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6

WAR

I always thought that when this thing is over, I am going to go back to the studio and make movies … It helped me not to go insane.

— Ishiro Honda

In mid-December 1939, a week before the baby was due, Honda received a shock: he was recalled to active duty.

In the years since Honda had entered the military, Japan had widened the China conflict on multiple fronts against Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army and Mao-tse Tung’s Communists. In July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, another staged provocation, became the pretext for a massive troop escalation and the plunge into total war. Then came the occupation of Shanghai, China’s largest city; and in December 1937 the Japanese began the six-week-long Nanking Massacre, in which three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers and civilians were slaughtered and raped, one of the most notorious war crime sprees of the twentieth century.

Despite these brutal campaigns, by the end of 1937 there was no end in sight to the conflict. More than six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were now spread across an area roughly equivalent to the United States west of the Mississippi. The men were weakened by exhaustion and heavy casualties, and many were due to return home. To replace these losses, the army doubled the draft beginning in 1938 and called up tens of thousands of reserves, mostly men in their twenties and thirties with wives, children, and jobs. Some men were so upset that they openly rebelled, only to be severely punished.¹

Honda, just shy of twenty-nine, shared the resentment but was not one to complain. Protesting would only make his situation worse. “If I were to … show my anti-war feelings, then I am sure I would not have survived, not even a day,” he would recall.²

“My father was the type of person who [thought], ‘It is what it is,’” said Honda’s son, Ryuji Honda. “‘This is my fate. So, what else can I do but to follow orders and do it?’ He did, however, have the conviction that he would return alive and make movies.”

After Honda’s latest draft notice arrived, Kimi’s mother congratulated her daughter. It was an honor to have a husband or son at the front, and there was no greater purpose than to fight and die for one’s country. Nationalism reigned, and propaganda fueled support for the war. Neighborhood associations and the Special Higher Police kept tabs on the citizenry. The media and schools became indoctrination tools against Western ideals of individuality and materialism. War was a righteous struggle against colonialism; Japan would soon lead a new world order with its superior values, which derived from the cult of the divine emperor as head of the nation-family, the absolute authority.

Kimi gave birth to a daughter on December 23, 1939. Honda had rejoined his regiment for training, but he now had risen in rank and was allowed to visit his wife in the hospital. The baby was premature, tiny and covered with hair; Honda thought she looked like a baby bird. Kimi remembered, “My mother scolded him, saying that he’ll be cursed for saying such a thing, and that she will grow up to be a beautiful child.” Honda named the girl Takako. He left the hospital and was bound for China.

———

“There were so many [soldiers] who hated war,” Honda later wrote. “I was one of them, but I kept my thoughts deep inside my chest, to myself, and every time I received [a draft notice], I [convinced] myself that I was not going to die. Why should that stupid red piece of paper decide the freedom or lives of individuals? Why couldn’t I just rip this paper to shreds?”³

Honda’s belief that he would survive helped him suppress fear, and it wasn’t entirely irrational. When bullets were exchanged, he noticed that few connected. He had become an excellent marksman, and he knew how difficult it was to hit the target in a firefight, with thousands of rounds discharging rapidly and tensions high. The chances of being hit were slim, he told himself. He would listen to the reports of gunfire, and if the bullets whizzed through the air, that meant the enemy didn’t have a clear shot; but if he heard the pop of bullets hitting nearby trees, then it was time to move. By keeping vigilant, he could live through this. Most soldiers died, he observed, not from gunshots but from disease.

He would defend himself if threatened, but Honda felt no animus toward the Chinese. “He said, ‘Everyone, shoot your guns into the air,’” recalled Koji Kajita, later Honda’s longtime assistant and a fellow veteran. “‘Why must we kill one another?’ he wondered. His long years in the military helped make him the person he was.”

With extended periods of inactivity and the doldrums of daily routine, boredom reigned. Soldiers looked forward to the doling out of liquor and cigarette rations, a reprieve from the monotony. Honda developed a taste for sake and became a heavy smoker, a habit he would maintain well into his fifties, though he would eventually quit. By middle age, his fingertips would be brown with permanent tobacco stains.

