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of destruction, with the peculiar beauties to be found in wreaking havoc [that are] the core of a good science fiction film.” Sontag also noted themes that Honda’s work shares with American genre films of the period: concern about the ethical pursuit of science; radiation casualties and mutations resulting from nuclear testing; moral oversimplification; a “U.N. fantasy” of united international warfare, with science as “the great unifier”; war imagery; and the depiction of mass destruction from an external and impersonal point of view, showing the audience the thrilling awe of cities crumbling but not the death and suffering that result.

      Sontag failed, however, to detect the culturally specific subtleties that separate Japanese science fiction films, informed by the atomic bombings, from American ones, influenced by fears of nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Perhaps the lone Western scholar to define this difference was Donald Richie, the distinguished historian of Japanese cinema, who saw Godzilla, Rodan, et al., not simply as a Cold War–era phenomenon but part of a unique film cycle that expressed the prevailing national attitude regarding the bomb in the 1950s: a lamentation for the tragedy of Hiroshima, an acceptance of its inevitability, and an awareness that the sense of melancholy would pass. Richie identified this feeling as mono no aware (roughly translated as “sympathetic sadness”).

      Richie wrote, “This is the authentic Japanese attitude toward death and disaster … which the West has never understood. The bomb, like the war, like death itself, was something over which no one had any control; something which could not be helped; what we mean by an ‘act of God.’ The Japanese, in moments of stress if not habitually, regard life as the period of complete insecurity that it is; and the truth of this observation is graphically illustrated in a land yearly ravaged by typhoons, a country where the very earth quakes daily. The bomb, at first, was thought of as just another catastrophe in a land already overwhelmed with them.”¹³

      Richie’s analogy helps explain why the arrival of Godzilla, Honda’s monster manifestation of the bomb, resembles both a war and one of Japan’s extreme weather events; indeed, when it first comes ashore, Godzilla is obscured by a fierce storm. No one questions why the monster attacks Tokyo, though it has no apparent purpose other than destruction, nor why it returns again, just as typhoons predictably hit Japan’s capital every summer. It also explains why people respond as they would to a natural disaster. An electrical barrier is built around the city, like sandbags against a flood, and citizens seek safety at high ground, as if fleeing a tsunami. Similarly, Rodan creates a metaphorical hurricane, and the Mysterians cause a giant forest fire and landslide. Sometimes, like a sudden earthquake, Honda’s monsters disrupt the humdrum of everyday life: Godzilla’s footfalls come while a family idly passes time in the living room, a giant insect bursts into a home and frightens a young mother, or a woman taking a bath spies a giant robot outside the window.

      For Honda, the monsters’ suggestion of natural disaster was also rooted in things he witnessed on the battlefront. “During the war, the Chinese people did not run away when there was shooting between soldiers near their fields,” Honda said. “To them, we were just like a storm. They thought of us as [like] a natural disaster, otherwise they would not have continued living there in such a dangerous place … For me, the monsters were like that. Just [like] a natural disaster.”¹⁴

      ———

      “I am responsible for tying Honda to special effects movies,” producer Tomoyuki Tanaka once confessed. “If I hadn’t, he might have become a director just like [Mikio] Naruse.”¹⁵

      Like the respected Naruse, and like all fine directors, Honda made films chronicling his time and place. Postwar Japan was a crucible of social, political, and economic change, as the veneer of Westernization continued to obscure centuries-old culture. Honda’s early work followed what scholar Joan Mellen calls “the major theme in Japanese films … the struggle between one’s duty and the individual desire to be independent and free of traditional values.” His protagonists were young people, torn between their parents’ ideals and their own, and the conflict often centered on an arranged but unwanted marriage. During the second half of the 1950s, Honda was groomed as a specialist in women’s stories, and made a number of films about independent-minded young women and their changing roles at home and at work. Honda’s handful of women’s films, like Naruse’s, question Japan’s gender norms and depict female passions and disappointments; but Honda’s world is a far more hopeful place, his characters less tragic. Honda had apprenticed with Naruse briefly and admired Naruse’s “sturdy rhythm” and talent for “[showing] people’s thinking in very special, quiet times.” Honda didn’t believe he was directly influenced by the melodramatic Naruse style, but acknowledged, “I had the same kind of things in me.”¹⁶

      Some of Honda’s recurring themes and motifs were evident even before Godzilla. For instance, The Skin of the South offers images of a natural disaster and the destruction of a town, and presents a scientist as the trustworthy authority in a crisis and a greedy villain exploiter of indigenous people and the environment, two frequent Honda archetypes. From The Blue Pearl through Terror of Mechagodzilla, his last feature, and many times in between, Honda’s drama hinged on a character’s sacrificial death, self-inflicted or otherwise, to restore honor, save others from harm, express deep love, or a combination thereof. Japan’s beautiful and dangerous seas and mountains served as visual and thematic symbols of nature’s power from the very beginning; a mountain boy himself, and an avid hiker, Honda would frequently show a sort of reverence for Japan’s majestic bluffs by having his characters trekking uphill, a visual motif reappearing in numerous films. And throughout his filmography, Honda utilized regional locations, culture, and minutiae to enhance authenticity, from local pearl divers and Shinto ceremony dancers in Godzilla to the obon festival signs written in reverse script, as per regional custom, in The Mysterians. Honda’s preference for a trio of protagonists—sometimes a love triangle, often just three friends—was also there from the first.

      The uneasy postwar Japan-US alliance underlies many of Honda’s science fiction films, and while Godzilla and especially Mothra might be interpreted as somewhat anti-American, Honda was increasingly optimistic about the relationship. In his idealized world, America and the “new Switzerland” of Japan are leaders of a broad, United Nations–based coalition reliant on science and technology to protect mankind. Scientists are highly influential, while politicians are ineffective or invisible. The Japan Self-Defense Forces bravely defend the homeland and employ glorified, high-tech hardware; but military operations often fail, and force alone rarely repels the threat. Assistance comes from monsters, a deus ex machina, or human ingenuity. Honda was also frequently concerned with the dehumanizing effects of technology, greed, or totalitarianism.

      Honda relied on his cinematographers and art directors to create the look of his films; thus the noirish style of Godzilla, made with a crew borrowed from Mikio Naruse, is completely unlike the larger-than-life look of the sci-fi films shot in color and scope just a few years later by Honda’s longtime cameraman Hajime Koizumi. He was less concerned with visual aesthetics than with theme and entertainment. Therefore, in analyzing Honda’s work, the authors weight these and other story-related criteria, such as tone, characterization, actors’ performances, editing (under the Toho system, editors executed cuts as instructed by the director), pacing, structure, use of soundtrack music, and so on, more heavily than technique or composition. The magnificent special effects of Eiji Tsuburaya are discussed in this same context; detailed information about Tsuburaya’s techniques is available from other sources.¹⁷

      Honda believed in simplicity of theme. “Yama-san [Kajiro Yamamoto] always used to say … the theme of a story must be something that can be precisely described in three clean sentences,” Honda said. “And it must be a story that has a very clear statement to make. [If] you must go on and on explaining who goes where and does what [it] will not be entertaining. This, for me, is a golden rule.”

      ———

      Research for this project was conducted over a four-year period and included interviews conducted in Japan with Honda’s family and colleagues; archival discovery of documents, including Honda’s annotated scripts and other papers, studio memorandums, Japanese newspaper and magazine

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