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FOREWORD

I had the honor of working with Ishiro Honda when I appeared in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams. It was extremely moving to me to see Honda, in his late seventies at the time and an internationally acknowledged and celebrated filmmaker, working as an assistant director to his old friend and acknowledged master, Akira Kurosawa. It taught me something about Japanese culture, but it also gave me an enriched sense of Mr. Honda, as a wonderful human being and an extraordinary artist and craftsman.

This carefully researched and detailed book gives us a full picture of the man and his life—his early love for cinema; the terrible trials he endured as a soldier, a prisoner of war, and then as a veteran returning to a devastated world; his relationship with his wife, Kimi; his devotion to Kurosawa; his gradual rise within the studio system from assistant to director of documentaries to features; and his remarkable run of science fiction and monster films from the 1950s through the 1970s. Of course, that includes Gojira (known to American audiences as Godzilla) as well as Rodan, The Mysterians, The H-Man, and Mothra, pictures that haunted the imaginations of young moviegoers like myself and millions of others for years to come.

—Martin Scorsese