———

From 1940 to 1941 Honda was assigned to help manage a comfort station, a euphemism for the hundreds of brothels the Imperial Army established in China and the occupied territories. As the Roman Empire had done in its far-flung conquests, Japan provided its soldiers with prostitutes, purportedly to curb sexual assaults on civilians, which were widespread in Shanghai, Nanking, and other places. The first documented comfort stations opened in Manchukuo in 1931–32; and by 1938 an estimated forty thousand ianfu (“comfort women”) were working and living in often deplorable conditions there, cut off from their families and made to perform sex acts dozens of times per day. The great majority were Korean women, though there were also Chinese, Japanese, and other nationalities, many lured with promises of ordinary jobs and then taken into slavery. One of the darkest aspects of Japan’s war legacy, the subject has been dramatized in a few books and movies, notably Seijun Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute (Shunpu den, 1965) and Kei Kumai’s Sandakan 8 (Sandakan hachibanshokan bokyo, 1974). The comfort women have long been a controversial subject in Japan, where conservative politicians have maintained there is no evidence the women were forcibly enslaved. Relations between Tokyo and Seoul were strained for decades over the issue, and in December 2015 the Japanese government extended a formal apology to South Korea and made an $8.3 million reparations payment.

Honda, then, deserves some credit for writing Reflections of an Officer in Charge of Comfort Women, an uncharacteristically candid essay published in Movie Art magazine in April 1966, in which he described both his duties at the comfort station and the plight of the women working there.

“[L]istening to their complaints and stories was [part of] my job. Once a week [the prostitutes] had a checkup, and I would sign off on their health documents. At that time, they would tell me things—their complaints, their personal stories. Some girls had been told that they would be doing a kind of consulting job; the reason they accepted was because they [believed] they would be [merely] consoling the soldiers. I couldn’t do anything to help them but I told them my story, that being here was also not my choice. Getting the [draft notice] with my name on it, that’s the only reason I was there. They [began to understand] they were not the only ones, that the men also were forced to do things. When they would return [to the brothel], they could accept their situation a little better.”

Honda recalled tragic stories: a girl who had been sold into prostitution by her parents; a prostitute who had hitchhiked for five days through a war zone in order to find a soldier she’d fallen in love with, only to be rejected; the women’s lost dreams of marriage, family, and happiness. And he told of the emotional and physical toll they endured:

“[T]hey sent us a report every day. ‘Umeko: 12 soldiers; 2 junior officers; 3 senior officers.’ That was the number of men that this one girl serviced in a day … Whenever the army would move, whether to the war front or the rear lines, the street with all the [brothels] was like a festival. The next day, my daily report would say that some girls took as many as 30 or 40 men in one night. One girl from Manchuria, a little over 30 years old, told me, ‘Back then, I took more than 83 … that was the number I could remember up to. After that, I fainted. I don’t know how many there were after that.’ Whenever a new girl arrived they would come to see us at headquarters. There were some really pretty ones, but after a half year, they all looked like a different person … The girls [clung] to their dreams of the future [to survive]. No matter how dirty they felt physically, they tried to stay mentally clean.”

Honda recalled one distraught woman who turned to drugs in order to cope and serviced as many soldiers as possible in order to support her habit. “[She] was completely destroyed by this war. War is evil. Once it starts, no one can stop it.”

———

The atrocities in China resulted from the indoctrination and brutal training of Japanese soldiers, which intensified as the country plunged into World War II. The Bushido code, the “way of the warrior” practiced by the chivalrous samurai, was now corrupted into “victory by any means.” Honorable rules of war no longer applied. Hatred of the enemy and cruel discipline reigned. Recruits were taught that the Chinese, a people Japan had long revered, were now a nation of subhuman weaklings, easily and justly conquered. War required ruthless killing, and not even civilians were to be spared. Officers became so authoritarian that soldiers learned to hate them. Troops were beaten, cursed, and humiliated at the slightest hint of insubordination. Surrender was not an option. Death was an honor. No less than absolute loyalty to the emperor, commander-in-chief of the military, was expected.⁴

Honda recorded the madness in his journals. “My superior officer killed a young Korean today with his bayonet,” he once wrote. Another entry read, “I’m trying to adjust to the environment around me, but if you are a normal person in this place you’d either kill yourself or go crazy.”

