said. “It was not just one-to-one, artist to viewer, like ordinary art before it. For example, you could show paintings in an exhibition, but the experience is personal, one-to-one. Stage plays and concerts play to an audience, but even then, the audience is limited to the venue. Movies play on a much bigger scale … and this was when they began to appear before many people.”8
There was no clear path to a career in film. Formal education in the field was nonexistent. Then, just before graduating high school, Honda learned that the art department of Nihon University (Nihon Daigaku, often abbreviated as “Nichidai”) had recently established a film major program. It needed warm bodies; there were no entrance requirements. Instead of dental college, after graduating from middle school, Honda secretly applied to Nihon University and was accepted. Despite the broken promise, and even if Honda was opting for a nontraditional career path in a young, unstable industry, his family was not upset.
“My father never told me [what to do with my life]. My brother was much older, and he told me to do whatever I wanted, but he also said I must be responsible for whatever I chose. Back then, most people looked down on [working in the movie business], but my family was never like that.”9
“[So] I thought, OK, let me try studying this thing called the cinema. That was when I bet my life on this field,” Honda said.10 As more and more new cinemas were built and traditional theaters were converted into movie houses, young Honda saw Tokyo entering a cinematic boom. “I realized there could be a pretty well paying future for me in the business. It all came together: I enjoyed telling stories and could find work in an industry that was financially successful and artistic to boot.”11
3
FILM SCHOOL LESSONS
Honda entered Nihon University in 1931 with dreams of a career in the cinematic arts, but he was confronted with some rather unpleasant realities. If he was betting his life on a movie career, the odds didn’t look good.
“Nothing [at the school] was well prepared,” he remembered. “It was all brand new … The classes were not really that good, and there was not enough equipment. There was not even an actual campus … they rented space in a nearby school building and held classes there. A lot of the professors were well-known, good teachers, although they canceled classes all the time.”1
The film department was a pilot program and, as such, it was disorganized and erratically run. The school’s administration wasn’t fully convinced that film could be taught at a university, thus there were no studio facilities or practical training. Many of the two hundred students in the inaugural class got frustrated and quit.
Still, when class was canceled, Honda had time to visit local cinemas, many in converted kabuki theaters and Buddhist temples (and some still bearing signs of earthquake damage), and there his education continued. He took copious notes on silents such as Edward Sloman’s adventure The Foreign Legion (1928) and early talkies such as René Clair’s classic romantic comedy Under the Roofs of Paris (Sous les toits de Paris, 1930). He watched Josef von Sternberg’s Morocco (1930) more than ten times, noting all its cuts and dialogue for further study; the wartime romance between a legionnaire (Gary Cooper) and a cabaret girl (Marlene Dietrich) may have influenced Honda’s Farewell Rabaul two decades later. He was impressed by Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932), admired Frank Capra, and watched as many Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton films as he could.
Early on, Honda and four classmates rented a room in Shinbashi, a neighborhood south of Ginza and a few kilometers from the university. It was a place to hang out after school, talk movies, and discuss the latest issue of Kinema Junpo, Japan’s first journal of film criticism, founded in 1919. Honda hoped the group might collaborate on a screenplay, but mostly they socialized and drank. He also attended an occasional salon of film critics and students, though he rarely participated. “I couldn’t pound others with my opinion, so I just quietly listened … I was the type of student who didn’t stand out at all,” he later recalled.2 Still, even if school was not all he’d hoped, it introduced Honda to Iwao Mori, an executive in charge of production for an upstart studio called Photographic Chemical Laboratories, or PCL. Mori would become an influential figure in Honda’s life.
Born in 1899, Mori was a film critic and screenwriter who emerged in the 1920s as a leading advocate for the improvement of Japanese films, which he considered far behind those produced in the West. Mori had entered the movie business in 1926 at Nikkatsu Studios, where he formed the Nikkatsu Kinyokai (Friday Party), a think tank of executives, producers, writers, directors, advertising staff, theater operators, and so on. Young and hungry, they discussed how to make better films and run a better operation, and were credited with helping reestablish Nikkatsu’s Tokyo studio after the earthquake had crippled it. Mori would become known as an innovator, collecting ideas from his travels to Hollywood and Europe.
Mori taught a class at Nihon University called “Creating Movies,” but he was too busy to show up often. His main interest lay in recruiting young talent for PCL; so in September 1932 he created a new Friday Party with about ten promising students from various colleges, and paid them a small stipend as an incentive to attend. Honda was one of just two Nihon University students accepted. The group also included Senkichi Taniguchi, an ambitious young man who’d just quit Waseda University to join the film industry and who would become Honda’s close friend. The group’s discussions might focus on critiquing a particular film or on the montage theory of Russian directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Not one to stand out from the crowd, Honda wondered why Mori had included him in the group. Honda later learned that he was recommended by Hiroshi Nakane, a Russian music scholar who had befriended him; Nakane was impressed by Honda’s curiosity about classical music and his interest in how music might enhance motion pictures in the coming age of sound film.
PCL was founded in 1929 as a film laboratory, but with the arrival of talkies it began providing state-of-the-art recording services to the big studios. Soon it moved into film production, starting with musical advertising shorts for beer, candy, and record companies. PCL made just two films in 1933, then quickly expanded production and released fifty-one features from 1934 to 1936.3
In August 1933, Mori offered entry-level jobs at PCL to a select few members of the Friday Party, including Honda and Taniguchi. It was a tremendous opportunity; industry jobs, even bottom-rung positions, were highly coveted, and it was nigh impossible to get hired without an inside connection. For roughly a year, Honda simultaneously completed his college studies while working at the studio.
PCL’s innovative business model, largely Mori’s creation, introduced a Hollywood-style, producer-centered system. It was markedly different from other studios, where production was a big bureaucracy run by an executive and built on the star power of famous directors and actors. Instead, PCL emphasized quality filmmaking and the latest technological advances. It abolished the feudal system of lifetime contracts and hired filmmakers, actors, and other personnel on short-term deals that could be renewed or canceled as warranted. Mori put producers in charge of individual projects, leaving directors free to concentrate on the work.
“PCL was just a dream place for young people who were aiming for the movie world,” Honda recalled.4 After some basic training, the young recruits were put on different tracks—management, screenwriter, cameraman, sound, and other business and technical areas. Honda became a jokantoku (assistant director) trainee, and his first jobs involved working as a scripter in the editing department, which required logging and memorizing every cut, arduous tasks for an absolute beginner. Finally, Honda made his debut on a film set, working at the bottom rung as a third assistant director—or kachinko (clapperboard), as they were nicknamed—on director Sotoji Kimura’s The Elderly Commoner’s Life Study (Tadano bonji jinsei benkyo, 1934).
Then, suddenly, good fortune ran out. Immediately after the film was completed, Honda received a red postcard calling on him to serve his country and his emperor. A draft notice.
4
A RELUCTANT SOLDIER
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