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9

THE DOCUMENTARIES

Ise-Shima (1949), Story of a Co-op (1950)

The events leading to Honda’s debut as a feature filmmaker in 1951 have previously been difficult to trace because of the lack of official records and the fading memories of those involved. Archival records of the national Film Classification and Rating Committee (Eiga Rinri Kanri Iinkai, or EIRIN), however, provide a clearer timeline of Honda’s career progression and help correct long-held assumptions and misinformation regarding the sequence in which certain projects were made, and even the title of one of Honda’s earliest films.¹

Honda’s first opportunity to direct came from Toho, though not from the company’s near-moribund feature film studio but its Educational Film Division, which produced bunka eiga (cultural films). In the 1930s the Toho Educational Film Division and its subsidiary, the Toho National Policy Film Association, had made numerous war propaganda documentaries to stir the nation’s fighting spirit, a concept borrowed from the Kulturfilms produced by UFA for Nazi Germany. After the war, bunka eiga evolved into documentary short subjects about Japanese life, focusing on topics such as agriculture, sports, arts, and tourism. The films were funded by outside backers and shown mainly in schools. Toho sometimes used these productions as proving grounds for assistant directors due for promotion.

In April 1949, Honda began shooting the documentary short film Ise-Shima, a highlight reel of the cultural attractions of Ise-Shima National Park in eastern Mie Prefecture. The park is a popular coastal sightseeing destination and home to the Ise Grand Shrine, considered the most sacred Shinto shrine in Japan; the film was commissioned by local officials shortly after the area’s designation as a national park, to promote tourism. In a span of twenty minutes, Ise-Shima gives a brief history of the shrine, the local people, and the economy. It also looks at the workings of a pearl farm, where gems are harvested from the sea in large quantities.

Honda’s Ise-Shima is notable for Japan’s first successful attempt at underwater motion picture photography, an innovation that was a source of great pride for the new director. The region is well known for the ama, female divers who harvest pearls and abalone from the ocean; and from the moment he agreed to make the film, Honda knew he must shoot the divers in their element. Previous attempts at underwater photography were limited to pointing a camera lens into the water from a boat, or other crude methods. Honda wanted to follow the divers into the depths, moving the camera freely beneath the surface; and he spent seven to eight months developing a device to accomplish this feat.²

Honda turned to a camera technician colleague, who designed and built an airtight, waterproof, metal-and-glass housing for a compact thirty-five-millimeter camera (possibly an Eyemo or Parvo, portable cameras then popular with newsreel photographers). Two cameramen are credited on the film, Kiyoe Kawamura and Kuniichi Ushiyama, though it is unclear who shot the underwater sequences. As a safety precaution, professional divers assisted the camera crew during the shoot.

Honda’s original plan called for a more elaborate apparatus. Blueprints were drawn for a small, submarinelike craft enabling a cameraman to descend underwater, but that project was apparently canceled because of cost and safety concerns. In the end, the available technology was more than adequate for the task, however. An extended sequence shows the grace and beauty of the female divers as they descend, in relatively long takes, into the depths of the bay to collect noshi awabi (stretched abalone), the beautiful shells of which, according to local custom, are brought to Ise Grand Shrine each year as an offering.

Honda greatly admired the work of trailblazing documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty, particularly Man of Aran (1934), a beautifully rugged chronicle of the lives of fishermen in the remote, dangerously primitive Aran Islands off the coast of Ireland. Flaherty’s views of craggy seaside cliffs and rocky shorelines, and his story of simple people struggling against the elements to survive, evidently influenced not only Honda’s approach to Ise-Shima but also later works such as The Blue Pearl and The Skin of the South. (Flaherty’s 1922 film Nanook of the North, about the indigenous people of northern Quebec, was also among Honda’s favorites; its influence is similarly detectable in Honda’s Half Human.) Even though Ise-Shima is a travelogue rather than the work of an embedded documentarian, it bears glimpses of Honda’s affinity for a simpler way of life. The centerpiece of Ise-Shima is a brief history of the Ise Grand Shrine. According to legend, the great sun goddess Amaterasu chose this shrine as her final resting place. During feudal times, the movements and travel of the common people were severely regulated through a system of travel permits and barriers, called sekisho; these are depicted in Kurosawa’s The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail (Tora no o wo fumu otokotachi, 1945; released 1952). People who believed in the shrine’s powers would make pilgrimages from all over Japan, defying travel restrictions, just to pray there. Today, about six million Japanese visit the shrine annually. Honda’s film illustrates this history through a series of historical woodblock paintings, and also tours the grounds of the shrine, capturing the structure’s beauty.