He hated the way superiors shouted at their subordinates, and especially how they struck them as punishment. “I could not agree with that at all. I tried to avoid getting hit as much as possible … I myself never struck anyone.”⁵ Somehow he salvaged his humanity. He vowed to treat the Chinese, his fellow soldiers, and himself humanely. He was now a low-level officer, participating in the basic training of new arrivals. He taught them the fundamentals: how to line up, how to salute. Most important, he taught them about survival. When you run, run to live. Respect your body; stay healthy. The alternatives were to get shot and die or get sick and die.

He cooked, cleaned, polished shoes, and distributed uniforms and name tags to new recruits, always burying his bitterness, knowing he’d suffer if it showed. He was, he said, “not a professional military person,” uninterested in getting promoted through the ranks. He simply worked hard because it was his nature and focused on the task before him rather than dwell on his situation. “I didn’t like the war, but that didn’t mean you should do a mediocre job,” he would say.⁶ Kimi wrote daily, and he stayed grounded by reading her letters and writing back. With the exception of one furlough home, this dangerous and dull routine lasted three years. Losing the prime of his life was tortuous, what with a young daughter growing up and a career that might be slipping away.

At the time he was recalled to active duty, Honda had been working on Kajiro Yamamoto’s Horse (Uma), the story of a poor farm girl (Hideko Takamine) and her relationship with a colt she raises from birth. In order to depict the changing seasons, Yamamoto spent two years completing the film, and it was during this time that Akira Kurosawa’s stock rose rapidly at Toho. When Yamamoto had to return to Tokyo to begin another project, he left Kurosawa in charge of Horse, supervising a lengthy location shoot in northeast Japan.⁷ Released in March 1941, Horse was a major box-office hit in Japan and the occupied territories—Honda would see it while away at the front—and Toho subsequently made Kurosawa a director, a promotion that followed Satsuo Yamamoto, Tadashi Imai, and a few other assistant directors, all of whom had, like Kurosawa, arrived at the studio after Honda.

In a letter dated August 29, 1942, Kurosawa told Honda the news: “I’m going to direct a film in October. [I’ll] write the original story, the screenplay, and direct. Even if things go wrong, there won’t be anybody to complain to but myself.” Kurosawa expressed sympathy for his friend at the front and wished him well. Honda pressed on, convinced his time would eventually come.

———

Japan’s runaway militarism led to a government takeover of the film industry. Censorship was enforced during the invasion of China, but the passage of the Motion Picture Law in 1939, modeled after Nazi policy, brought more severe authoritarian controls. Scripts and films were reviewed to ensure they supported the war effort; filmmakers and studios deemed noncompliant could be punished by firing, harassment, or worse. Under this framework, the government and the army subsidized the industry. Toho was considered the most compliant of the studios—the Information Bureau’s offices were located in a theater owned by studio founder Ichizo Kobayashi—and so the company greatly benefited from wartime policies.⁸

Honda returned to Tokyo in December 1942, but now the war was inescapable, even at the studio. Kajiro Yamamoto’s latest film, The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya (Hawai mare oki kaisen, 1942), was a big-budget, docudrama-style propaganda piece glorifying the Pearl Harbor attack and commemorating its first anniversary. Made with government support and featuring Japan’s most ambitious special-effects work to date, the film was the year’s biggest box-office hit, and Toho claimed it was seen by one hundred million people in Japan and the wartime territories.⁹ Its popularity launched a slate of war movies exalting the military. Thus, Honda spent much of 1943 working as first assistant on Yamamoto’s follow-up project, Col. Kato’s Flying Falcons (Kato hayabusa sento-tai, 1944), a biopic of World War II ace aviator Tateo Kato (Susumu Fujita). It was a lengthy production, and Honda oversaw major action sequences with two captured US P-40 fighters, shot on location at a military aviation school. More significant, though, was Honda’s first meeting with Eiji Tsuburaya, the technician hailed as “the god of special effects” for his convincing re-creation of the Pearl Harbor attack, which was credited with making The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya such a success.¹⁰

