Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
Art Association and Shin Toho, and Kurosawa staffed key crew positions with unemployed Toho staffers. He named Honda his chief assistant director.
An early Kurosawa masterpiece, Stray Dog follows young police detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), whose service revolver is pickpocketed on a crowded bus and used in a series of crimes. The guilt-ridden policeman becomes obsessed with finding the culprit and goes deep into Tokyo’s seedy underbelly. As many critics have observed, the film is a near-flawless document of the tension, desperation, poverty, and crime of postwar Japan.
“I had Honda do mainly second-unit shooting,” Kurosawa wrote in Something Like an Autobiography. “Every day I told him what I wanted and he would go out into the ruins of postwar Tokyo to film it. There are few men as honest and reliable as Honda. He faithfully brought back exactly the footage I requested, so almost everything he shot was used in the final cut of the film. I’m often told that I captured the atmosphere of postwar Japan very well in Stray Dog, and if so, I owe a great deal of that success to Honda.”
After the war, black-market districts dominated by yakuza gangsters, petty criminals, and hardscrabble types had arisen near train stations in Asakusa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ueno, and other parts of Tokyo. In search of his gun, Mifune’s detective combs these backstreets; but rather than try to re-create the black market on a set, Kurosawa sent Honda and cameraman Kazuo Yamada to Ueno, where they spent about a week filming documentary-style footage of crowd scenes and daily activity, unscripted and without actors.
Honda recalled, “Even newsreel cameramen could not shoot there because of [threats of violence].” In these sequences, Mifune’s detective poses as a soldier returning from the front. To blend into the throng, he wears “demobilization fatigues” issued by the military. For shots of Murakami wandering through the black market, viewed from behind or from the waist down, Honda body-doubled for Mifune, wearing an identical wardrobe. As noted in the documentary Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create (2002), “Since [Honda] had actually served as a soldier, he was a valuable adviser to Kurosawa, who had never served in the military, and Honda looked the part in a soldier’s uniform.” Honda and Yamada also went to Ginza to film one of Stray Dog’s most recognizable shots, rays of sunlight filtering through a rattan screen, a brilliant visualization of the brutal summer swelter.
Honda and Yamada captured the required footage but not without incident. “Yamada-kun put a hand-held camera in a box and followed me around,” Honda would recall. “The first five or six shots went fine, but as I was about to enter the side street [of the black market] from Yamashita Park, somebody said, ‘Here he comes,’ and a man blocked my path. He showed me his [yakuza] tattoo. The boy who said, ‘Here he comes,’ had apparently seen Yamada and me conferring. The man was not frightening at all. He said that he was desperately trying to survive. When I gave him some of my lunch, he seemed impressed. ‘White rice!’ he said.”4
Honda had no reservations about taking a secondary position to Kurosawa. “I was Kuro-san’s assistant director for Stray Dog, but to me it was just two people who were friends, who … had the same passion for filmmaking, so the [title] of director or assistant director did not have any meaning to me.”5 Four decades later, Honda would film similar second-unit sequences for Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (1991), capturing a crowded, hot summer in the city of Nagasaki; and he would make essentially the same remarks about their collaborative relationship.
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Following Stray Dog, Honda’s stock had risen such that he was subsequently credited as “adviser to the director” on two Film Art Association projects directed by his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto. In early 1950 Honda was busy with Escape from Prison (Datsugoku, 1950), which starred Toshiro Mifune in a love triangle involving two ne’er-do-wells and the beautiful owner of an oden (fish cake stew) stand, played by Mieko Takamine. Later that year, he worked on Yamamoto’s Elegy (Aika, 1951), one of the last Film Art Association projects, featuring Ken Uehara as a classical music composer who falls in with cabaret performers and prostitutes.
In between these films, Honda began preproduction on a drama for Toho titled Newspaper Kid (Shimbun kozo), which would have marked his feature film directorial debut had it not, for unknown reasons, been canceled. Based on an original story by esteemed novelist Tomoji Abe, whose works often espoused antimilitarist, prohumanist views, Newspaper Kid told the story of Isamu, a sixth-grader living in a provincial town where “the most beautiful castle in Japan” is located. Isamu’s family is poor, so he earns money delivering the local paper and doing chores in the newsroom. The editor gives Isamu an assignment to hang out with a group of orphans who shine shoes for money, to collect their stories for an article, and he is immersed in a world of street kids, gangsters, and black market criminals. His friends include a rich boy whose father owns a big factory, and a poor orphan who is cared for by a temple monk. One night, the gangsters break into the factory. The orphan boy is mistakenly accused, and Isamu helps clear his friend’s name. The story ends with the kids running a marathon around the castle, and a sentimental theme that resonates with Honda’s own outlook in childhood: “[Isamu] felt that it didn’t matter if you win or lose. It was important for everyone to come together and run as one.”
EIRIN records indicate that Honda spent time working on Newspaper Kid in 1950, but no further information about this unmade project is known. Instead, Honda turned his attention to a documentary short about consumer cooperatives. Co-ops had been shut down by the government during World War II, but they reappeared across the country in the late 1940s to distribute affordable food and goods, as a buffer against ongoing shortages, rationing, and starvation. Co-ops remain a major force in the Japanese economy today, comprising large portions of retail and rural trade.
The title of this film is usually given as Story of a Co-op, though EIRIN records indicate that its actual title was Flowers Blooming in the Sand.6 It was reportedly made by Toho under the auspices of the government’s Ministry of Health and Welfare to educate the public about the advent of co-ops. A Toho newsletter said the film “[introduces] consumer cooperative societies in towns and countrysides, not simply as a documentary but … abundantly incorporating theatrical elements.” Veteran Toho producer Jin Usami oversaw the production, and Honda wrote the script. The film was shot in docudrama fashion, telling the story of Shozo (Yasuo Hisamatsu), a demobilized soldier searching for work in postwar Tokyo and living with his supportive but impatient girlfriend. Through a newspaper reporter friend, Shozo finds work researching the living conditions of Tokyoites. In meeting the most poverty-stricken citizens, he learns about the existence of consumer cooperatives and pledges to establish one in his neighborhood. Records indicate the film included animated segments and illustrations to explain how co-ops work, though this is unconfirmed. Honda completed the film on October 6, 1950, and it has been seen seldom if at all since then. As of 2015, there were no known extant prints or other film elements. According to Honda’s memoirs, it reportedly sold well enough that Toho felt confident in giving him another assignment, his first feature.
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Honda’s transitions from soldier to civilian, and from assistant director to director, both occurred during the Allied Occupation (August 1945 to April 1952), Japan’s forced transition from military rule to a Western-style representative government. As part of the effort to demilitarize, democratize, and rehabilitate Japan into a peace-loving nation, MacArthur’s SCAP promoted free speech and expression while, conversely, it exerted control over the media and the arts, including cinema. It decided which films could be made, banned hundreds of preexisting films deemed militaristic and feudalistic (prints and negatives were mass-incinerated, a la Fahrenheit 451), and imposed a strict censorship program. New films were urged to advocate peace, tolerance, and equal rights; show male-female affection openly; support Japan’s new Occupation-mandated constitution; and encourage individualism and other Western ideals. Banned topics included criticism of the atomic bombings; stories portraying the war and militarism favorably; sword fighting; criticism of America and foreigners; suicide and self-sacrifice as an act of fealty; feudalism; and the subjugation of women. References to the war had to acknowledge Japan’s guilt for instigating the conflict.
Honda,