Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle
warm and likeable. A late bloomer, Honda was already age forty; and if not for his long military service, he likely would have become a director much earlier. He had apprenticed at Toho Studios under Kajiro Yamamoto, one of Japan’s most commercially successful and respected directors; and he hinted at, as an uncredited Nagoya Times reporter put it, the “passionate literary style” and “intense perseverance” that characterized Yamamoto’s two most famous protégés, Akira Kurosawa and Senkichi Taniguchi, who were also Honda’s closest friends.
“Although their personalities may be similar, their work is fundamentally different,” the reporter wrote. “Ishiro Honda [is] a man who possesses something very soft and sweet, yet … his voice is heavy and serene, giving off a feeling of melancholy that … does not necessarily suit his face. The many years he lost out at war were surely a factor…. The deep emotions must be unshakeable.”
Honda’s inclinations, it was noted, were more realistic than artistic. He didn’t share the “Fauvism” of Kurosawa’s painterly compositions.1 He took a dim view of the flashy, stylistic film technique that some of his contemporaries, including Kurosawa and famed director Sadao Yamanaka, with whom Honda had also apprenticed, borrowed from American and European cinema of the 1920s and 1930s.
“I do not want to deceive by using superficial flair,” Honda said. “Technique is an oblique problem. The most important thing is to [honestly] depict people.” A beat later, he was more introspective: “This may not really be about technique. Maybe it is just my personality. Even if I try to depict something real, will I succeed?”
The newspaper gave Honda’s debut film, The Blue Pearl, an A rating, declaring it “acutely magnificent.” And with a bit of journalistic flourish, the paper contemplated the future of the fledgling director, admiring his desire to “practice rather than preach, [to] cultivate the fundamentals of a writer’s spirit rather than being preoccupied with technique, a fascination with the straight line without any curves or bends…. How will this shining beauty, like a young bamboo, plant his roots and survive in the film industry?”2
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A tormented scientist chooses to die alongside Godzilla at the bottom of Tokyo Bay, thus ensuring a doomsday device is never used for war. An astronaut and his crew bravely sacrifice themselves in the hope of saving Earth from a wayward star hurtling toward it. Castaways on a mysterious, fogged-in island are driven mad by greed, jealousy, and hunger for a fungus that turns them into grotesque, walking mushrooms. A pair of tiny twin fairies, their island despoiled by nuclear testing, sing a beautiful requiem beckoning the god-monster Mothra to save mankind. Invaders from drought-ridden Planet X dispatch Godzilla, Rodan, and three-headed King Ghidorah to conquer Earth, but an alien woman follows her heart and foils their plan. A lonely, bullied schoolboy dreams of a friendship with Godzilla’s son, who helps the child conquer his fears.
The cinema of Ishiro Honda brings to life a world of tragedy and fantasy. It is a world besieged by giant monsters, yet one in which those same monsters ultimately become Earth’s guardians. A world in which scientific advancement and space exploration reveal infinite possibilities, even while unleashing forces that threaten mankind’s very survival. A world defined by the horrific reality of mass destruction visited upon Japan in World War II, yet stirring the imaginations of adults and children around the world for generations.
Honda’s Godzilla first appeared more than sixty years ago, setting Tokyo afire in what is now well understood to be a symbolic reenactment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was a major hit, ranking eighth at the Japanese box office in a year that also produced such masterpieces as Seven Samurai, Musashi Miyamoto, Sansho the Bailiff, and Twenty-Four Eyes. It was subsequently sold for distribution in the United States, netting sizeable returns for Toho Studios and especially for the American profiteers who gave it the exploitable new title, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! If the triumph of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon—which took the grand prize at the 1951 Venice International Film Festival, and subsequently received an honorary Academy Award—had brought postwar Japanese cinema to the West, then it was Honda’s monster movie that introduced Japanese popular culture worldwide.
Only fifteen years after Pearl Harbor, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (famously reedited with new footage starring Raymond Burr, yet featuring a predominantly Japanese cast) surmounted cultural barriers and planted the seed of a global franchise. It was the forerunner of a westward Japanese migration that would eventually include everything from anime and manga to Transformers, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi, and Pokémon. Godzilla became the first postwar foreign film, albeit in an altered form, to be widely released to mainstream commercial cinemas across the United States. In 2009 Huffington Post’s Jason Notte declared it “the most important foreign film in American history,” noting that it had “offered many Americans their first look at a culture other than their own.”3
An invasion of Japanese monsters and aliens followed in Godzilla’s footsteps. With Rodan, The Mysterians, Mothra, Ghidorah the Three-Headed Monster, and many others, Honda and special-effects artist Eiji Tsuburaya created the kaiju eiga (literally, “monster movie”), a science fiction subgenre that was uniquely Japanese yet universally appealing.
Honda’s movies were more widely distributed internationally than those of any other Japanese director prior to the animator Hayao Miyazaki. During the 1950s and 1960s, the golden age of foreign cinema, films by Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and other acclaimed masters were limited to American art house cinemas and college campuses, while Honda’s were emblazoned across marquees in big cities and small towns—from Texas drive-ins to California movie palaces to suburban Boston neighborhood theaters—and were also released widely in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and other territories. Eventually these films reached their largest overseas audience through a medium they weren’t intended for: the small screen. Roughly from the 1960s through the 1980s, Godzilla and company were mainstays in television syndication, appearing regularly on stations across North America. Since then, they have found new generations of viewers via home video, streaming media, and revival screenings. Today, the kaiju eiga has gone global. It continues to be revived periodically in Japan, while Hollywood, via Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim (2013) and two big-budget Godzilla remakes (1998 and 2014), has fully co-opted it.
Honda’s remarkable achievement went entirely unnoticed in the early years, because of several factors. First, there was a critical bias against science fiction films; in the 1950s, even exemplary genre pictures such as Howard Hawks’s The Thing (1951), Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and Fred M. Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956) “were taken to be lightweight mass entertainment, and even in retrospect they have rarely been credited with any substantial degree of aesthetic or intellectual achievement,” observes film historian Carl Freedman.4 Critics tended to focus on technical merits, or lack thereof, rather than artistic value or content.
Stereotypes about Japan and its then-prevalent reputation for exporting cheap products were another obstacle, compounded by US distributors’ tendency to radically alter Honda’s films by dubbing them into English (often laughably), reediting them (sometimes very poorly), or giving them ridiculous new titles such as Attack of the Mushroom People. This process could marginalize Honda’s authorship, or render it invisible: he sometimes shared a director’s credit with the Americans who had chopped up his movies, and overseas theatrical posters often excluded his name entirely.
As Christopher Bolton, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi note in their survey of Japanese science fiction, Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams:
In the U.S., the Japanese monster film became the archetype for cheap, cheesy disaster movies because of … cultural and technological interference patterns … In many cases, the original films’ anamorphic widescreen photography, which lent images greater scale and depth when properly projected, was reduced for American showings to a smaller format; the original stereophonic soundtracks (among the most technically innovative and musically interesting in the medium at the time) were [replaced] and rearranged; and additional scenes with American actors, shot on different screen ratios, were added … The American versions inevitably stripped