Such distractions and biases were evident in the writings of American reviewers. Variety called Mothra, one of Honda’s most entertaining genre films, “ludicrously written, haphazardly executed”; of The Mysterians, it wondered if “something was lost in translation.” Japanese film critics, meanwhile, tended to dismiss kaiju eiga as juvenile gimmick films. The genre’s domestic marginalization as an otaku (fan) phenomenon was cemented in 1969 with the World of SF Film Encyclopedia (Sekai SF eiga taikan), a landmark volume covering sci-fi films by Honda and his contemporaries. Though published by the respected Kinema Junpo film journal, its author was not a mainstream critic but “monster professor” Shoji Otomo, editor of Shonen Magazine, a weekly children’s publication.
Thus, Honda’s career is one of contradictions. In Japan he was an A-level director, but abroad he was known only as a maker of B movies. Despite his large output and the popularity, longevity, and influence of his work (director Tim Burton once called Honda’s genre pictures “the most beautiful movies in the whole world”), there has been relatively little study of it beyond Godzilla. Honda never had a number-one hit, but his films consistently performed well at the Japanese box office and netted substantial foreign revenue; yet even commercial success did not lead him to make the projects he was most passionate about.
Not unlike the English director James Whale—who, despite making war dramas, light comedies, adventures, mysteries, and the musical Show Boat (1936), is most widely remembered for directing Universal’s Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of Frankenstein (1935)—Honda became known for one genre even though his output included documentaries, dramas, war films, comedies, melodramas, and even a yakuza (gangster) actioner and a sports biopic. Of Honda’s forty-six features, nearly half had nothing to do with sci-fi, and more than a few of these films are excellent, though underappreciated. The “shining beauty” who planted his roots in the business in 1951 would prove a versatile craftsman driven to, as he said, “depict something real.”
Honda’s career began with four subdued dramas about young people navigating the changing postwar landscape, with themes common to gendai-geki (modern drama) films reflecting social friction in contemporary Japan. After The Blue Pearl came The Skin of the South (1952), The Man Who Came to Port (1952), and the teen melodrama Adolescence Part 2 (1953). Then a pair of dramas about the human cost of Japan’s wartime hubris, Eagle of the Pacific (1953) and Farewell Rabaul (1954), presaged the cautionary tale Honda would tell next in Godzilla (1954).
As Japan’s harsh economic conditions slowly improved, Honda entered a second, more optimistic period, and through the early 1960s he would frequently incorporate music and humor in both his monster and mainstream films. Although the press had initially raised lofty expectations, Honda now became a member of Toho Studios’ stable of contracted program-picture directors, craftsmen respected for their commercial durability and their ability to deliver films on time and on budget, while largely toiling in the critical shadows of the resurgent early masters (Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse) and rising auteurs (Kurosawa, Kon Ichikawa, Masaki Kobayashi, among others). As such, Japan’s critics essentially dismissed him; of his films, only The Blue Pearl made Kinema Junpo’s annual best-of list. It would be decades before Godzilla would earn worldwide critical acceptance as a significant entry in Japan’s postwar cinema, and even longer before several of Honda’s nongenre films would begin to be reappraised.
Though he was instrumental in creating iconic films known around the globe for more than sixty years, Honda has been overlooked as a director deserving scholarly attention. That his talents and interests went far beyond the narrow limits of the monster-movie genre, and that he effectively had two overlapping but very different careers, one invisible outside Japan, remains little known. And so his story has not really been told, and his body of work not fully considered. This book looks at Honda’s life, reexamines his films, recognizes his substantial achievements, and casts light on his contributions to Japanese and world cinema. Through a combination of biography, analysis—including the first study, in any language, of his entire filmography—and industrial history, it not only tells how Honda created a world of fearful yet familiar monsters, but also recalls the experiences and relationships that informed his movies, including his long years at war and the endless nightmares that followed. And it explores a lasting mystery of Honda’s legacy: why, for reasons difficult to understand, he did not parlay the broad popularity of his genre pictures into the freedom to make the films he most wanted to; and why, while close friends and colleagues Akira Kurosawa and Eiji Tsuburaya used their own successes to gain independence from the studio system, Honda remained committed to it and accepted the constraints placed on his work and career.
———
“I’ve always felt that films should have a specific form,” Honda said. “Cinema should be entertaining, and should give much visual enjoyment to the public. Many things can be expressed by literature or painting, but cinema has a particular advantage in its visual aspect. I try to express things in film that other arts cannot approach….
“My monster films have met with a great commercial success in Japan and elsewhere [but] that doesn’t mean I’m strictly limited to this type of film. I think I make too many monster films, but that’s because of the direction of Toho.”6
In this excerpt from a 1968 interview, Honda indicated his simple and unaffected philosophy toward film, but also hinted that his creativity was stifled by the studio’s business strategy. Despite his statement to the contrary, by this time Honda was exclusively making monster movies, a source of frustration largely responsible for his eventual departure from Toho. It was Honda’s personality—a quiet and gentle spirit, a self-effacing and selfless tendency to put the needs of others before his own, a desire to create harmony and avoid conflict, and his strong sense of loyalty—that enabled him to thrive under the Toho system, within the parameters set by the company. Honda’s reserved nature was a great asset, the reason he was so beloved by colleagues, but also a liability.
While Kurosawa reinterpreted Shakespeare and Dostoevsky in a postwar Japanese context, Honda was similarly inspired by Merian C. Cooper’s King Kong (1933), George Pal’s War of the Worlds (1953)—two films he frequently cited as influences—and the productions of Walt Disney to create his world of tragedy and fantasy, resembling the Hollywood prototypes but distinctly Japanese in viewpoint. Honda considered himself an entertainment filmmaker, and he admired fellow travelers; in later years, he would prefer the works of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. He was unabashedly populist, putting the viewer’s experience before his agenda behind the camera.
“No matter how artistic a film can be, if no one can appreciate it, it is no good,” he said late in life. “Maybe that was my weak point, that I never thought that pursuing my theme was absolute. That is the way I live. I was never actually in the position where I could say or push my idea on everybody … like, ‘No matter who says what, this is my movie.’ After all, I grew up in the film studio system … I had to make my movies in that system. That’s one reason why I wasn’t completely strict about my theme, but at least I tried to show what I wanted to say, as best I could under the circumstances.
“I have a really strong [connection] with the audience. It’s not about treating the audience just as my customer … I always thought about how [I could make them] feel what I was thinking about. I always tried to be very honest with myself. I tried to show my feelings directly and have the audience feel my excitement. That’s how I tried to make my films.”7
Honda’s loyalty showed in many aspects of life. He remained loyal to his country even when war pulled him away from the job he loved, and even when he was unfairly, unofficially punished for an act of treason with which he had no involvement and was forced to serve much longer than usual. He was a reluctant soldier who avoided fighting unless necessary, but he carried out his duties, motivated to survive the war and return to his family and his work. He remained loyal to the studio even when it nearly fell apart, while others were revolting and defecting, and while younger men were promoted before him. He resolved