Читать книгу Ishiro Honda - Steve Ryfle - Страница 18

7

STARTING OVER

Honda’s letters from the front stopped arriving sometime in 1944. Months passed without word of his fate, and Kimi feared the worst. And she feared for her family’s safety. In June 1944, American B-29 planes launched from offshore carriers began leveling vast swaths of Tokyo with incendiary bombs, indiscriminately targeting neighborhoods and industrial zones. By 1945 there were hundreds of attacks, almost unceasing.

About half of Tokyo’s population fled to the city’s outskirts or the countryside to escape the onslaught.² Kimi joined the exodus, taking Takako and baby Ryuji to the safety of her parents’ home for an extended visit. Before long, though, her father told her: “It would be awful if [Honda] came home and nobody was there. He is not yet dead. Go back to Seijo.”

Food, provisions, and money were scarce in the war’s waning days, but friends from the studio lent a hand. “Those who were part of Ino-san’s group were my friends too; we also worked together,” she said. “So if someone got a chicken leg, they would bring some over for me to share. Someone was always looking out for me.”

On May 21, 1945, Kimi received a visit from Akira Kurosawa. It wasn’t unusual for Kurosawa to stop by—with Honda away for so long, Kurosawa regularly checked in on Kimi and the children—but this was a special occasion, the day of his wedding to the actress Yoko Yaguchi. Kimi regretted she had no wedding gift to offer, but given the dire living conditions of the day, no gift was expected. Instead, Kurosawa asked Kimi if she would make a hot bath for him so he could be presentable for the ceremony. Fire logs for the bath were hard to come by, so Kimi asked Kurosawa not to drain the tub so she could bathe baby Ryuji afterward.

“We were given two bottles of beer a month as part of our rations,” Kimi remembered. “I had one bottle left, so I put it on the table for Kuro-san. I told him to please drink it as a token of my congratulations. I left him alone, and took Ryuji into the bath with me. When I came out, I found half a bottle of beer left, with the cap back on, along with a note saying, ‘Thank you, Kimi-san. Please enjoy the remainder yourself and celebrate for me.’”

———

Though Kimi wasn’t alone, it was impossible to forget her husband’s absence now that Japan was literally under siege.

“We always carried our babies on our backs because if the sirens went off, we would have to take cover,” she said. “In the corner of our backyard was a small hole, which the gardener had dug for us. That was our bomb shelter. Towards the end, it was so bad that we were able to see bombs go off in the air and come falling down from over the Fujimi Bridge.”

When air-raid sirens blared, Kimi and the children would hide for fifteen or thirty minutes, until the all clear. After a while, though, Takako could no longer stand the heat and the damp smell of dirt. Kimi remembered, “We had to go in and out of the shelter many times during the middle of the night. Finally, Takako said, ‘Mommy, I don’t care if we die. Can we please just get out of here? I hate it.’ I said to myself, ‘This must be destiny.’ And from then on, we never went back into the shelter.”

In terms of human life and property lost, the devastation wrought upon Tokyo from November 1944 to August 1945 was even greater than what Little Boy did to Hiroshima. Nearly two hundred thousand people were killed or deemed missing, one million injured, and one million homeless, with roughly half of all residential structures destroyed.³ The suburb of Seijo, though located miles from the city center, did not go completely unscathed, as some homes were damaged or destroyed by burning debris. Still, most of the area, including Toho Studios and the Honda residence not far away, was spared the sea of flames.

More time passed. News came of defeat at the Battle of Okinawa, of the Russian invasion of Manchuria, and of the destruction at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Finally, at noon on August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito addressed the nation via radio, announcing Japan’s unconditional surrender. Two weeks later, Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur arrived and quickly established the Occupation government’s seat of power, the general headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, known as GHQ or SCAP. Soon, American officials, businessmen, press, and others connected with the Occupation, along with their families, moved into Tokyo neighborhoods. MacArthur ordered them not to eat the scarce Japanese food. The Japanese, having sacrificed all for the war effort, were now literally starving. Food shortages would last for years.

“After the war ended, I was tending to the field on the side of the road one day and a Black American soldier passed by,” Kimi said. “He asked what I was doing. I had baby Ryuji on my back as I was working in the field. With my poor English, I just managed to put a few words together. I said that my husband was still [in China] and has yet to come home, so I am raising vegetables for us to eat.

“He had a [woman] with him. I went home, and that evening the doorbell rang. She said, ‘This is from the soldier you saw this afternoon,’ and gave me chewing gum and chocolate, wrapped up with a ribbon. At that moment I felt, ‘Our countries were at war, but the people are really not.’ That visit made me teary.”

