Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

was in third grade when his life abruptly shifted from the bucolic mountains to the bustling city; he’d never even seen a train before boarding one for Tokyo. Still, he adapted quickly to his new surroundings. When his classmates at Takaido Elementary teased him about his mountain dialect, he took it in stride and learned to speak like a Tokyoite. He’d been an honors student back home; but the city schools were more difficult, and he faltered briefly before his grades rebounded. His favorite subjects were Japanese, history, and geography; and he continued to cultivate a love of the natural sciences, saving his allowance to buy more science magazines. (Later, in middle school, he would struggle with chemistry, biology, algebra, and other subjects involving equations, but he still liked the scientific mindset.) Despite a drastic change of scenery, many things in his life—family, school, play—were basically the same.

      Then he experienced something entirely different. Before Tokyo, Honda had never heard of eiga (movies), but one day at school the students were assembled to watch one. Though Honda would forget the title, it was likely one of the Universal Bluebird photoplays, a series of mostly Westerns that were considered minor pictures in the United States, but were extremely popular in Japan from 1916 to 1919.² Honda described the film this way: “It was the story of a girl who was kidnapped and raised by Indians. She grew up and found out that she wasn’t one of them. There was a dispute over her, who[m] she should live with … she got on the back of the horse and went off fighting … against her real brother, something like that. I saw it at the schoolgrounds. I still remember that girl, she was a little on the chubby side, not quite pretty, she had long dark hair, sort of looked like an Indian, and there was a situation where she was surprised by being told that she was actually a white person, not Indian … That was quite shocking, a machine that projected something like that, and people were moving around in there. I was so interested, and I definitely wanted to see more.”³

      Tokyo offered a multitude of ideal diversions for a “science boy,” such as air shows and invention expos, which Honda would sneak off to see all by himself, without his parents’ permission. But more and more, he was drawn to the movie houses. By the third and fourth grade he was reading newspaper critiques and asking friends which movies were worth seeing, and begging his big brothers to take him. “If you had the money, you’d just go to the movie theater and watch whatever,” he said. “It was that kind of time.”

      ———

      Two minutes before noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, a seismic fault six miles beneath the sea floor off Tokyo unleashed a magnitude 7.9 temblor, mercilessly shaking the Kanto Plain. A forty-foot-high tsunami came ashore and swept away thousands of people, and fires engulfed the city’s wooden structures for days. Nearly 140,000 of Tokyo’s roughly 2.5 million residents were killed and about half the city was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake, Japan’s deadliest natural disaster. Fortunately, the Hondas lived in the low-density western suburbs, where many people survived by escaping to nearby forests and farmland, away from burning debris.

      Tokyo’s rapid postearthquake reconstruction created a cosmopolitan, urban environment, where leisure activities now included jazz clubs, modern theater, and cinema. Film was by this time known as daihachi geijutsu (the eighth art), and its form and content had greatly evolved since Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope had arrived in Japan in 1896. The earliest Japanese movies were essentially filmed stage plays that borrowed the conventions of Noh, kabuki, and Shinpa (a style of melodrama popular in the late 1800s) and featured stars of the theater. By the 1920s filmmakers were embracing new narrative styles, and their movies ranged from lowbrow sword-fighting adventures to high-minded studies of the human condition. The quake had leveled all but one of Tokyo’s studios, resulting in a shortage of domestic movies. Films were imported from abroad to fill the void, and Japanese audiences and filmmakers were influenced by Western methods, techniques, and stories.

      Thus, the first films Honda saw ranged from ninja shorts starring Japan’s first movie star, Matsunosuke Onoe (nicknamed “Eyeballs Matsu” for his big, demonstrative eyes) to the German expressionist horror masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920). Honda’s parents forbade him from going to cinemas alone, but he often did anyway, usually sneaking away to the nearby Nikkatsu theater in the Sangenjaya neighborhood of Setagaya Ward. Japan’s silent-movie cinemas, unlike those in the West, did not employ screen titles; instead there were benshi, narrators who stood beside the movie screen and provided live running commentary. Some benshi were such great orators that they were considered artists, as popular as movie stars. “I was more interested in them than what was happening on screen,” Honda later recalled.⁴ After spending an afternoon at the cinema, he would often visit the nearby home of a young male cousin, who was blind. Honda recounted each movie for the boy, acting out the story and describing the actors, the action scenes, even the backgrounds and sets; it was his first real experience as a storyteller. Sometimes he’d perform this routine for his father.

      One of the benshi whom Honda admired was Musei Tokugawa, among the most famous in Tokyo, known for his erudite delivery and for working in finer movie houses where foreign films played. It was at the high-class Musashinokan cinema in Shinjuku, during a showing of F. W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Der letzte mann, 1924) narrated by Tokugawa, that young Honda experienced a small epiphany that helped him begin to understand how films were created. The Last Laugh follows an old doorman at a fancy hotel, who is demoted to washroom attendant. Ashamed, the man hides his plight from family and friends, but soon everyone finds out and he is ridiculed. In the surprise happy ending, the doorman inherits a fortune from a hotel patron. Explaining this turn of events to the audience, the benshi Tokugawa said the filmmaker, Murnau, had taken pity on the protagonist.

      At that, Honda’s brother Ryuzo, sitting next to him, remarked, “Wow, I’m really impressed by this director.” That word—director, kantoku—immediately grabbed Honda’s attention. He knew directors were important because their names were prominent in the credits; he enjoyed the comedies of director Yutaka Abe or the action films of directors Yoshiro Tsuji and Minoru Murata, but he didn’t know what these people did. He’d always thought movies were made by the actors, but now he began to understand there was someone else offscreen.⁵ (The benshi Musei Tokugawa would go on to become one of Japan’s most famous actors of the 1930s; Honda, perhaps recalling this pivotal childhood moment, years later would choose Tokugawa to narrate his documentary film Ise-Shima.)

      After his father transferred to another temple, Honda enrolled in Tachibana Elementary School in Kawasaki, just southwest of Tokyo, and then Kogyokusha Junior High School, later a prestigious prep school for the Imperial Japanese Naval Academy. Athletically inclined, he studied kendo and archery and became an accomplished swimmer, but quit the swim team after tearing his Achilles tendon. Around this time, his brother Takamoto completed his service as a military physician and settled in Tokyo with plans to open a clinic, hoping Honda would become a dentist and join him there. Honda half-heartedly promised to attend dental college, but soon witnessed something that changed his mind.

      High school portrait, c. 1927.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.

      Kendo training, late 1920s.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.

      One day Honda was walking down a neighborhood street frequently used by filmmakers for location shooting when he saw a crew from Shochiku Kinema Kamata, predecessor of the modern Shochiku Studios. Tadamoto Okubo, mentor of Yasujiro Ozu, was directing action star Goro Morino in a jidai-geki (period drama) film.⁶ Honda would always remember the scene: Morino stood atop a cliff, threw a rope, and captured the bad guy. Okubo, the man barking out orders, was addressed by a familiar word: kantoku. Little by little, Honda’s understanding of the filmmaking process was growing. “That was a big deal for me, to see a location shoot,” he recalled. “I realized that the true author of the movie is the director. Watching this … really made me want to enter the world of cinema.”⁷

      “The