Ishiro Honda was born on May 7, 1911, in Yamagata, Japan. It was the year of the boar and his name is a combination of the words boar (“i” or “ino”) and fourth child (“shiro”). For this reason, his name is sometimes indicated as Inoshiro.

Being good at drawing Ishiro Honda wanted to become an artist, eventually, he chose cinema. Honda was however drafted into the Japanese army and in World War II he was a prisoner of war in China, where he discovered that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by atomic bombs.

When he finally returned to Japan Ishiro Honda began working in the world of cinema where he was also an assistant to Akira Kurosawa, with whom he started a friendship that lasted throughout his life.

During his work, Ishiro Honda met special effects wizard Eiji Tsuburaya, with whom he collaborated in the production of several films including the original “Godzilla” (1954). In the following years, Honda directed many other films of that kind: in some of them, Godzilla appeared again while in others there were other monstrous creatures.

In the last years of his life, Ishiro Honda again worked in several films of Akira Kurosawa such as “Kagemusha” (1980) and “Ran” (1985).

Ishiro Honda died on February 28, 1993, in Tokyo.

Inevitably the name of Ishiro Honda is very closely linked to Godzilla. Often people have a low opinion about those monster movies and actually, many of them have childish plots that over the years have become repetitive. It’s, however, true that in the first film Godzilla is a dinosaur that survived to this day who gets mutated by atomic radiation, and therefore it’s the symbol of the Japanese fear of nuclear power they experienced the hardest way.

In the following movies, Godzilla has various powers, often directly related to atomic radiation, but the metaphor becomes emptier and emptier and in various films, the famous monster becomes the hero who fights against other evil monsters.

The nuclear issue was very important to Ishiro Honda and even in his later collaborations with Akira Kurosawa that topic was touched, for example in the films “Dreams” (1990) and “Rhapsody in August” (1991), confirming that after decades this is a subject that remains dramatic in Japan.