Though not a commercial film, Ise-Shima appears to have netted returns for Toho. Honda recalled that a European distributor had come to Japan looking for documentaries, seeking something “extraordinary.” Honda showed the man Ise-Shima, starting the projector at the scenes of divers plunging underwater. Honda would recall that the distributor was instantly hooked, and Ise-Shima was eventually exhibited in multiple European territories, though details of this are lost. The film was rarely seen again until it reappeared on Japanese cable television in 2003, paired with Japan and Her Imperial Way (Kodo Nippon, 1940), a wartime propaganda documentary glorifying the emperor, directed and shot by Eiji Tsuburaya.

Honda had hoped the technical achievement of Ise-Shima would spark interest in underwater photography. “The fact that Ise-Shima got sold opened up my way to theatrical features. And, since we made this equipment to shoot underwater, I really wanted to use it again,” he said.³

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Honda completed Ise-Shima in July 1949, according to EIRIN records. He then pivoted back to the Film Art Association where, for the first time since the war, he would work beside Kurosawa. But if Honda had once had seniority over his good friend, now the roles were reversed. Honda was a fledgling director with one documentary short to his credit; Kurosawa was about to direct his ninth feature, Stray Dog (Nora inu, 1949), with shooting taking place in Tokyo from July to September 1949. The film was coproduced by the Film Art Association and Shin Toho, and Kurosawa staffed key crew positions with unemployed Toho staffers. He named Honda his chief assistant director.

An early Kurosawa masterpiece, Stray Dog follows young police detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), whose service revolver is pickpocketed on a crowded bus and used in a series of crimes. The guilt-ridden policeman becomes obsessed with finding the culprit and goes deep into Tokyo’s seedy underbelly. As many critics have observed, the film is a near-flawless document of the tension, desperation, poverty, and crime of postwar Japan.

“I had Honda do mainly second-unit shooting,” Kurosawa wrote in Something Like an Autobiography. “Every day I told him what I wanted and he would go out into the ruins of postwar Tokyo to film it. There are few men as honest and reliable as Honda. He faithfully brought back exactly the footage I requested, so almost everything he shot was used in the final cut of the film. I’m often told that I captured the atmosphere of postwar Japan very well in Stray Dog, and if so, I owe a great deal of that success to Honda.”

After the war, black-market districts dominated by yakuza gangsters, petty criminals, and hardscrabble types had arisen near train stations in Asakusa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ueno, and other parts of Tokyo. In search of his gun, Mifune’s detective combs these backstreets; but rather than try to re-create the black market on a set, Kurosawa sent Honda and cameraman Kazuo Yamada to Ueno, where they spent about a week filming documentary-style footage of crowd scenes and daily activity, unscripted and without actors.

Honda recalled, “Even newsreel cameramen could not shoot there because of [threats of violence].” In these sequences, Mifune’s detective poses as a soldier returning from the front. To blend into the throng, he wears “demobilization fatigues” issued by the military. For shots of Murakami wandering through the black market, viewed from behind or from the waist down, Honda body-doubled for Mifune, wearing an identical wardrobe. As noted in the documentary Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create (2002), “Since [Honda] had actually served as a soldier, he was a valuable adviser to Kurosawa, who had never served in the military, and Honda looked the part in a soldier’s uniform.” Honda and Yamada also went to Ginza to film one of Stray Dog’s most recognizable shots, rays of sunlight filtering through a rattan screen, a brilliant visualization of the brutal summer swelter.

Honda and Yamada captured the required footage but not without incident. “Yamada-kun put a hand-held camera in a box and followed me around,” Honda would recall. “The first five or six shots went fine, but as I was about to enter the side street [of the black market] from Yamashita Park, somebody said, ‘Here he comes,’ and a man blocked my path. He showed me his [yakuza] tattoo. The boy who said, ‘Here he comes,’ had apparently seen Yamada and me conferring. The man was not frightening at all. He said that he was desperately trying to survive. When I gave him some of my lunch, he seemed impressed. ‘White rice!’ he said.”⁴

Honda had no reservations about taking a secondary position to Kurosawa. “I was Kuro-san’s assistant director for Stray Dog, but to me it was just two people who were friends, who … had the same passion for filmmaking, so the [title] of director or assistant director did not have any meaning to me.”⁵ Four decades later, Honda would film similar second-unit sequences for Kurosawa’s Rhapsody in August (1991), capturing a crowded, hot summer in the city of Nagasaki; and he would make essentially the same remarks about their collaborative relationship.

