Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

      Chinese proverb written on one of Honda’s scripts.Courtesy of Honda Film Inc.

      And so it is not known exactly where and when, but during Honda’s final tour he escaped certain death in a firefight with Chinese resistance fighters, somewhere near Hankou. In the chaos of soldiers fleeing and bombs hailing, an enemy shell hit the dirt in front of him. At that moment he believed it was all over, but the mortar did not detonate; a random misfire spared his life. Later, when the fighting subsided, Honda went back to the site of the skirmish, retrieved the shell, and eventually brought it home to Japan, carrying its more than twenty pounds of iron among his belongings. He would keep it forever; in his later years, the unexploded bomb sat atop his desk in his private study, remaining there until his death.

      The images of combat and destruction that would appear in his films were, in a sense, Honda’s only real catharsis. Like so many veterans, he took his demons to the grave.

      Even as an old man, “He was still awakened by horrible nightmares two or three times each year,” Kimi recalled. “He’d see all of his friends in his dreams, all of those who died fighting, all standing in a line.

      “The horror of war was with him until he died.”

       The unexploded shell.Courtesy of Ed Godziszewski

      II

      AWAKENINGS

      1946–54

      There are two types of people in Tohoku [the northeastern region of Honshu, Japan’s largest island]. One is like Kurosawa-kun. He’s the type who challenges the natural order.1 On the other hand, Honda-kun fits himself into the natural order. That’s why Kurosawa-kun’s films are always about battles, relationships, love, human feelings, and so on, but what Honda-kun wants to show in his movies is … harmony in the relationship between nature and man.

       — Kajiro Yamamoto

      7

      STARTING OVER

      Honda’s letters from the front stopped arriving sometime in 1944. Months passed without word of his fate, and Kimi feared the worst. And she feared for her family’s safety. In June 1944, American B-29 planes launched from offshore carriers began leveling vast swaths of Tokyo with incendiary bombs, indiscriminately targeting neighborhoods and industrial zones. By 1945 there were hundreds of attacks, almost unceasing.

      About half of Tokyo’s population fled to the city’s outskirts or the countryside to escape the onslaught.² Kimi joined the exodus, taking Takako and baby Ryuji to the safety of her parents’ home for an extended visit. Before long, though, her father told her: “It would be awful if [Honda] came home and nobody was there. He is not yet dead. Go back to Seijo.”

      Food, provisions, and money were scarce in the war’s waning days, but friends from the studio lent a hand. “Those who were part of Ino-san’s group were my friends too; we also worked together,” she said. “So if someone got a chicken leg, they would bring some over for me to share. Someone was always looking out for me.”

      On May 21, 1945, Kimi received a visit from Akira Kurosawa. It wasn’t unusual for Kurosawa to stop by—with Honda away for so long, Kurosawa regularly checked in on Kimi and the children—but this was a special occasion, the day of his wedding to the actress Yoko Yaguchi. Kimi regretted she had no wedding gift to offer, but given the dire living conditions of the day, no gift was expected. Instead, Kurosawa asked Kimi if she would make a hot bath for him so he could be presentable for the ceremony. Fire logs for the bath were hard to come by, so Kimi asked Kurosawa not to drain the tub so she could bathe baby Ryuji afterward.

      “We were given two bottles of beer a month as part of our rations,” Kimi remembered. “I had one bottle left, so I put it on the table for Kuro-san. I told him to please drink it as a token of my congratulations. I left him alone, and took Ryuji into the bath with me. When I came out, I found half a bottle of beer left, with the cap back on, along with a note saying, ‘Thank you, Kimi-san. Please enjoy the remainder yourself and celebrate for me.’”

      ———

      Though Kimi wasn’t alone, it was impossible to forget her husband’s absence now that Japan was literally under siege.

      “We always carried our babies on our backs because if the sirens went off, we would have to take cover,” she said. “In the corner of our backyard was a small hole, which the gardener had dug for us. That was our bomb shelter. Towards the end, it was so bad that we were able to see bombs go off in the air and come falling down from over the Fujimi Bridge.”

      When air-raid sirens blared, Kimi and the children would hide for fifteen or thirty minutes, until the all clear. After a while, though, Takako could no longer stand the heat and the damp smell of dirt. Kimi remembered, “We had to go in and out of the shelter many times during the middle of the night. Finally, Takako said, ‘Mommy, I don’t care if we die. Can we please just get out of here? I hate it.’ I said to myself, ‘This must be destiny.’ And from then on, we never went back into the shelter.”

      In terms of human life and property lost, the devastation wrought upon Tokyo from November 1944 to August 1945 was even greater than what Little Boy did to Hiroshima. Nearly two hundred thousand people were killed or deemed missing, one million injured, and one million homeless, with roughly half of all residential structures destroyed.³ The suburb of Seijo, though located miles from the city center, did not go completely unscathed, as some homes were damaged or destroyed by burning debris. Still, most of the area, including Toho Studios and the Honda residence not far away, was spared the sea of flames.

      More time passed. News came of defeat at the Battle of Okinawa, of the Russian invasion of Manchuria, and of the destruction at Hiroshima and then Nagasaki. Finally, at noon on August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito addressed the nation via radio, announcing Japan’s unconditional surrender. Two weeks later, Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur arrived and quickly established the Occupation government’s seat of power, the general headquarters of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, known as GHQ or SCAP. Soon, American officials, businessmen, press, and others connected with the Occupation, along with their families, moved into Tokyo neighborhoods. MacArthur ordered them not to eat the scarce Japanese food. The Japanese, having sacrificed all for the war effort, were now literally starving. Food shortages would last for years.

      “After the war ended, I was tending to the field on the side of the road one day and a Black American soldier passed by,” Kimi said. “He asked what I was doing. I had baby Ryuji on my back as I was working in the field. With my poor English, I just managed to put a few words together. I said that my husband was still [in China] and has yet to come home, so I am raising vegetables for us to eat.

      “He had a [woman] with him. I went home, and that evening the doorbell rang. She said, ‘This is from the soldier you saw this afternoon,’ and gave me chewing gum and chocolate, wrapped up with a ribbon. At that moment I felt, ‘Our countries were at war, but the people are really not.’ That visit made me teary.”

      Kimi still didn’t know if Honda had been killed in action, or if he would ever come home. Hundreds of thousands of troops were returning from China and other war fronts, but there was no word of his fate. “Since Allied governments had sent the Japanese [authorities] lists of POWs they held, it would have been possible to assuage the fears of the POWs’ relatives,” notes historian Ulrich Strauss. However, the authorities “failed to take such action … [they] remained under the mistaken impression that notification that their next of kin was a prisoner would not be welcomed, despite the vastly changed circumstances after the war’s end.”

      All