Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
in his career, when making science fiction films, Honda would often visit scientists at universities, querying them about pseudoscientific concepts in the hope of making his films believable, if not always realistic. Honda did this for the first time during preproduction for The Skin of the South, a story based on geological fact. Honda was inspired by a news magazine article about disasters in the Satsuma Peninsula area of Kagoshima Prefecture, near the southwestern tip of Kyushu, where farmlands cultivated on unstable soil composed of porous volcanic ash were washing away during heavy rains, leaving behind huge craters and valleys. To learn more about the phenomenon, Honda visited the Institute for Science of Labor, a think tank for industrial and agricultural safety issues, where researchers had been investigating the landslides. Honda also went on a fact-finding trip to the region, where he was shown roads and farm fields that had sunken into the earth.
“There was an elderly man who took us around,” Honda remembered. “He said, ‘This land had been in our family for generations.’ We are talking acres and acres. [During a storm], someone came calling for him yelling, ‘Grandpa, it’s crumbling!’ So he immediately ran out to see. What he found was farmland slipping away right in front of his eyes, making a sound like twenty or thirty army tanks driving by. He was in a pure daze, but then ran straight back to the house, grabbed a bottle of sake, and just drank as he watched his land disappear. What a shocking story … I only wished there was something that could have been done to help the situation.”11
In his initial draft, Honda’s geologist hero solved the problem and saved the villagers, a happy ending, but Honda rewrote it after a geologist at Kagoshima University told him no such solution was remotely possible. “We [told] him how we need a happy ending since this is a movie. He made a sad face and said, ‘I am very sorry to have to say this, but there really is nothing that can be done to prevent this occurrence … Frankly, I am a bit troubled you are going to depict this in a movie.’ As a filmmaker, this experience made such a strong impression on me.”12 Honda opted for an ambiguous resolution instead, one showing the area recovering from the tragedy, but offering no assurance that it could not happen again. Indeed, typhoons regularly trigger landsides across Japan; in Kagoshima, a series of typhoons in July and August 1993 caused landslides that killed seventy-one people.
The story follows two university geologists from Tokyo, Kakuzo Ono (Hajime Izu) and Shoichiro Takayama (Shunji Kasuga), researching the soil on a plateau in Kagoshima, where huge swaths of land have been washed away by typhoons, killing two hundred. They are joined by Sadae Miura (Yasuko Fujita), a female doctor conducting a health study on the area’s women. A big logging company plans to revive the local economy by cutting down trees, but Ono, the head researcher, warns that deforesting the mountainside will bring massive landslides when it rains, destroying the village. Greedy lumber baron Nonaka (Yoshio Kosugi) convinces everyone that the scientists are meddlesome outsiders, not to be trusted. The feudalistic town elders reject Ono’s plea to relocate the village to a safer area; logging continues, and Ono becomes despondent. Then one night a downpour comes. The villagers run to higher ground, all except the evil Nonaka. Ono risks his life trying to save the villains as a massive landslide wipes out the village. Two years later, Ono and Sadae visit the graves of two friends killed in the disaster. Livestock graze and crops are growing, a ray of hope.
This is the framework of Honda’s screenplay, which according to some sources was based on Blooming Virgin Soil (Hana aru shojochi), an original story by writer Kiyoto Fukuda. But it’s really just half of the film. Superimposed onto the researchers’ struggle is a soapy love quadrangle involving the three scientists and Keiko (Harue Tone), a mysterious local girl. It is explained that Keiko was sent away to live with a wealthy family as a teenager (a Meiji-era tradition to teach girls manners and etiquette in preparation for marriage) and was sexually assaulted by the family’s son, leaving her traumatized. Meanwhile, Ono is so focused on his work that he fails to notice Sadae is falling hard for him. Soon Sadae’s uncle tries to convince her to quit her job for an arranged marriage with the wealthy Motomura (Ryuzo Okada), but she rebukes her suitor after learning he is the man who raped Keiko years ago. Then there is Ono’s assistant, Takayama, who falls ill halfway through the film, spends much time in bed, and expires while bravely trying to warn others about the impending storm.
With its unusual and beautiful setting and themes of conflict, corruption, love, and destruction, The Skin of the South has the makings of a compelling disaster drama. It flirts with numerous interesting ideas: a professional woman rejecting an arranged marriage, the taboo subject of rape, and the outmoded custom of enslaving prospective wives. These issues are resolved too easily, leaving Ono’s quest to save the villagers from doom as the only plot thread generating conflict and drama. The battle between science and politics, illustrating Honda’s concern about the fate of the environment in Japan’s then emerging capitalist system, comes to a head in a showdown at city hall, a scene foreshadowing present-day debates over climate change. Ono tries to convince officials of the grave danger ahead, but the conniving Nonaka discredits him. “You people keep saying science this, science that, but when exactly will that mountain crumble?” Nonaka says. “If we cut down the trees, will the mountain slide the very next time it rains? Or will it be ten years from now, or even a hundred years from now? How can we spend tens of millions of yen to relocate the village based on what you say you know, but you’re unsure of? Stop with your dreaming. The village is already worried about the upcoming taxes.”
Discussing a scene from The Skin of the South with cast and crew on location.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.
The two halves of The Skin of the South unspool as separate stories, unevenly weighted. Honda is most interested in the ethical scientists and their pursuit of truth. Considerable time is spent with the geologists as they mundanely collect and sort soil samples. Copious exposition details the area’s history, and Ono repeatedly pleads his case to anyone who will listen. Ono is a precursor to scientists confronting political intransigence in later Honda films, notably Dr. Yamane in Godzilla. Honda’s favored semidocumentary style is evident during the opening credits and sequences showcasing Kiyoe Kawamura’s cinematography of landslide-affected areas, such as a huge crater in the side of a mountain and a field that ends at a sheared cliff. Kawamura, who shot Honda’s Ise-Shima, renders both the Kagoshima beauty (majestic streams, valleys, and lakes) and the threat to it (newsreel-style shots of trees falling) in stunning black and white.
The three main protagonists are all flawless and therefore rather dull. Izu, the nominal leading man, plays Ono as a single-minded square, passionate about soil and little else. However, Kosugi, a great and prolific character actor for Honda, Kurosawa, and others, steals every scene as the gap-toothed, intimidating thug Nonaka. The only A-lister among the cast is Shimura, making a cameo. “Around this time,” Honda remembered, “my films were not so much about the kind of human drama that veteran actors liked to do, so I tended to use new people.”13
Eiji Tsuburaya had left Toho in 1948, ostensibly because of his involvement in national policy films. According to Tsuburaya biographer August Ragone, Occupation authorities concluded that Tsuburaya’s realistic Pearl Harbor miniatures could have been created with only classified information; therefore, they erroneously believed Tsuburaya “must have been part of an espionage ring.”14 Undaunted, Tsuburaya formed an independent company, Tsuburaya Visual Effects Laboratory, and worked for various studios on a freelance basis. He received no screen credit for his work during this period, but several projects are known to bear his handiwork, notably Daiei’s Invisible Man Appears (Tomei ningen arawaru, 1949), one of Japan’s first significant science fiction films. The Skin of the South was produced in the last days of the Occupation, but before those people banished from the studios were allowed to return openly; Tsuburaya’s uncredited involvement has been documented by film historian Hiroshi Takeuchi and others. The landslides during the film’s climax are a preview of the more ambitious disaster scenes Tsuburaya would create in science fiction films years later. There are several brief cutaways to the villagers watching their land wash away, and these appear to be the first-ever scenes combining Tsuburaya’s effects and Honda’s live-action footage.
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