For Fans of Ishirō Honda

The Director Who Made Dread Enormous

Ishirō Honda spent World War II as a foot soldier in China, was captured, and returned home to find Hiroshima reduced to ash. He had been there shortly after the bombing. That experience never left him, and it runs through almost every film he ever made, whether he was pointing a camera at a giant lizard or at a quiet scientist staring into the sea.

Honda joined Toho Studios as an assistant director, working alongside Akira Kurosawa, a partnership that would last decades (he assisted on several of Kurosawa's late masterworks, including Kagemusha and Ran). But his own lane was science fiction, and he became its defining Japanese voice. The film that made him is Gojira (1954), a picture so precisely calibrated to postwar Japanese grief that audiences who lived through the firebombings wept at it. To them the creature was not a monster movie. It was a documentary about what nuclear weapons do.

What distinguishes Honda from peers making similar material in the West is sincerity. His films never wink. The scientists are earnest. The destruction is mourned. The monsters, however rubbery, are treated as forces of nature rather than props for action sequences. He had a gift for holding the human and the colossal in the same frame and making you feel the disproportion physically. Watching a Honda film, scale becomes emotional information.

He worked prolifically through the 1960s and 1970s, producing kaiju sequels and tokusatsu spectacles for Toho at a pace that sometimes dulled the material. But his best work, from Gojira to Matango to Mothra, carries a specific weight: the sense that the natural and the nuclear are the same catastrophe, and that human beings brought it entirely on themselves.