Ishiro Honda. Steve Ryfle

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      TOKYO

      The city of Edo was already one of the largest in the world when, in 1868, Emperor Meiji took power and the capital’s name was officially changed to Tokyo. Its modernization continued as Western influence increased; and by the early 1900s, the rapid expansion of railroads to the plains beyond the city center gave rise to suburbs, with residential neighborhoods “scattered in the fields and wooded hills around long-established farming villages,” according to historian Jordan Sand. These developments became home to people from central Tokyo and, in large numbers, from other parts of Japan.

      In 1921 the Hondas uprooted from their tiny village and transplanted themselves to this burgeoning metropolis. Hokan was appointed chief priest at a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, and the family settled in the Takaido neighborhood of the city’s Suginami Ward, a fast-growing suburb on the western side. In 1919 Suginami’s population was roughly 17,000; by 1926 it would soar to 143,000 as families of modest means moved into newly built homes, displacing the area’s rural peasant population.¹

      Honda was in third grade when his life abruptly shifted from the bucolic mountains to the bustling city; he’d never even seen a train before boarding one for Tokyo. Still, he adapted quickly to his new surroundings. When his classmates at Takaido Elementary teased him about his mountain dialect, he took it in stride and learned to speak like a Tokyoite. He’d been an honors student back home; but the city schools were more difficult, and he faltered briefly before his grades rebounded. His favorite subjects were Japanese, history, and geography; and he continued to cultivate a love of the natural sciences, saving his allowance to buy more science magazines. (Later, in middle school, he would struggle with chemistry, biology, algebra, and other subjects involving equations, but he still liked the scientific mindset.) Despite a drastic change of scenery, many things in his life—family, school, play—were basically the same.

      Then he experienced something entirely different. Before Tokyo, Honda had never heard of eiga (movies), but one day at school the students were assembled to watch one. Though Honda would forget the title, it was likely one of the Universal Bluebird photoplays, a series of mostly Westerns that were considered minor pictures in the United States, but were extremely popular in Japan from 1916 to 1919.² Honda described the film this way: “It was the story of a girl who was kidnapped and raised by Indians. She grew up and found out that she wasn’t one of them. There was a dispute over her, who[m] she should live with … she got on the back of the horse and went off fighting … against her real brother, something like that. I saw it at the schoolgrounds. I still remember that girl, she was a little on the chubby side, not quite pretty, she had long dark hair, sort of looked like an Indian, and there was a situation where she was surprised by being told that she was actually a white person, not Indian … That was quite shocking, a machine that projected something like that, and people were moving around in there. I was so interested, and I definitely wanted to see more.”³

      Tokyo offered a multitude of ideal diversions for a “science boy,” such as air shows and invention expos, which Honda would sneak off to see all by himself, without his parents’ permission. But more and more, he was drawn to the movie houses. By the third and fourth grade he was reading newspaper critiques and asking friends which movies were worth seeing, and begging his big brothers to take him. “If you had the money, you’d just go to the movie theater and watch whatever,” he said. “It was that kind of time.”

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      Two minutes before noon on Saturday, September 1, 1923, a seismic fault six miles beneath the sea floor off Tokyo unleashed a magnitude 7.9 temblor, mercilessly shaking the Kanto Plain. A forty-foot-high tsunami came ashore and swept away thousands of people, and fires engulfed the city’s wooden structures for days. Nearly 140,000 of Tokyo’s roughly 2.5 million residents were killed and about half the city was destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake, Japan’s deadliest natural disaster. Fortunately, the Hondas lived in the low-density western suburbs, where many people survived by escaping to nearby forests and farmland, away from burning debris.

      Tokyo’s rapid postearthquake reconstruction created a cosmopolitan, urban environment, where leisure activities now included jazz clubs, modern theater, and cinema. Film was by this time known as daihachi geijutsu (the eighth art), and its form and content had greatly evolved since Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope had arrived in Japan in 1896. The earliest Japanese movies were essentially filmed stage plays that borrowed the conventions of Noh, kabuki, and Shinpa (a style of melodrama popular in the late 1800s) and featured stars of the theater. By the 1920s filmmakers were embracing new narrative styles, and their movies ranged from lowbrow sword-fighting adventures to high-minded studies of the human condition. The quake had leveled all but one of Tokyo’s studios, resulting in a shortage of domestic movies. Films were imported from abroad to fill the void, and Japanese audiences and filmmakers were influenced by Western methods, techniques, and stories.

      Thus, the first films Honda saw ranged from ninja shorts starring Japan’s first movie star, Matsunosuke Onoe (nicknamed “Eyeballs Matsu” for his big, demonstrative eyes) to the German expressionist horror masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari СКАЧАТЬ