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Following Stray Dog, Honda’s stock had risen such that he was subsequently credited as “adviser to the director” on two Film Art Association projects directed by his mentor Kajiro Yamamoto. In early 1950 Honda was busy with Escape from Prison (Datsugoku, 1950), which starred Toshiro Mifune in a love triangle involving two ne’er-do-wells and the beautiful owner of an oden (fish cake stew) stand, played by Mieko Takamine. Later that year, he worked on Yamamoto’s Elegy (Aika, 1951), one of the last Film Art Association projects, featuring Ken Uehara as a classical music composer who falls in with cabaret performers and prostitutes.

In between these films, Honda began preproduction on a drama for Toho titled Newspaper Kid (Shimbun kozo), which would have marked his feature film directorial debut had it not, for unknown reasons, been canceled. Based on an original story by esteemed novelist Tomoji Abe, whose works often espoused antimilitarist, prohumanist views, Newspaper Kid told the story of Isamu, a sixth-grader living in a provincial town where “the most beautiful castle in Japan” is located. Isamu’s family is poor, so he earns money delivering the local paper and doing chores in the newsroom. The editor gives Isamu an assignment to hang out with a group of orphans who shine shoes for money, to collect their stories for an article, and he is immersed in a world of street kids, gangsters, and black market criminals. His friends include a rich boy whose father owns a big factory, and a poor orphan who is cared for by a temple monk. One night, the gangsters break into the factory. The orphan boy is mistakenly accused, and Isamu helps clear his friend’s name. The story ends with the kids running a marathon around the castle, and a sentimental theme that resonates with Honda’s own outlook in childhood: “[Isamu] felt that it didn’t matter if you win or lose. It was important for everyone to come together and run as one.”

EIRIN records indicate that Honda spent time working on Newspaper Kid in 1950, but no further information about this unmade project is known. Instead, Honda turned his attention to a documentary short about consumer cooperatives. Co-ops had been shut down by the government during World War II, but they reappeared across the country in the late 1940s to distribute affordable food and goods, as a buffer against ongoing shortages, rationing, and starvation. Co-ops remain a major force in the Japanese economy today, comprising large portions of retail and rural trade.

The title of this film is usually given as Story of a Co-op, though EIRIN records indicate that its actual title was Flowers Blooming in the Sand.⁶ It was reportedly made by Toho under the auspices of the government’s Ministry of Health and Welfare to educate the public about the advent of co-ops. A Toho newsletter said the film “[introduces] consumer cooperative societies in towns and countrysides, not simply as a documentary but … abundantly incorporating theatrical elements.” Veteran Toho producer Jin Usami oversaw the production, and Honda wrote the script. The film was shot in docudrama fashion, telling the story of Shozo (Yasuo Hisamatsu), a demobilized soldier searching for work in postwar Tokyo and living with his supportive but impatient girlfriend. Through a newspaper reporter friend, Shozo finds work researching the living conditions of Tokyoites. In meeting the most poverty-stricken citizens, he learns about the existence of consumer cooperatives and pledges to establish one in his neighborhood. Records indicate the film included animated segments and illustrations to explain how co-ops work, though this is unconfirmed. Honda completed the film on October 6, 1950, and it has been seen seldom if at all since then. As of 2015, there were no known extant prints or other film elements. According to Honda’s memoirs, it reportedly sold well enough that Toho felt confident in giving him another assignment, his first feature.

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Honda’s transitions from soldier to civilian, and from assistant director to director, both occurred during the Allied Occupation (August 1945 to April 1952), Japan’s forced transition from military rule to a Western-style representative government. As part of the effort to demilitarize, democratize, and rehabilitate Japan into a peace-loving nation, MacArthur’s SCAP promoted free speech and expression while, conversely, it exerted control over the media and the arts, including cinema. It decided which films could be made, banned hundreds of preexisting films deemed militaristic and feudalistic (prints and negatives were mass-incinerated, a la Fahrenheit 451), and imposed a strict censorship program. New films were urged to advocate peace, tolerance, and equal rights; show male-female affection openly; support Japan’s new Occupation-mandated constitution; and encourage individualism and other Western ideals. Banned topics included criticism of the atomic bombings; stories portraying the war and militarism favorably; sword fighting; criticism of America and foreigners; suicide and self-sacrifice as an act of fealty; feudalism; and the subjugation of women. References to the war had to acknowledge Japan’s guilt for instigating the conflict.

Honda, as an assistant director, did not clash directly with SCAP, but he 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.