Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

of Ishiro Honda’s career more than producer Tomoyuki Tanaka. Born into a wealthy Osaka family, Tanaka came from a far different background than Honda; but the two men were close in age and had certain things in common, including the tutelage of studio head Iwao Mori, who had pulled Tanaka from Toho’s literature department and groomed him to be a producer. Tanaka produced a handful of Toho movies before the end of World War II; then, during the Occupation he made the controversial Those Who Make Tomorrow; Senkichi Taniguchi’s debut, Snow Trail; and other projects. In 1948 Tanaka left Toho in protest of the communist purge and spent four years working with the Film Art Association, where he produced the aforementioned Escape at Dawn and other projects. In 1952 Iwao Mori’s banishment by Occupation authorities was over, and Mori returned to Toho, inviting Tanaka to join him. Although in his early forties, Tanaka was still viewed as an up-and-comer. In the years ahead, Tanaka would become one of the studio’s most commercially successful producers through a close alliance with Honda and Tsuburaya, the foundation of which was inconspicuously laid in The Man Who Came to Port (Minato e kita otoko), a film that proved far less than the sum of its substantial parts, including starring turns by Takashi Shimura and Toshiro Mifune.

      “This was the film where I met Tomoyuki Tanaka,” Honda later recalled. “We both had the same type of goal … At this time [he] was really a beginner; many of the producers were much older then. [Projects with] big stars were done more by the upper echelon, but younger producers had to explore new genres. Because of this, younger producers and directors and staff were all working together [and] people started noticing the kinds of things I wanted to do.”¹⁵

      Honda was earning a reputation for his semi-nonfiction style and skill at capturing natural, nonurban settings; so when Tanaka approached the director with a drama about whalers, it seemed an ideal fit. Toho had acquired the book Dance of the Surging Waves (Odore yo Doto) by Shinzo Kajino, a popular writer of maritime fiction, and it had access to more than twenty thousand feet of documentary footage shot by cameramen Hiromitsu Karasawa and Taichi Kankura on actual Japanese whaling expeditions at sea, including a trip to Antarctica.

      At the time, Mori was just beginning to reestablish Toho’s special-effects capabilities, and the studio had recently acquired a rear-screen projection system. Shimura and Mifune play captains of competing whaling vessels, and the idea was to use the rear-screen process to combine the documentary footage in the background with shots of the actors firing a harpoon gun on a soundstage, creating the illusion they were on the bow deck of a whaling vessel. Tsuburaya hadn’t perfected the process yet, thus the results were unconvincing and used sparingly. Honda liberally incorporates actual footage of whales breaching, harpoon guns firing, whales flailing as they’re fatally struck, and cetacean carcasses being towed into harbor; he crosscuts these violent, graphic images of the animals being hunted with actors matter-of-factly pretending to hunt them. Compared to the reverence for the ocean and the view into the world of the ama in The Blue Pearl, this film’s surface treatment of the dangerous life of whalers, who spend most of their time on land, drinking sake, is uninspired. There is no romance of the sea, no worshipping of the mighty, godlike creatures pursued across the hemispheres and, aside from a fleeting reference to a “white whale,” no aspirations to Melvillean adventure. The Man Who Came to Port is a compact soap opera in which the two main rivals just happen to be whalers.

      Set in a small whaling town on Kinkasan Island in Miyagi Prefecture, the story centers on the gruff veteran Capt. Okabe (Shimura). An expert whale gunner and respected seaman, Okabe values tradition and experience above all, but his beliefs are challenged by the arrival of the outsider Ninuma (Mifune), a young, handsome sailor with an urban air, education, and top whale-gunning skills. Sensing his seafaring days waning, Okabe plans to buy the local inn and settle down for retirement, and hopes the innkeeper’s daughter, the much younger Sonoko (Asami Kuji), will marry him. Sonoko, however, is attracted to Ninuma, who suppresses his own feelings and, out of respect for his captain, encourages her to marry Okabe, creating a complicated triangle of hurt feelings. Soon Ninuma becomes captain of another whaling ship, infuriating Okabe, who feels pushed aside for the younger generation. Complicating matters is a rocky reconciliation between Okabe and his illegitimate son, Shingo (Hiroshi Koizumi). In the climax, Okabe foolishly tries to prove himself by hunting whales in a typhoon, but he goes adrift and Ninuma must rescue him. Now friends, the two former rivals leave for a six-month whaling expedition to Antarctica.

      This image has been redacted from the digital edition. Please refer to the print edition to see the image.

      The Man Who Came to Port. © Toho Co., Ltd.

      Though rarely seen today, The Man Who Came to Port was a significant movie for Toho, one of the first projects completed after the studio fully resumed production in 1952 and began to recover from the disastrous effects of the war, the strikes, and the communist purge. This was an A-class picture, evidenced by the personnel in front of and behind the camera. Shimura and Mifune were by now firmly ensconced in Kurosawa’s fold and committed to his projects first and foremost, sandwiching other films in between. Shimura had just finished starring in Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), while Mifune was busy working on a number of films after Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and before Seven Samurai (1954), the film that would make both he and Shimura superstars.

      Honda’s direction of the leads is more nuanced than before, as Shimura and Mifune create believably flawed, yet likeable dueling protagonists. Capt. Okabe feels so threatened by young Ninuma’s arrival that he lashes out at his crew when things go wrong, but Shimura also shows the grizzled captain’s other side, a lonely and sensitive older man. While best known in the West for his animalistic fury in Rashomon and Seven Samurai, Mifune in The Man Who Came to Port is typical of the stoic, stalwart heroes he played in studio fare outside Kurosawa’s oeuvre during this phase of his career. As Ninuma hides his emotions, Mifune layers the character with simmering anger that surfaces in drunken outbursts.

      By now Toho had a stable of character actors populating the works of most all the studio’s directors. A core group became Honda’s favorites, reappearing in numerous films. The Man Who Came to Port marks the first appearances of two such actors who became very familiar faces: Ren Yamamoto, who would later stand out as a terrified villager in Godzilla, and Senkichi Omura, known for playing excitable working-class types, and later memorable as the goofball interpreter in King Kong vs. Godzilla. The cast also features Kurosawa mainstays, including Bokuzen Hidari, known for portraying sad old men, as the glassy-eyed town drunk, and Kamatari Fujiwara, who would go on to play the paranoid peasant Manzo in The Seven Samurai. The score was by Ichiro Saito, who had previously worked for Yasujiro Ozu and Mikio Naruse. Honda shared screenplay credit with Masashige Narusawa, who would later write Kenji Mizoguchi’s acclaimed Tales of the Taira Clan (Shin heike monogatari, 1955) and Street of Shame (Akasen chitai, 1956).

      Despite its quality pedigree, The Man Who Came to Port was a step backward. Honda had neglected two of his strengths. His previous films showed isolated cultures in their natural surroundings, but remove the documentary stock footage and The Man Who Came to Port takes place almost entirely in nondescript interiors. The conflict between man and nature is never contemplated; the whale is little more than a harpooner’s target.

      Critics assailed the picture. “There are so many spots that just don’t make any sense,” complained the Shukan Yomiuri newspaper. “The script … is very poorly done. The direction by Honda is so amateurish … They inserted actual whaling footage … which only adds boredom.” A Kinema Junpo reviewer actually praised the film’s visual style, but added, “What director Honda needs to learn is how to make the drama part better … It needs a little more of a climax.”

      On location for Adolescence Part 2.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.

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      Honda’s next feature revisited ideas explored in The Blue Pearl: conflict between traditional and modern values, anxiety about encroaching Western influence, and the impact of these pressures