Honda Ishirō

Honda Ishirō (born May 7, 1911, Asahi [now part of Tsuruoka], Yamagata prefecture, Japan—died February 28, 1993, Tokyo) was a Japanese filmmaker who worked closely with director Kurosawa Akira but was perhaps best known for his leading role in Japan’s kaijū eiga (“monster movie”) craze of the 1950s and ’60s, mostly through his direction of Gojira (1954; Godzilla) and several of its sequels.

Honda grew up in a small village, the youngest of five children born to a Buddhist priest and his wife. When Honda was a child, the family moved to the Tokyo area, where he encountered motion pictures for the first time. He later attended Nihon University (1931–33) as one of its first film majors, and before graduating, he was recruited to join Photo Chemical Laboratory, a film-production facility that in 1936 was subsumed into the Tōhō Motion Picture Company. Until the early 1950s Honda worked as an assistant director for the studio on more than a dozen films, including many directed by Yamamoto Kajirō.

After Honda enlisted in an army infantry regiment in 1935, however, his nascent film career was periodically interrupted by military duties, including assignments in China and Manchuria during the second Sino-Japanese War. While stationed near Wuhan, China, in 1945, he was taken captive as a prisoner of war for about six months.

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At Tōhō, Honda had become friends with the talented young director Kurosawa Akira, and he later worked as chief assistant director on Kurosawa’s Nora inu (1949; Stray Dog), capturing indelible footage of areas of Tokyo devastated by World War II. He established himself as a director in his own right with Aoi shinju (1951; “The Blue Pearl”), a semidocumentary about pearl divers that was the first full-length Japanese film to feature underwater sequences.

However, the film that brought him wide attention was the special-effects showcase Gojira, released in 1954, in which a giant lizardlike monster, the mutant result of atomic radiation in the ocean, terrorizes Japan. Although Honda, who cowrote the screenplay, had intended the film to alert audiences to the dangers of nuclear war, it was more commonly seen as an escapist fantasy, and perhaps for that reason it became immensely popular at the box office. A liberally edited version of Gojira was released in the United States as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! in 1956.

Gojira heralded a wave of low-budget Japanese monster and alien movies, and Honda was assigned by Tōhō to direct such eventual cult favorites as Sora no daikaijū Radon (1956; Rodan), Uchū daisensō (1959; Battle in Outer Space), and Mosura (1961; Mothra). By the early 1960s the studio had developed a stable of iconic monsters, including Godzilla, and Honda’s subsequent directorial efforts frequently saw them clash with each other as well as with such classic film creatures as the giant ape in King Kong and the monster in Frankenstein. Despite the fact that his monster movies derived much of their success from their crudely spectacular nature, Honda imbued his fantastic characters with a pathos that was atypical for the genre. Honda’s films also attracted a sizable international audience.

After completing Mekagojira no gyakushū (1975; Terror of Mechagodzilla), Honda stepped away from the director’s chair, having helmed more than 40 feature-length productions, primarily but not exclusively in the science-fiction genre. He then resumed his association with Kurosawa, assisting him on his final five films, including the acclaimed Ran (1985). In addition to movies, Honda directed for television in the 1960s and ’70s.

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