they didn’t work on the same film often and seldom saw one another during the day, they walked to the studio together each morning and joined their regular crowd in the evening. This routine had continued for more than a year when, one morning, Honda and Kimi were standing on the Fujimi Bridge, a small pedestrian overpass in Seijo that, on cloudless days, offered breathtaking views of Mount Fuji and the Tanzawa Mountains to the west. Honda asked, matter-of-factly, “Want to get married with me?”
“Everybody was just friends back then,” Kimi said. “I had no idea he viewed me as more than just that. I was so surprised when he asked me. But I recall feeling really warm when I was with him, and I never got sick of being around him. I wondered what he saw in me. I was pretty naïve, simple, and innocent. So I said, ‘Sure, OK.’ Just like that.”
In proposing, Honda was breaking with tradition once again. The great majority of marriages were customarily arranged by a go-between, acting on the parents’ behalf, who screened prospective partners for compatibility based on family reputation, income, profession, education, and other factors.18 Those who deigned to choose a spouse against their parents’ wishes might be shunned. Kimi’s mother, Kin Yamazaki, supported the couple’s engagement but, perhaps unsurprisingly, her father was strongly opposed. Heishichi Yamazaki was a wealthy and conservative landowner in Ibaraki, north of Tokyo; it would be unacceptable for his daughter to marry a country boy with unclear prospects for gainful employment in a new, unproven industry. Kimi stood firm on her wishes, and her father stood equally firm, responding simply, “Suit yourself.” With those words, Heishichi denied the couple the financial support they so desperately needed. Once Kimi quit her job, as was customary for new wives, the pair would have to survive on Honda’s meager salary. Honda’s more unconventional family, by contrast, congratulated the couple. Takamoto wrote to Kimi, “No matter what others say, believe in each other and live with confidence.”
Honda was twenty-seven years old, Kimi twenty-two. On their wedding day in March 1939, they filed papers at city hall, paid their respects at Meiji Shrine, and went home. It was so uneventful that, years later, neither one could recall the precise date. There was no ceremony, celebration, or honeymoon. With little money, the pair moved into a tiny, one-room apartment with a shared bathroom.
Before long Kimi was pregnant, complicating the newlyweds’ financial struggles. Although Kimi’s father would never openly approve of the marriage, the news of a grandchild on the way caused Heishichi to quietly relent; and he sent her a bank book with a ¥1,000 balance, a then sizeable gift. “His head clerk came to give it to me, saying, ‘This is from the master,’” Kimi remembered. “My mother expressed her love in a very kind manner, but [my father’s] love was more from afar.” Each month Heishichi would send money to Kimi, enabling the couple to move into a small rented house on the south side of Seijo, about five minutes from the studio, where they would start their family.
It was a happy time, but short-lived.
6
WAR
I always thought that when this thing is over, I am going to go back to the studio and make movies … It helped me not to go insane.
— Ishiro Honda
In mid-December 1939, a week before the baby was due, Honda received a shock: he was recalled to active duty.
In the years since Honda had entered the military, Japan had widened the China conflict on multiple fronts against Chiang Kai-Shek’s National Revolutionary Army and Mao-tse Tung’s Communists. In July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, another staged provocation, became the pretext for a massive troop escalation and the plunge into total war. Then came the occupation of Shanghai, China’s largest city; and in December 1937 the Japanese began the six-week-long Nanking Massacre, in which three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers and civilians were slaughtered and raped, one of the most notorious war crime sprees of the twentieth century.
Despite these brutal campaigns, by the end of 1937 there was no end in sight to the conflict. More than six hundred thousand Japanese soldiers were now spread across an area roughly equivalent to the United States west of the Mississippi. The men were weakened by exhaustion and heavy casualties, and many were due to return home. To replace these losses, the army doubled the draft beginning in 1938 and called up tens of thousands of reserves, mostly men in their twenties and thirties with wives, children, and jobs. Some men were so upset that they openly rebelled, only to be severely punished.1
Honda, just shy of twenty-nine, shared the resentment but was not one to complain. Protesting would only make his situation worse. “If I were to … show my anti-war feelings, then I am sure I would not have survived, not even a day,” he would recall.2
“My father was the type of person who [thought], ‘It is what it is,’” said Honda’s son, Ryuji Honda. “‘This is my fate. So, what else can I do but to follow orders and do it?’ He did, however, have the conviction that he would return alive and make movies.”
After Honda’s latest draft notice arrived, Kimi’s mother congratulated her daughter. It was an honor to have a husband or son at the front, and there was no greater purpose than to fight and die for one’s country. Nationalism reigned, and propaganda fueled support for the war. Neighborhood associations and the Special Higher Police kept tabs on the citizenry. The media and schools became indoctrination tools against Western ideals of individuality and materialism. War was a righteous struggle against colonialism; Japan would soon lead a new world order with its superior values, which derived from the cult of the divine emperor as head of the nation-family, the absolute authority.
Kimi gave birth to a daughter on December 23, 1939. Honda had rejoined his regiment for training, but he now had risen in rank and was allowed to visit his wife in the hospital. The baby was premature, tiny and covered with hair; Honda thought she looked like a baby bird. Kimi remembered, “My mother scolded him, saying that he’ll be cursed for saying such a thing, and that she will grow up to be a beautiful child.” Honda named the girl Takako. He left the hospital and was bound for China.
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“There were so many [soldiers] who hated war,” Honda later wrote. “I was one of them, but I kept my thoughts deep inside my chest, to myself, and every time I received [a draft notice], I [convinced] myself that I was not going to die. Why should that stupid red piece of paper decide the freedom or lives of individuals? Why couldn’t I just rip this paper to shreds?”3
Honda’s belief that he would survive helped him suppress fear, and it wasn’t entirely irrational. When bullets were exchanged, he noticed that few connected. He had become an excellent marksman, and he knew how difficult it was to hit the target in a firefight, with thousands of rounds discharging rapidly and tensions high. The chances of being hit were slim, he told himself. He would listen to the reports of gunfire, and if the bullets whizzed through the air, that meant the enemy didn’t have a clear shot; but if he heard the pop of bullets hitting nearby trees, then it was time to move. By keeping vigilant, he could live through this. Most soldiers died, he observed, not from gunshots but from disease.
He would defend himself if threatened, but Honda felt no animus toward the Chinese. “He said, ‘Everyone, shoot your guns into the air,’” recalled Koji Kajita, later Honda’s longtime assistant and a fellow veteran. “‘Why must we kill one another?’ he wondered. His long years in the military helped make him the person he was.”
With extended periods of inactivity and the doldrums of daily routine, boredom reigned. Soldiers looked forward to the doling out of liquor and cigarette rations, a reprieve from the monotony. Honda developed a taste for sake and became a heavy smoker, a habit he would maintain well into his fifties, though he would eventually quit. By middle age, his fingertips would be brown with permanent tobacco stains.
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From 1940 to 1941 Honda was assigned to help manage a comfort station, a euphemism for the hundreds of brothels the Imperial Army established in China and the occupied territories. As the Roman Empire had done in its far-flung conquests, Japan provided its