Kimi still didn’t know if Honda had been killed in action, or if he would ever come home. Hundreds of thousands of troops were returning from China and other war fronts, but there was no word of his fate. “Since Allied governments had sent the Japanese [authorities] lists of POWs they held, it would have been possible to assuage the fears of the POWs’ relatives,” notes historian Ulrich Strauss. However, the authorities “failed to take such action … [they] remained under the mistaken impression that notification that their next of kin was a prisoner would not be welcomed, despite the vastly changed circumstances after the war’s end.”

All Kimi could do was wait, resigned to the likelihood that Honda had died.

“It’s unthinkable now. He was like Urashima Taro—no news, no nothing,” she remembered.⁴ “Not knowing whether someone is alive or dead is really hard for those waiting for their return. Whenever I saw a shooting star, I thought, ‘Oh, maybe he just died.’ Or when I heard a rooster crow, I’d think, ‘Maybe just now.’ Frankly, I thought it would be easier if he really had died. I was in my twenties, young enough to start life over and recover emotionally. But to carry this heavy concern with me, every single day, it was unbearable. But once I’d wake up in the morning, the children were there, so we’d try to be upbeat, sing songs, eat sweet potatoes, and carry on.

“One evening, I was washing the dishes in the kitchen and I heard the front door open. Takako ran to see who it was, and didn’t come back for a while. I assumed it was the local store guy who always delivered food when the rations came in. I asked, ‘Ta-chan [Takako], who is it?’ But she didn’t say a word. Then Ryuji crawled over to the front door, and I heard him start to cry, really loudly. Surprised, I ran to see what was going on and saw a very gaunt soldier standing there, malnourished. That was Dad.

“To this day, I don’t know why I did this. I had waited so long for my husband, wondering where he was and if he was still alive. If I were an American, I guess I would have jumped into his arms with a big hug. But instead, I started stacking logs to prepare a hot bath for him. Thinking back now, I wonder what sort of emotions I was going through. I guess I wanted to clean him up and make him feel comfortable. Along with the smoke from the bath fire came many tears, flowing for the first time. I was then able to finally say to him, ‘Welcome home.’”

———

For many Japanese soldiers, the return from the front was the last circle of hell. Demoralized and defeated, some bearing battle wounds or carrying diseases, the men spent weeks or even months at demobilization centers in China and the South Pacific, sleeping in cold, makeshift shelters as they awaited passage home. They were cramped together onto ships, often with insufficient food and drinking water for the journey and poor hygienic facilities. They slept in cramped bunks or on the floor, riding out the hunger and the stench, wondering what fate awaited back home. How would the Americans treat them? Would they be arrested and charged with war crimes? Were their homes still standing? Were their wives and children alive, or had they been killed by the firebombs? Had they been misinformed by the government—as many families of POWs were—that the soldier had died a “glorious death?” After landing in Japan, the men were given money for a train ticket home and rations for a few days’ travel. Those who were POWs exchanged their prison garb for old Japanese military uniforms, which many would wear for months because no other clothing was available.⁵ Like so much about his war experience, Honda never discussed this chapter of his story in detail.

He arrived home in March 1946. At nearly thirty-five years old, he was eager to start his life over.

———

The most remarkable aspect of the Honda-Kurosawa friendship may have been their diametrically opposed personality types, which would seem utterly incompatible yet proved the opposite. And there was no clearer illustration of their temperamental differences than each man’s response to the aftermath of a holocaust.

As a child, Kurosawa walked through the ruins of the Great Kanto Earthquake with his brother, which was “a terrifying experience for me, and also an extremely important one,” he recalled. In his autobiography, Kurosawa wrote viscerally, movingly about the episode: “Amid this expanse of nauseating redness lay every kind of corpse imaginable. I saw corpses charred black, half-burned corpses, corpses in gutters, corpses floating in rivers, corpses piled up on bridges, corpses blocking off a whole street at an intersection, and every manner of death possible to human beings … Even if I had tried to close my eyes, that scene had imprinted itself permanently onto the backs of my eyelids.”

The stoic, quiet Honda, by contrast, witnessed firsthand the damage caused by the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and yet never once described the experience in any detail, though in interviews with writers and journalists he would cite his visit to ground zero as an inspiration for the antiwar subtext of Godzilla. This event, probably the most oft-repeated story about Honda’s life, has become something of a minor legend, largely because of Honda’s reticence. It’s not difficult to imagine a young Honda, rail thin and still wearing a soldier’s uniform, wandering the burned-out streets and being deeply moved.

The actual circumstances of Honda’s visit to Hiroshima were less dramatic, though equally important. Honda learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while being held captive in China. About seven months later he was aboard a train streaking home toward Tokyo. It passed through Hiroshima, stopped briefly at the station less than a kilometer from the city center, and then moved on.

