(Kato hayabusa sento-tai, 1944), a biopic of World War II ace aviator Tateo Kato (Susumu Fujita). It was a lengthy production, and Honda oversaw major action sequences with two captured US P-40 fighters, shot on location at a military aviation school. More significant, though, was Honda’s first meeting with Eiji Tsuburaya, the technician hailed as “the god of special effects” for his convincing re-creation of the Pearl Harbor attack, which was credited with making The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaya such a success.10
It was an inauspicious encounter, portending nothing of their eventual partnership. Honda, in his usual hands-on fashion, was prepping a scene wherein a squadron of model fighters would fly over a bank of clouds made of white cotton. When Tsuburaya inspected the shot, he complained to Yamamoto about it. “I could tell Eiji was not happy with the width of the stage, the cloud material, or the method used to operate the model [plane],” Honda wrote in 1983. “I could not help feeling like a failure, but Yamamoto was very reassuring and helped smooth my feelings.”11
He also settled back into family life. On January 31, 1944, Kimi gave birth to a son, Ryuji. But the war’s shadow still loomed. Now Japan was fighting America. Shortages of food and supplies were common. The military was overextended by its conquest of Asia, which now encircled a vast area from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific. The fighting was bloody; warm bodies were needed. Soldiers in their thirties and forties were pressed into service again.
In March 1944, another draft card was delivered. Kimi was in the kitchen making doughnuts, a dessert treat recently imported to Japan from the West. The Hondas didn’t have a telephone, so she used a neighbor’s phone to call her husband at Toho. “He smelled such pleasant sweetness as he came home, that when he found out the news, he thought it was a cruel joke.”
This time, the unflappable Honda was rattled. “The third time that I got called up, I felt it really was not fair,” he said. “I thought maybe if I just ripped it up, I would not have to go.”12
His family said good-bye at the train station. It was snowing, but Honda wore short sleeves. His unit was headed for the Philippines.
“Honda-san now had small children, so it must have been so hard for him to go,” related Koji Kajita. “[But] to not show your emotions on your face was the rule. It was a great national ethos, the good military trait of the time … One had to experience it back then in order to understand. You didn’t question, you just followed completely what you were directed to do. The times were different, and the education was different.”
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His troop missed the boat. Later, he would learn that it never reached its destination. Somewhere between Taiwan and Manila it was sunk, killing all aboard. Other regiments of the First Division arrived safely in the Philippines, only to die there. In October 1944 many fought in the horrific Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle of World War II, by some criteria the largest naval battle in history, which killed more than twelve thousand Japanese soldiers.
Instead, Honda went to China yet again. It was a fortunate break, as the conflict there had reached a stalemate and was now far less intense than in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. He spent most of the next two years in and around the city of Hankou, which is now part of Wuhan, capital of the central province of Hubei. Situated on the north side of the Yangtze River where it meets the Han River, it was a beautiful place, and Honda’s familiarity with Chinese customs and culture made him comfortable dealing with the people there. Honda was now a gunso (sergeant), and his job involved communicating and trading with civilians.
Still, even though fighting had subsided in the area, the Chinese continued to live in a state of war, “with a mixture of terror and resignation” and memories of the early days of Japan’s occupation, when soldiers might shoot civilians without provocation.13 Honda would recount that, because the Chinese feared and hated the “oriental devils” occupying their country, he tried to demonstrate that not all Japanese were cruel. When he and his fellow troops entered a village, they would dress in Chinese clothing and be on their best behavior. “We [bought] vegetables and supplies from the Chinese people,” he remembered. “We had to interact with them. I never ordered them around as a Japanese soldier … I would pay what I was supposed to and I tried to talk to them with the small amount of Chinese that I knew.”14
Japan launched its final major offensive in China in 1944, conquering parts of Henan and Hunan provinces in the interior. But Chinese forces would not surrender; and with its military resources now heavily overextended on multiple fronts, Japan’s presence in China was severely weakened. The Chinese National Revolutionary Army began seizing lands from the Imperial Army and capturing Japanese troops. Honda was relocated to an area between Beijing and Shanghai; and although the exact place is unknown, it was somewhere along the Yangtze River south of Shanghai that Honda was taken prisoner about one year before the war’s end.15
Imperial soldiers had been taught that being a prisoner of war was “so shameful that it was equivalent to forfeiting one’s citizenship,” according to historian Ulrich Straus. The Japanese government “had made it absolutely clear that they were to fight to their last breath, and when they could no longer fight, they were to commit suicide.”16 Many prisoners who did not die faced hellish conditions, especially those taken by Russia, which invaded Manchuria in August 1945 and overran weakened Japanese forces in China and northern Korea. More than a half million Japanese soldiers were shipped to work camps in Mongolia and the Soviet tundra, where they endured years of captivity, hard labor, malnutrition, and disease. About sixty thousand prisoners died; many killed themselves, or tried to. Honda was fortunate, for POWs in China fared far better than did those taken by America and Russia. By comparison, the Chinese “treated their 1.2 million Japanese POWs with kid gloves.”17
Many Japanese soldiers have recounted their experiences as POWs. Honda, in his typical fashion, said little, only that he was treated well. Japan’s occupation forces in China formally surrendered on September 9, 1945, one week after Japan had surrendered to Allied forces.18 That December, the American-led occupation governing postwar Japan began sending ships to retrieve demobilized Japanese troops and POWs from China and South Seas outposts, with priority given to the sick and wounded. Seven months would elapse between the war’s end and Honda’s release and repatriation; while he waited, he was assigned to help manage the turnover of Japanese supplies and equipment to Chinese authorities. During this time he was befriended by local officials and temple monks, and posed for pictures with children. As Honda would later tell Kimi, the Chinese came to accept him; and he developed a bond with friends there, a bond strong enough that he was invited to remain permanently, and he gave it serious consideration. He had lost contact with home for more than a year and didn’t know if his family had survived, if the studio was still standing, or how he would be treated as an ex-POW. He wondered if there was a life for him in Japan anymore.
“The Chinese told him, ‘Don’t bother going back to your defeated nation. We will take care of you and your troops, so stay here,’” recalled Kimi. “But he said, ‘I have a wife and children, so I will go back just once, to see if they are still there or not. If not, I will return.’ Even as a POW, he became friends with the locals.”
When Honda left for home, the local villagers gave him several beautiful rubbings of Chinese proverbs, imprinted from stone carvings of sacred temples, as a parting gift. He would cherish them, and when he became a film director, he often wrote the verses on the back of his scripts. His favorite one, roughly translated, was,
Read good books
Say kind words
Do good deeds
Be a good person
Honda would never set foot on Chinese soil again.
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Honda served three tours of duty totaling more than six years at the front and more than one year stationed in Japan for training. But the record of his service—dates, locations, combat, casualties, captivity—is impossible to reconstruct in precise detail because of the loss and destruction of wartime documents and the unavailability of Honda’s