Namikiza Closes

[Abe' Mark Nornes]

>From the Japan Times Website:

Namikiza theater shows its last film

The Namikiza theater in Tokyo's Ginza district closed its doors on nearly
45 years of film history Tuesday.

Die-hard cinema fans packed the theater, which has shown classic films for
years, to view its final
showing. Following the closure of Ikebukuro's Bungeiza theater, yet another
famous film house has
disappeared.

The program for the theater's last day of showing was "Bangiku" ("Late
Chrysanthemum''), released
in 1954, and "Okasan" ("Mother''), released in 1952, both by director Mikio
Naruse.

Customers lined up from the early morning hoping to get one of the cinema's
nearly 80 seats. The
first in line, a 43-year-old woman from Urawa, Saitama Prefecture, said
that she used to frequent the
theater as a student and that she wishes it would continue to screen films.

Muramatsu, a 70-year-old resident of Tokyo's Bunkyo Ward, voiced similar
sentiments. "Of course
there is a sense of nostalgia, but this is an era when old things just
disappear. There is nothing you
can do about it. Still, nothing beats watching movies in a theater," he said.

Namikiza opened in 1953, during the heyday of the film industry in postwar
Japan. The theater
gained a reputation for emphasizing the quality of a film in deciding what
to play, rather than
indiscriminately playing hits to increase revenues. For the past 15 or 16
years, the theater has shown
double features of films by such directors as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu,
Kenji Mizoguchi and
Mikio Naruse. "The problem is the number of classic films is limited and
planning what to show gets
tedious," said the president of the cinema, Hiroshi Yoshi, who decided to
close the movie house last
July. Reportedly the landlord also played a role in the decision.

Yoshi said he wanted to close the theater without much fanfare and that no
particular events were
scheduled.