Asakusa Eiga-gai

[Yeh Yueh Yu]

A report from nostalgic Tokyo. We spent the New Year in Japan, hooking
up w/ some fellow KineJapaners.  Staying a few days in Asakusa, next to
the famous Kannon-sama, we were attracted to a street called Eiga dori
(Movie Street). This was the first place in Japan where movies were
shown, along with Kobe and Yokohoma, the expatriate enclaves. The street
had old photos, statues, and effigies of famous actors w/ holes where
their faces should be (I'd post an example but our film hasn't come back
yet).

	There is still a square here with a half-dozen or so large movie
palaces with names like Toei-za, Shochiku-za, and the International.  It
was a Saturday night, and there were queues for the string of
"all-night" triple- and quadruple features. These queues consist
entirely of scruffy, coughing middle-aged men who look like they had
been sleeping outside.

	Against my wife's better judgement, we bought 800 yen tickets from a
machine and went into the Shin Asakusa Gekijo, where they were showing a
quadruple feature of comedies and yakuza pictures from the 1960s and
70s.  For awhile, we watched a SHACHO san (Company president) comedy
(Toho, 1966). It was supposed to be in color, but it had a terribly
faded, salmon hue. The story was a silly satire about a vain, lecherous
company head, w/ his demanding wife and spoiled boy.  Underlings step in
to save him from his own vices.  Complications ensue when effeminate,
French-born designer decides he is in love w/ Shacho-san's secretary.

	This mid-1960s bourgeois fluff found an appreciative audience that
night in Asakusa.  The Shin Asakusa Gekijo (New Asakusa Theater) was
filled to capacity w/ homeless vagabonds who used the hall as a refuge. 
They filled the air w/ their cigarette smoke, nearly obscuring the
no-smoking signs up by the screen. Hawking coughs punctuated the film
soundtrack. The floor was awash w/ butts, trash, tissues.  Most of the
men were sound asleep, or mumbling to themselves.  My wife saw the man
in front of her carefully licking the lid and sides of his Yoshinoya
curry bowl before tossing it to the floor.  Needless to say she was the
only woman in the place. 

	Seems like the studios who own and run these bombed out palaces are
providing a kind of welfare service.  All the theaters along the square
play all-night programs w/ nostalgic yakuza, chambara, and comedy fare. 
Nikkatsu AKUSHON ("action") are also heavily represented, as is postwar
Enoken, Drifters, and Crazy Cat serials.  I guess these films were in
their first run when these worn-out men were putting in their time with
companies and raising families.

	A final consideration in this new age of multinational multiplexes:
such atavistic screening conditions take one back to the earliest stage
of theatrical exhibition, not only in Japan, but all over. In every city
before 1910, the issues of fire safety, adequate lighting, supervised
seating, and the lengthening of programs toward feature formats were
prime considerations in the elevation of movies to middle class
standards.  The kind of "homeless Meigaza" we found in Asakusa--along
with porno theaters--appeal to a specific clientele first for their
spatial composition, their congeniality to down-and-out "shitamachi"
ojisan; and only second for the content of their projected programs,
which went mostly ignored.

	This is a neighborhood and a kind of film culture that goes
unacknowledged, not only by film scholars but by the Japanese public. We
pay tribute to Asakusa's historical distinction; meanwhile on Saturday
nights it becomes the haunt of homeless.  The Shin Asakusa Gekijo, and
its neighbors, are doing God's work for these men who otherwise would be
out on the freezing streets.

Darrell Davis