen calls “the major theme in Japanese films … the struggle between one’s duty and the individual desire to be independent and free of traditional values.” His protagonists were young people, torn between their parents’ ideals and their own, and the conflict often centered on an arranged but unwanted marriage. During the second half of the 1950s, Honda was groomed as a specialist in women’s stories, and made a number of films about independent-minded young women and their changing roles at home and at work. Honda’s handful of women’s films, like Naruse’s, question Japan’s gender norms and depict female passions and disappointments; but Honda’s world is a far more hopeful place, his characters less tragic. Honda had apprenticed with Naruse briefly and admired Naruse’s “sturdy rhythm” and talent for “[showing] people’s thinking in very special, quiet times.” Honda didn’t believe he was directly influenced by the melodramatic Naruse style, but acknowledged, “I had the same kind of things in me.”16
Some of Honda’s recurring themes and motifs were evident even before Godzilla. For instance, The Skin of the South offers images of a natural disaster and the destruction of a town, and presents a scientist as the trustworthy authority in a crisis and a greedy villain exploiter of indigenous people and the environment, two frequent Honda archetypes. From The Blue Pearl through Terror of Mechagodzilla, his last feature, and many times in between, Honda’s drama hinged on a character’s sacrificial
