Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
witnessed the battles fought by friends and colleagues. Iwao Mori, the executive who had brought Honda and many others to Toho, and who was considered the architect of the company’s commercial success, was deemed a “war exploiter” and suspended from the industry when SCAP expelled studio executives who had made war propaganda films; he was not allowed to return until 1952. Kurosawa battled Occupation censors over two films. The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail was withheld from release for six years because of SCAP’s restrictions on jidai-geki and kabuki theater (the film was based on a kabuki play). Kurosawa’s debut feature, Sanshiro Sugata (1943), could not be exhibited during the Occupation because of its samurai story.
Although records are inconclusive, it appears that Honda worked as an assistant director on one of the most heavily scrutinized movies of the Occupation, his old friend Senkichi Taniguchi’s antiwar drama Escape at Dawn (Akatsuki no dasso, 1950).7 This Film Art Association production, with a script cowritten by Kurosawa and starring Ryo Ikebe and Yoshiko “Shirley” Yamaguchi as a romantically entwined soldier and comfort woman, was based on novelist Taijiro Tamura’s Story of a Prostitute (Shunpu den), a soldier’s memoir of life on the front in China. SCAP objected to images of sex and prostitution and ordered Taniguchi to rewrite the script eight times. Among the changes, the prostitute became a singer, and her comfort station a bar. These compromises would be mirrored, four years later, in Honda’s Farewell Rabaul, a film with similar wartime themes and a female character whose occupation and workplace are similarly veiled. Even after the Occupation’s end and the lifting of SCAP censorship in 1952, certain subjects would remain taboo. (Story of a Prostitute would be made into a film again in 1965 by Seijun Suzuki, who portrayed the lives of comfort women in stark terms.)
Honda’s professional trajectory had been slowed by forces beyond his control, but the timing was fortuitous, as he began his directing career just as Japanese cinema entered a resurgent period. Honda’s life experiences—roots in a small mountain village, boyhood interest in science, moving between rural and city life, nontraditional marriage, the hell of war, and his witness to the power of the atom bomb—all these things, coupled with the social and political dynamics of a Japan pressured by Western occupiers, would resonate in his early films. During this pre-Godzilla period, Honda would do more writing and exert greater influence over scripts than at any other time in his career; and as a result, he did some of his most challenging work. In an uneasy time when the Japanese worried about the future while still reconciling the recent past, Honda would prove himself an able chronicler of postwar anxiety.
10
SEA, LAND, AND SKY
The Blue Pearl (1951), The Skin of the South (1952), The Man Who Came to Port (1952), Adolesence Part 2 (1953), Eagle of the Pacific (1953), Farewell Rabaul (1954)
The area of Ise Peninsula is land that sunk into ocean and later resurfaced. Because of this, there are mountains that come right up to the shorelines. About 85 percent of the land is mountainous or wasteland, and only the remaining 15 percent or so is suitable for agriculture. This is not nearly enough for the people to maintain economic stability, so the special occupation of the ama divers came into being naturally, out of necessity. Most of the workers are female, so the men born on the [peninsula] are sent away, with the exception of first-born sons. The girls start their training in the ocean from about 11 or 12, become fully trained by 16 or 17, and will continue to work in the sea until about 60. They dive into the ocean and harvest abalone, sazae (a type of conch) and gelidiaceae (a type of algae). Pearl oysters are harvested for a limited time each year, the best time being usually a week or so in mid-May. Single ladies dive individually and married ladies dive with a lifeline tied to them, which is connected to a pulley and handled by their spouse. The wives dive down to the ocean floor holding a 15-kilogram weight. Their methods are quite primitive, their living standards are quite low, and there are many myths and legends that they believe in. However, all of these things fit their lifestyle well … They do not use modernized harvesting methods, diving suits or equipment because this would cause their profession to become obsolete … Everything is unwittingly and naturally adapted.
In a poor village with such traditions and culture and an unnatural society where women hold financial power, there is a certain need for traditional conventions to take control and for the people to be content with such ways. These women are born into such dreary living conditions; I wanted to incorporate these elements as the basis of the film and capture their reality.
— From “Ama,” an essay by Ishiro Honda (1951)
Japanese culture has clashed with Western values ever since Commodore Matthew Perry made his uninvited visit in 1853 and pried open the nation’s ports and markets to the world, a clash intensified by the Occupation’s assault on customs and traditions. Honda’s romantic tragedy The Blue Pearl, at first glance, appears to follow the democratization standards proscribed by the American censors: open criticism of old superstitions, assertive and independent female characters, and affection between the two leads. At the same time, in depicting a traditional way of life suddenly threatened by outside influence, The Blue Pearl mirrors the occupied Japan of its day. These themes and ideas reflected Honda’s own worldview, and they would recur in his films well after the Occupation. Upon its release, this remarkable little film was praised for its promising director’s auspicious debut and for introducing underwater photography to Japanese cinema, but over the decades it has become forgotten, a lost gem.
The Blue Pearl was partly inspired by Honda’s experiences filming the documentary Ise-Shima. He admired the people he’d met, felt the coastal scenery of Mie Prefecture was an ideal setting for a dramatic film, and wanted to shoot underwater again. The project was suggested by Sojiro Motoki, a close friend of Honda and Kurosawa since the Toho days and a driving force behind the Film Art Association. Motoki was now working for Toho and considered the Japanese film industry’s leading producer.1 Motoki had found an ideal story: Ruins of the Sea (Umi no haien), a 1949 Naoki Prize–winning novella about pearl divers written by seafaring author Katsuro Yamada. Honda decided to adapt it for the screen, and in 1950 he and Akira Kurosawa left Tokyo for a writing retreat at an inn in Atami, a popular hot spring resort.2 While Honda wrote The Blue Pearl, Kurosawa adapted Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s acclaimed 1922 short story “In a Grove” (Yabu no Naka), which became Rashomon.
“I wanted to do a film with underwater scenes, and this story just happened to be there,” Honda later said. “I wanted to show the relationship between nature and humans through these ama [who survive by diving for abalone]. I thought this would lead to a new field of movies that featured undersea scenes.”
The two men would begin writing at 9:00 a.m. daily, sitting at adjacent desks. After each had completed about twenty pages, they’d exchange drafts and critique one another’s work. Honda would later recall that, within just a few days, Kurosawa disagreed with certain aspects of Honda’s script, and “after that he decided not to read mine any more. Of course he still made me read his.”3 Ultimately, though, Kurosawa gave Honda’s work a thumbs-up. Honda said, “When I finished writing the screenplay, I could not hold back [the excitement] so I immediately went to see Kurosawa. He was sleeping, but he read through it at once, still lying down. And then he tapped my shoulder. That really moved me. I could not help the tears coming out of me.”4
After the men had finished writing, producer Motoki pitched The Blue Pearl to Toho and received approval right away; it was one of about twenty-seven features produced by the resurgent studio in 1951. Around the same time, Motoki proposed Rashomon to Daiei Studios’ president Masaichi Nagata, who at first turned that project down, predicting a flop. The irony, of course, is that decades later The Blue Pearl is a footnote in Japanese cinema, while Rashomon is indisputably one of the great films of all time.
Honda spent considerable preproduction time hunting locations and conducting research in the Ise-Shima area. “I had written the first draft of the script and the project was officially given the green light,” he recalled. “[Toho] gave me about