Honda observed the city’s ruins from the window of a passenger car. That is, he observed what little he could view. He recalled, “They had boarded up the area, put a fence around it, so I really couldn’t see much of anything.”⁶

Over time, Honda said almost nothing more about the experience, not to his wife, family, or colleagues. One might conclude this silence was the result of emotional trauma, though there is no evidence that glimpsing Hiroshima’s ashes was more traumatic than the horrors witnessed during his years in China. The cumulative toll of fighting a war he was not passionate about, being separated from his family, losing prime years of his life and career, and returning to an utterly defeated country had tested Honda’s will to survive. Through it all, he was motivated by the desire to work.

“The eight years I spent at war … helped me grow as a director,” he said.⁷ “The war, meeting the people of the continent with whom we were fighting, the relationships I established with them, their daily lives. I experienced all of that, as a human being … These things made me grow tremendously. I lived and survived only by thinking, ‘When can I go home? When can I make movies again?’”

———

Shortly after his arrival, he developed a horrible fever, a symptom of malaria. The military had given soldiers departing from China a supply of Atabrine tablets, a medication to treat the mosquito-borne disease, which was rampant in POW camps and spread rapidly on the overcrowded boats sailing home. Honda was laid up in bed for a short time, but once ambulatory he had only one destination in mind.

To the studio. Back to work.

He was eager to return. He had no bitterness about the years lost, no envy toward fellow rookies who had become directors while he struggled just to maintain a footing in the industry between tours of duty. No regret that he had spent more time on the battlefield than the back lot. All through the war, he was focused on this moment.

When he had returned to Tokyo in between tours, friends and colleagues urged him to quit the film industry, which many considered a frivolous line of work. Make yourself useful. Do something good for the country. Get a job at a war plant, they said. You’re getting older. You will probably never get a chance to become a director, so find another career. But he was resolute. On those lonely nights in China, he chased away doubts by recalling the musical sound of the camera rolling, the intoxicating scent of film stock, and the joy of sitting in a cinema, looking up at the big screen. This is what I live for.

At the Toho Studios gate, the guard stopped him: “Who are you?”

It was an abrupt reminder of how much time had passed and how far behind Honda had fallen. He kept his spirits, but others were concerned about him. Kajiro Yamamoto, ever the father figure, made arrangements for Honda to work in Toho’s administrative offices. With a university degree, a rare commodity then, the company will give you a secure career, Yamamoto told him. Honda needed a week to mull it over. “He always liked to take a week to think things through,” Kimi remembered. “But after much thinking, he said, ‘No, I do not want to leave the film studio, even if it means I starve.’ From that point, we went through a deep pit of hardship for a while.”

The film industry was in disarray. Work was infrequent and pay remained low. Kimi worried that the pressure might be too much, so she decided to put a firewall around her husband as best she could. “I thought, ‘This man has lost eight precious years, his peak years. What can I do to help him compensate for this lost time?’ He suddenly returned to a country that lost everything, had nothing. I decided to never bother him about materialistic or financial matters. And this lasted until the end of his life.” As in most traditional Japanese families, the wife supervised the family budget, but from this point forward Honda would never have to concern himself whatsoever with matters of money—whether or not, as his career ebbed and flowed, he had much of it. Kimi would eventually also serve as Honda’s de facto agent and negotiator, handling all contractual matters with his employer.

“Around this time, my motherly instincts towards him grew greater than my feeling for him as a wife, [and] I became focused on trying to care for him,” Kimi said, adding with a laugh, “I also thought to myself, ‘We shall never fight from this point forward.’ But that particular feeling didn’t last forever.”

———

The “deep pit of hardship” that Kimi remembered affected all Japanese. Many cities and towns were destroyed, including the factories where men and women worked and the neighborhoods where they lived. Roads, buildings, and bridges were demolished, and there was insufficient water and electricity. Shortages of food and commodities were extreme, worsened by a population explosion as soldiers returned home and the birth rate rose. Millions were homeless and jobless, with vagrants and criminals in the streets. The economy was in shambles, inflation was severe and rapid. In light of the economic and social devastation, Japan’s eventual recovery would be remarkably swift, but the first years were painful.

Still, the movie industry was in relatively good shape immediately after the war, with Toho atop the heap. Its production facilities in Setagaya were intact, and though a good number of theaters were shelled, many were open for business even if there were seats missing and holes in the roof. Amid the strife, movies offered a relatively affordable form of escapism, and “Toho was the healthiest of any of the companies and was naturally very pleased with itself,” according to historians Joseph Anderson and Donald Richie.⁸ “Pride, however, was but a preliminary to the fall.”