A week after the Star Festival, Tsuburaya was beginning dinner at his desk when Honda telephoned with news of yet another logistical catastrophe, then caught himself in the middle of his narrative and said, “Oh, but today you have to be home. It’s the Obon.” And he was right: of all the days of the year, this was not the one to come home late. If the Star Festival for Masano was all about how exhilarated they’d once been as lovers, the Obon was the principal commemoration of her lost little girl. She had reminded Tsuburaya once, at the beginning of the week, and then had not mentioned it again. She’d be celebrating for the full three days, and on the first night she intended that as a family they would light the paper lantern and hang it on the grave to invite their daughter’s spirit to come forth and visit their home. On the table for the dead her meal would already be set out, with tiny portions featuring her favorite dishes. Akira, as always, had been given charge of arranging the display.
Hajime, now nineteen, was invited, but had yet to indicate whether he would appear. Masano had requested it when they’d last seen him, on a school holiday, and he’d answered that he’d see what he could do. He then pointed out that he’d finished his technical training, and asked his father whether he might work with him as assistant camera operator on the miniatures team.
Tsuburaya discussed what that would involve, and Masano interrupted to ask if they could return to the subject of their daughter and Hajime’s sister. Then Hajime said he would make every effort, and his mother told him he should see that he did.
That night she informed Tsuburaya that she considered their son’s request a bad idea, at least for the time being; that he should stay in school; that he didn’t need additional training in how to ignore his family. Tsuburaya felt the need to defend his profession.
“Well, at least promise you’ll do nothing without consulting me,” she finally requested.
“Who Toho hires is none of your concern,” he reminded her.
“What you do with our son is my concern,” she answered. And neither of them pursued the matter after that.
When Mori and Honda first approached him, he’d been thrilled at the prospect after all of those years of finally being able to work on the kind of stop-motion effects he had so admired in King Kong. But when Mori asked him to write up a projected preproduction and shooting schedule for his unit, even after every shortcut he could conceive, he was forced to report that to do the job right he would need a little less than seven years. On the phone he could hear Mori repeating what he’d said to the others in his office, and there was a general hilarity in the background. When Mori returned to the line he was still chuckling. He said he could give Tsuburaya two months for preproduction and another two for shooting.
That left Tsuburaya’s department with few options other than what they knew best: miniature building. Which was what everyone expected of him anyway.
His big break had come when Toho was urged by the government during the war to pour nearly all of its resources into The War at Sea, the epic charged with the task of persuading the public that the new war with the Americans was one the Japanese could win. Using photographs supplied by the navy, his unit had recreated Pearl Harbor on a six-acre outdoor set on Toho’s backlot, and had done so with such persuasive detail that the footage of the attack on Battleship Row was confiscated by U.S. occupation officials after the war because they’d taken it to be real. The movie returned the highest grosses ever recorded in Japan, tripled his budgets and staff, and ensured that anyone in the country with a special-effects problem would seek out the celebrated Tsuburaya.
So if on this new project O’Brien’s solutions were denied to them, it meant only that they had to approach the situation in a new way. This didn’t dishearten them, since they already understood that whenever fixed rules were applied to a problem, only parts of it might be perceived. They operated on the principle that you weren’t ready for a task until you admitted it was beyond you.
He came up with the idea of an entire 1/25 scale miniature set of the capital, detailed inside as well as out in order to be convincing when trampled. Breakaway walls would reveal entire floors with all of their furnishings when the monster sheared away the outside surfaces. Various aspects of the city’s infrastructure, such as mailboxes or street lamps, would be rendered in wax and melted by huge offscreen heat lamps to simulate the monster’s radioactive breath. Small and precisely calibrated pyrotechnic charges would be installed to reproduce the explosive destruction as fuel and automobile gas tanks ignited.
And 1/25 scale would allow a monster of the proper size to be generated by simply putting a man in a suit.
The simplicity of the plan held enormous appeal. He’d always been drawn to the handmade approach, and of course the studio appreciated the relative lack of expense. Something made from nothing was how he liked to put it.
Mori and Honda loved the budget and feared the plan. A man in a suit? Tsuburaya only shrugged at their unease. They either trusted him or they didn’t. Proof was stronger than argument.
The day after the logistical catastrophe, Honda called to report that he’d handled it without Tsuburaya’s help. Honda was probably Tsuburaya’s closest friend, though at that suggestion Masano once responded that she would love to see Honda’s face when someone told him as much. Honda was forever sporting an American’s rumpled little fishing hat and was fond of walking great distances. He and Tanaka met when hiking the Diamond Mountains in Korea in the early thirties. Mori and Tanaka had both thought Honda would be the perfect director for this new project since he’d had so little trouble with all the visual effects in Eagles of the Pacific, and had worked so well with Tsuburaya. Having been a longtime assistant to Kurosawa, he was experienced in dealing with lunatic perfectionists. “Or, in other words, Tsuburaya,” Mori had said at their first full staff meeting.
They also liked that Honda had no patience for storylines that dawdled. They’d handed a first attempt at the script to the mystery writer Kayama and what he’d produced was far too tame, involving a nondescript dolphinlike creature that attacked only fishing boats and only to feed its insatiable hunger. Most of the story had involved the poor thing swimming this way and that in search of food.
Honda had clear-cut Kayama’s script, demanding something terrible enough to evoke both the fire raids on Tokyo and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He’d served three tours of duty as an infantryman, had been a prisoner of war in China, been repatriated near Hiroshima, and then had wandered the devastation three months after the surrender.
He thought much like Tsuburaya did: that the director, like a department head, had to include in his leadership the responsibility to protect the artisans under his umbrella. And, of course, to recruit those artisans. And where were they to be found? They had to have the right sensibility toward beauty, sufficient technical training and scientific knowledge, and a strong will, passion, and creative talent.
Honda claimed he drew his belief in himself from the soil of his life experience. His mother had also died when he was small, and his father soon afterward. He’d been left unable to attend school and had taught himself to read while carrying firewood for his neighbors. He knew that encountering the unfamiliar might involve many errors before a solution was found, and he had an intuition that seemed to draw on an extraordinary visual resourcefulness. When he loved something, he’d exclaim, “Oh, this is spring water!” Again like Tsuburaya, he knew that the craftsman worked with and for his world, but ultimately went his own way, not seeking praise. When Eagles of the Pacific premiered, Honda was on a little lake, fishing. Because the objects themselves were one’s best signature.