Honda became one of Yama-san’s most trusted disciples. From Yama-san, Honda learned all aspects of the craft with an emphasis on writing, as Yamamoto stressed that directors must write screenplays. While shooting, Yamamoto often scribbled in a journal, a practice that Honda adopted.
Honda also learned from Yamamoto how to treat his staff. Yama-san would throw parties at his home for cast and crew as a way of creating a family atmosphere; when Honda became a director, he would do the same for his charges. Yamamoto had a soft, quiet demeanor and always treated his protégés in equal terms. He called them by name: It was always Honda-san or the more familiar Honda-kun, never “hey you” or the condescending language other directors often used. He never sent them to buy cigarettes or do menial errands. Years later, Honda would show the same respect to his own crew members.
“He didn’t want yes-men around him,” Honda recalled. “We always went drinking with him, though. But he was never an autocrat … Since [Yamamoto] was so knowledgeable, his stories were always interesting. He was also frank on the set and would ask me to write parts of the script. And then he would use it.”1
Honda described Yamamoto as a connoisseur. “He was more like a free spirit. He was not like us, he was not all about movies. Movies were only a part of his life. He liked other things too, such as music. So I learned a lot of things from him.”2
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Honda’s two-year absence had stalled his career, while his peers advanced. His first job upon returning to work was on Yamamoto’s two-part drama A Husband’s Chastity (Otto no teiso, 1937). Senkichi Taniguchi, Honda’s friend since the Friday Party days, was now Yamamoto’s chief assistant director (or first assistant director), while Honda remained a second assistant director. Still, Honda accepted his situation and held no resentment toward the studio or his rank-and-file cohorts.
Released in April 1937, A Husband’s Chastity marked several milestones. It was a big hit, the first PCL film to turn a profit. It did so despite the refusal of Shochiku, Nikkatsu, and other studios to exhibit PCL movies in their theaters, a retaliation against PCL’s practice of hiring away its competitors’ actors and directors. For Honda, the film had another significance: it marked his meeting with an intensely ambitious new recruit, a man who would become his lifelong best friend.
The job of assistant director in the Japanese studios was not unlike that in Hollywood: keeping the production schedule, preparing call sheets, maintaining order on the set, and so on. Unlike their American counterparts, however, the Japanese were viewed as directors-in-training. At the time Honda joined PCL, trainees were hired strictly through personal connections, and so there were always too few assistant directors on the lot. In 1936, PCL chose ten prospective assistant directors from the general public for the first time to help bolster the ranks. All the new recruits had degrees from top universities except for one. Akira Kurosawa, at twenty-five, had just a junior-high-school education, but his enthusiasm and knowledge of the visual arts impressed the examiners.3
“[We] were placed in a sort of cadet system, like at military schools,” remembered Kurosawa. “We had to train in every area, even film printing. We rotated through a series of departments.”4 Only after thorough schooling in camera operation, editing, writing, costumes, props, scheduling, budgeting, and other areas could a trainee ascend from the ranks of third and second assistant to earn the coveted title of first assistant director.
PCL’s assistant directors put in long, hard days, worked well into the night, longed for sleep, and put saliva into their weary eyes to help them see clearly. Kurosawa quickly noticed Honda’s energy and diligence; he nicknamed his new friend “Honda mokume no kami”—Honda, keeper of the grain.
“[Honda] was then second assistant director, but when the set designers were overwhelmed with work, he lent a hand. He would always take care to paint following the grain of the wood on the false pillars and wainscoting, and to put in a grain texture where it was lacking … His motive in drawing in the grain was to make Yama-san’s work look just that much better. Probably he felt that in order to continue to merit Yama-san’s confidence, he had to make this extra effort. The confidence Yama-san had in us created this attitude. And of course this attitude carried over into our work.”5
Born on March 23, 1910, in Tokyo and standing five foot eleven and a half, Kurosawa was a year older and several inches taller than Honda and seemed worldly and larger than life. He was introduced to the cinema by his father, “a strict man of military background” who nevertheless loved movies and believed they had educational value.6 Growing up, Kurosawa was exposed to many different types of films, from Japanese silents to the Zigomar crime serials to Abel Gance’s The Wheel (La Roue, 1923). While Honda’s career was interrupted repeatedly by the war, Kurosawa apprenticed under Yamamoto for five straight years, becoming Yama-san’s “other self.”
Having just returned from China, Honda had no place of his own. He moved in with Kurosawa, who had a one-room apartment on the second floor of PCL’s employee dorm, Musashi-so, located near the studio in the Seijo neighborhood of Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward. They were opposites: Kurosawa opinionated and driven, Honda quiet and unassuming.
“Kuro-san was like a mentor-friend to me,” said Honda. “Even though he was the same age, I felt that way towards him because of his great talent.” Kurosawa, a gifted painter from a young age, introduced Honda to the work of calligrapher and artist Tessai Tomioka, an originator of the neotraditional Nihonga style, and other painters he was passionate about. The two friends discussed art and film at great length. And as years passed and Honda would go to and from the battlefront, they discussed the war and Japan’s escalating militarism.
“Honda and I agreed that it would be a disaster if Japan won, if the incompetents in the military stayed in power,” Kurosawa recalled. “Honda said this too. What we’d most hate was to see those military guys have their own way if we won the war, and drive the country into a deeper mess.”7 Thanks to his father’s respected name in the military, Kurosawa was exempted from duty. A draft official generously classified him as physically unfit to serve.
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On the PCL back lot they were known as the Three Crows: Akira Kurosawa, Senkichi Taniguchi, and Ishiro Honda, three up-and-coming assistant directors who, as Kajiro Yamamoto’s top protégés, commanded a bit of respect. No one remembers how the nickname came about, but they seemed significantly taller than everyone else, a trio of “very handsome fellows” who had “a little different vibe,” as a friend remembered. They seemed to be together constantly, during the workday and after hours. Theirs was a close-knit and sometimes tumultuous camaraderie based on shared interests and ambitions.
The three crows—Kurosawa, Honda, and Taniguchi—with mentor Kajiro Yamamoto, late 1930s.Courtesy of Kurosawa Productions
Each crow was a bird of a different feather. Taniguchi was the youngest, born February 12, 1912, in Tokyo. He wore eyeglasses, was perpetually tan, and was known for his ever-running mouth, sense of humor, and sharp tongue. Yamamoto encouraged his assistants to speak freely, and Taniguchi didn’t hesitate. “Taniguchi was merciless,” said Kurosawa. “One day he said, ‘Yama-san, you’re a first-rate screenwriter but a second-rate director.’ Yama-san just laughed.”
Taniguchi served in the war, but his stint was shorter than Honda’s and didn’t stall his career. “[Honda] had really bad luck,” Taniguchi said in 1999. “He was drafted when he was young, and just at a time when he could have learned so much about making movies.”8
Kurosawa