It was an inauspicious encounter, portending nothing of their eventual partnership. Honda, in his usual hands-on fashion, was prepping a scene wherein a squadron of model fighters would fly over a bank of clouds made of white cotton. When Tsuburaya inspected the shot, he complained to Yamamoto about it. “I could tell Eiji was not happy with the width of the stage, the cloud material, or the method used to operate the model [plane],” Honda wrote in 1983. “I could not help feeling like a failure, but Yamamoto was very reassuring and helped smooth my feelings.”¹¹

He also settled back into family life. On January 31, 1944, Kimi gave birth to a son, Ryuji. But the war’s shadow still loomed. Now Japan was fighting America. Shortages of food and supplies were common. The military was overextended by its conquest of Asia, which now encircled a vast area from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific. The fighting was bloody; warm bodies were needed. Soldiers in their thirties and forties were pressed into service again.

In March 1944, another draft card was delivered. Kimi was in the kitchen making doughnuts, a dessert treat recently imported to Japan from the West. The Hondas didn’t have a telephone, so she used a neighbor’s phone to call her husband at Toho. “He smelled such pleasant sweetness as he came home, that when he found out the news, he thought it was a cruel joke.”

This time, the unflappable Honda was rattled. “The third time that I got called up, I felt it really was not fair,” he said. “I thought maybe if I just ripped it up, I would not have to go.”¹²

His family said good-bye at the train station. It was snowing, but Honda wore short sleeves. His unit was headed for the Philippines.

“Honda-san now had small children, so it must have been so hard for him to go,” related Koji Kajita. “[But] to not show your emotions on your face was the rule. It was a great national ethos, the good military trait of the time … One had to experience it back then in order to understand. You didn’t question, you just followed completely what you were directed to do. The times were different, and the education was different.”

———

His troop missed the boat. Later, he would learn that it never reached its destination. Somewhere between Taiwan and Manila it was sunk, killing all aboard. Other regiments of the First Division arrived safely in the Philippines, only to die there. In October 1944 many fought in the horrific Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II, by some criteria the largest naval battle in history, which killed more than twelve thousand Japanese soldiers.

Instead, Honda went to China yet again. It was a fortunate break, as the conflict there had reached a stalemate and was now far less intense than in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. He spent most of the next two years in and around the city of Hankou, which is now part of Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei. Situated on the north side of the Yangtze River where it meets the Han River, it was a beautiful place, and Honda’s familiarity with Chinese customs and culture made him comfortable dealing with the people there. Honda was now a gunso (sergeant), and his job involved communicating and trading with civilians.

Still, even though fighting had subsided in the area, the Chinese continued to live in a state of war, “with a mixture of terror and resignation” and memories of the early days of Japan’s occupation, when soldiers might shoot civilians without provocation.¹³ Honda would recount that, because the Chinese feared and hated the “oriental devils” occupying their country, he tried to demonstrate that not all Japanese were cruel. When he and his fellow troops entered a village, they would dress in Chinese clothing and be on their best behavior. “We [bought] vegetables and supplies from the Chinese people,” he remembered. “We had to interact with them. I never ordered them around as a Japanese soldier … I would pay what I was supposed to and I tried to talk to them with the small amount of Chinese that I knew.”¹⁴

Japan launched its final major offensive in China in 1944, conquering parts of Henan and Hunan provinces in the interior. But Chinese forces would not surrender; and with its military resources now heavily overextended on multiple fronts, Japan’s presence in China was severely weakened. The Chinese National Revolutionary Army began seizing lands from the Imperial Army and capturing Japanese troops. Honda was relocated to an area between Beijing and Shanghai; and although the exact place is unknown, it was somewhere along the Yangtze River south of Shanghai that Honda was taken prisoner about one year before the war’s end.¹⁵

