This is the second article in a series about “The Places of Film Culture in Japan” : cinema archives (big or small, independent or state-funded), film museums, and community cinema centers that foster a love for cinema and emphasize the importance of preserving and studying the history of audiovisual production.
You can read the first, Hashima Eiga Shiryō-kan 羽島市映画資料館, here.
This article is a translation of my piece originally written for the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto. Since it was written for a general audience, the article retains its broad approach.
Since the dawn of cinema, movie theaters have been an integral part of the evolution of urban areas. The Japanese archipelago is no exception: more than one phase of its urbanization coincided with the expansion of movie theaters, places that built the social fabric of an area, whether urban or rural.
During the golden age of Japanese cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, there were over 7,000 movie theaters in Japan. This number declined sharply when television became a central part of every household. 1964 was a crucial period in this sense; the Tokyo Olympics sparked a significant increase in television purchases that year. Additionally, some of the country’s major film studios went bankrupt in the early 1970s, and in the 1980s, a subsequent metamorphosis of cinematic spaces occurred. The advent of mini-theaters, small cinemas that screened (and still screen) independent or arthouse films from around the world.
The introduction of videocassettes and DVDs, as well as the proliferation of multiplexes in large shopping malls over the last twenty-five to thirty years, have contributed to epochal changes in how people experience cinema and inhabit Japan’s urban fabric. The relocation of cinemas, restaurants, entertainment venues, bars, and shops from historic city centers—which are rare in Japanese cities—to shopping complexes outside the city limits has furthered the emptying of entire urban areas.
This is especially true for small provincial towns, whose shōtengai have turned into ghost towns or hallucinations of a bygone era. Shōtengai refers to pedestrian streets, often covered arcades—as those loved and explored by Walter Benjamin in Paris—where various commercial establishments, small shops, restaurants, bars, cinemas, and small theaters are, or rather were, grouped. Though small commercial streets have existed since time immemorial, especially in front of temples and shrines, these urban areas evolved into covered arcades during the Showa period (1926–1989), especially near train stations.
The shift towards online shopping and the consumption of audiovisual products at home has led to the further decline of the shōtengai, a waning that had already started in the 1980s.
In recent years, these places have become known colloquially as shattagai, a portmanteau word that refers to the desolation of these places and a blending of the terms shattaa (shutter) and gai (town or urban area). In these arcades, most shops are now closed, or, if they are still open, they are run by longtime owners who aren’t ready to give up.
In large cities, some of these shotengai remain active, or at least afloat, thanks to the growing urban population and tourists seeking places with a bygone Showa-period feel. Others are undergoing gentrification and being demolished to make way for tall residential buildings.
The situation in small provincial towns is more complicated. Many of these towns are depopulating, a problem linked to the influx of younger generations from the countryside to the cities and the aging of the Japanese population more broadly.
Gifu is a city located at the geographic center of Japan’s main island, Honshū, and is halfway between a provincial and a metropolitan area. Although large, Gifu is not a metropolitan city in itself. It is too close to Nagoya, Japan’s third-largest city, and is slowly becoming its suburban area.
One of the town’s covered arcades is home to Japan’s only movie theater that exclusively shows movies on film. The Gifu Royal Gekijō (Gifu Royal Theater) is a repertory theater that shows one movie per week, with screenings three or four times each day, in the morning and afternoon. The theater is located in an area of the arcade known as Gekijō Dōri, or Theater Street, which, as the name suggests, once housed numerous theaters and cinemas.
Only vestiges remain of its glorious past. In addition to the Royal Gekijō, there is a small theater that shows contemporary films, Cinex, owned by the same company that manages the repertory cinema, and a theater for live performances.
Royal Gekijō evolved from numerous theaters and cinemas that opened and closed over the decades. The first venue was first opened in 1926 and later on, in 1955, became a large theater managed by the Tōei studio. Then, it changed hands over the following decades until its closure in the early 2000s. In 2009, the theater began hosting occasional events dedicated to Showa-era cinema. Given their relative success, these events later became a regular feature.
The entrance of the cinema, on the first floor, is decorated with large figures of stars from the golden age of Japanese cinema. These figures include Takakura Ken, Kiyoshi Atsumi, Asaoka Ruriko, Mifune Toshirō, and Hara Setsuko. The decorations serve as a sort of portal and conceptual introduction to the venue. This time machine effect, as it were, continues with the songs played in the theater before each screening. Mainly songs that were popular in Japan during the 1950s and 1960s.
The film program is varied, but only Japanese feature films are shown nowadays—when the Showa program was launched, it also screened movies from the U.S. or Europe. These include melodramas produced by Shōchiku, jidaigeki by Tōei and Tōhō, comedies and satires that are still little known outside the archipelago, and mini-retrospectives dedicated to actors, directors, and sometimes even the locations where the films were shot – with a particular attention to films shot in Gifu prefecture.
Every summer, to commemorate the end of the Pacific War and the tragedy of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the theater showcases films with strong anti war content or powerful pacifist messages. This year, the program is particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the war’s end. In July and August, films such as Kinoshita Keisuke’s Army (1944) and Twenty-Four Eyes, as well as the trilogy Men and War—directed by Yamamoto Satsuo for Nikkatsu between 1970 and 1973—are being screened.
In my ten years of going to the theater, I have been struck and impressed more than once by the sheer power of the viewing experience itself, regardless of the movie’s quality. Needless to say, seeing a movie—especially a 35mm film in TōhōScope or one of the other large-format experiments the studios tried in the 1950s and 1960s—is a different experience than watching a DCP screening. This is true even though many of the films are not in optimal condition.
As for the type of audience that usually attends the screenings at the Royal Gekijō, most viewers are over seventy. Through the movies, they can relive their youth or perhaps seek a couple of hours of relief from the heat in summer and the cold in winter. In this sense, the experience is almost like visiting a museum, or perhaps more akin to going to a Shōwa-kan or a Taishō-kan, places that recreate or preserve the atmosphere of bygone eras and evoke a strong sense of nostalgia.
As we have seen, the history and future of cinematic exhibition is linked to and depends on the evolution of urban spaces and, therefore, on how its inhabitants experience the city. It will be interesting to see if and how cinema—here considered as a collective experience—will endure or transform further, or if it will remain a shared dream that only a few will remember.
Asian Docs 