Asakusa Eiga-gai

[Sybil Thornton]

It doesn't sound so terribly different from when I used to go to all nighters
there nearly twenty years ago.
SAT

Yeh Yueh Yu wrote:

> 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

--
S.A. Thornton
History, ASU
480-965-5778
fax:480-965-0310