Imperial soldiers had been taught that being a prisoner of war was “so shameful that it was equivalent to forfeiting one’s citizenship,” according to historian Ulrich Straus. The Japanese government “had made it absolutely clear that they were to fight to their last breath, and when they could no longer fight, they were to commit suicide.”¹⁶ Many prisoners who did not die faced hellish conditions, especially those taken by Russia, which invaded Manchuria in August 1945 and overran weakened Japanese forces in China and northern Korea. More than a half million Japanese soldiers were shipped to work camps in Mongolia and the Soviet tundra, where they endured years of captivity, hard labor, malnutrition, and disease. About sixty thousand prisoners died; many killed themselves, or tried to. Honda was fortunate, for POWs in China fared far better than did those taken by America and Russia. By comparison, the Chinese “treated their 1.2 million Japanese POWs with kid gloves.”¹⁷

Many Japanese soldiers have recounted their experiences as POWs. Honda, in his typical fashion, said little, only that he was treated well. Japan’s occupation forces in China formally surrendered on September 9, 1945, one week after Japan had surrendered to Allied forces.¹⁸ That December, the American-led occupation governing postwar Japan began sending ships to retrieve demobilized Japanese troops and POWs from China and South Seas outposts, with priority given to the sick and wounded. Seven months would elapse between the war’s end and Honda’s release and repatriation; while he waited, he was assigned to help manage the turnover of Japanese supplies and equipment to Chinese authorities. During this time he was befriended by local officials and temple monks, and posed for pictures with children. As Honda would later tell Kimi, the Chinese came to accept him; and he developed a bond with friends there, a bond strong enough that he was invited to remain permanently, and he gave it serious consideration. He had lost contact with home for more than a year and didn’t know if his family had survived, if the studio was still standing, or how he would be treated as an ex-POW. He wondered if there was a life for him in Japan anymore.

“The Chinese told him, ‘Don’t bother going back to your defeated nation. We will take care of you and your troops, so stay here,’” recalled Kimi. “But he said, ‘I have a wife and children, so I will go back just once, to see if they are still there or not. If not, I will return.’ Even as a POW, he became friends with the locals.”

When Honda left for home, the local villagers gave him several beautiful rubbings of Chinese proverbs, imprinted from stone carvings of sacred temples, as a parting gift. He would cherish them, and when he became a film director, he often wrote the verses on the back of his scripts. His favorite one, roughly translated, was,

Read good books

Say kind words

Do good deeds

Be a good person

Honda would never set foot on Chinese soil again.

———

Honda served three tours of duty totaling more than six years at the front and more than one year stationed in Japan for training. But the record of his service—dates, locations, combat, casualties, captivity—is impossible to reconstruct in precise detail because of the loss and destruction of wartime documents and the unavailability of Honda’s war journals. That Honda was reluctant to discuss his war experiences during his lifetime makes the task doubly difficult.

Chinese proverb written on one of Honda’s scripts.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.

And so it is not known exactly where and when, but during Honda’s final tour he escaped certain death in a firefight with Chinese resistance fighters, somewhere near Hankou. In the chaos of soldiers fleeing and bombs hailing, an enemy shell hit the dirt in front of him. At that moment he believed it was all over, but the mortar did not detonate; a random misfire spared his life. Later, when the fighting subsided, Honda went back to the site of the skirmish, retrieved the shell, and eventually brought it home to Japan, carrying its more than twenty pounds of iron among his belongings. He would keep it forever; in his later years, the unexploded bomb sat atop his desk in his private study, remaining there until his death.

The images of combat and destruction that would appear in his films were, in a sense, Honda’s only real catharsis. Like so many veterans, he took his demons to the grave.

Even as an old man, “He was still awakened by horrible nightmares two or three times each year,” Kimi recalled. “He’d see all of his friends in his dreams, all of those who died fighting, all standing in a line.

“The horror of war was with him until he died.”

The unexploded shell.Courtesy of Ed Godziszewski