Adventures in Movie-going – Tokyo
A travelogue through a few of Tokyo's cinemas
Hello friends! I’m back from my long trip to Japan, met a lot of cool folk from around the world, spoke to many random Japanese strangers, and ate a metric ton of soba. Being home is bittersweet, but I’m so ready to keep plugging away on this newsletter and work on some other outstanding projects back home.
Rather than tell you about my trip in general, here’s a little travelogue focused on the cinemas I visited in Japan. I may not fully speak Japanese yet, but that was not going to stop me from watching some movies while I was in Japan, subtitles available or not.
Okura Cinema
The first film I saw in Tokyo could not be logged on Letterboxd and I can barely find a translation for its title. Google Translate spits out the following title: LoveJuiceArt.
It’s (softcore) porn.
From a friend’s suggestion (really) I visited Ueno’s long-standing Okura Cinema that’s dedicated to screening pink films, both vintage pinku and new releases produced by the same company that runs the theatre. Vertically integrated, baby. In Okura, the films run back to back throughout opening times, looping the same 3-film-program across the day’s opening hours. You could stay in the theatre throughout all the showings, and continue watching repeated screenings, all on a single ticket. The person managing the theatre was certainly a little surprised by the small group of foreigners who had wandered in. We waited awkwardly around the lobby before realizing we could go in anytime while the previous showing was already running.
The theatre was very warm and there were many men, looking to be in their 50s or 60s, seated generally spread out in what looked like a 150 person theatre. Men would totter around, giving us tourists a passing stare as they found a place to get seated. One of my friends accompanying me was a woman, which was probably a more peculiar sight for the regular patrons. There were multiple men with their feet propped up on the seat in front, shoes off. Every so often a female staff member would make a round around the theatre, presumably to make sure everyone was only watching the film with their eyes.
We caught a few minutes of the ending of the preceding film, Madame Lesbian, which seemed to be about a school-going step-daughter having a clandestine relationship with her stepmother. The film looked a little “retro”, maybe made in the 80s, with a DVDrip quality.
That film felt particularly more risqué in plot than the film that followed, the one we thought we were buying a specific ticket for. LoveJuiceArt follows a man, in his 50s, who is a painter who has lost his spark for painting until a young woman takes an interest in him and reignites his artistic drive. Along this story thread is also a friend asking for the painter’s help to reignite his relationship with his estranged wife. Aside from that, the painter sleeps with basically every woman in the story in drawn out sex scenes.
It’s interesting to see how the director attempts to make this more than just a pornographic film with a plot centred on artmaking even if the story lands very flat. I would have expected the film, with its inability to show explicit sexual intercourse, to approach filming sex with more deliberation to make up for its missing tools (haha). However, it feels like the people behind the camera were not interested in filming sex scenes, which felt included because they had to be, and focused their efforts on ancillary scenes in between sex. It mostly feels like porn with genitals strategically avoided (instead of pixelated) rather than using the form to ratchet up sensuality or titillation. Putting little effort into these sex scenes would’ve been laudable if those other scenes were more entertaining, but unfortunately they are not.
Pink films have existed alongside Japan’s entrenched pornography industry for a long time, and access to more explicit pornography is always available with the internet today, which makes me wonder what place pink films have in this landscape. What function do they fulfil? Broadly speaking, pink films are analogous to sexploitation as a genre but sexploitation has largely died out. The “erotic thriller” is occasionally still being produced today in Hollywood with an eye toward adding some form of “artfulness” to add a publicly acceptable prestige to it. If this film is an example of the quality and craft of modern pink films, I’d say that artfulness is largely absent with flat cinematography and performance. Yet, there’s clearly an audience for these films, and for new iterations of pink films, but I wonder what this audience expects from this subgenre and how it justifies Okura continuing to produce pink films today. Is the market big enough? Or is it just big enough to sustain the level of production that goes into it?
In the cinema, there was a sense of loneliness in the air, and yet maybe also a sense of comfort. Purely from conjecture, I’d imagine that for this older audience that has been attending these screenings for decades of their adult life, the ritual of watching one of these films with others is not something they want to give up yet. It’s clear that these films, and watching them in a theatre, fulfils something more than pure arousal, and I’m curious to find out what intangible quality this audience is here for.
Or maybe it really is just porn. I’ve read there’s a special “VIP” room upstairs… one can guess what it’s used for. It’s a shame the film we saw felt so limp (haha), I wished we had watched Madame Lesbian instead.
Cinema Blue Studio
In Kita-senju, to the north of central Tokyo is the Art Center of Tokyo which houses Cinema Blue Studio, a film theatre that only plays films on 35mm, which is a privilege I’ll likely never have again in Singapore. There, I watched Louis Malle’s debut feature Elevator to the Gallows for the first time with Japanese subtitles.
The Art Center is a fairly modern building of 22 floors, with floors for offices, fitness activities, and studios for a whole range of artistic pursuits. In Tokyo, I found that people find ways to engage with the arts in their many niches and facets, whether as spectators or practitioners. It makes me wonder what is necessary to sustain something as specific as Cinema Blue Studio that has to maintain a library of 35mm film and its projectors.
When you're seated in the cinema's dark blue retractable seats that feel more meant for lectures than movies, it's hard to imagine there's a huge 35mm projector whirring in the room behind you. There's something cold about Cinema Blue's environs, maybe because the cinema feels a little too large for its screen size, and the walk up to the cinema feels like you're about to clock in at the office. However, there's also something charming about how this neighbourhood outside the bustle of Tokyo's more well-known districts is playing films on 35mm everyday throughout the year in what feels like a community centre, and that there's an audience for every screening. It doesn't really matter how a space looks or feels, it matters what you do inside it.
While there were sections which tested my understanding in the film, it was largely visual and understandable. Even without English subtitles, most information can be understood from context. However, reading Japanese subtitles did help me understand a little more than someone who didn’t understand French or Japanese. It’s a novel experience reading subtitles in a non-native language for a film in another non-native language. There’s also the peculiar additional layer of understanding where some of the kanji (Chinese characters) in the Japanese subtitles I can somewhat read because of their Chinese origin and could glean meaning from even if I could not sound them out in Japanese.
I enjoyed the digressive nature of Malle’s film, both procedural and moody, like a filmmaker pulling from different cinematic influences to form a new concoction. In one instance it’s a procedural crime film, in another a delinquent film, and in yet another, a film of romantic yearning.
Waseda Shōchiku
Near Waseda University is Waseda Shōchiku that plays a double bill every day it is open. On a single ticket, you can watch 2 films that run back to back! A great value. They were playing a double bill of Kiyoshi Kurosawa's recent films, Cloud and his recent remake of his own Serpent's Path. As a bonus, they were also showing his short film Chime. Kurosawa was having a productive year last year. I didn't have the time to catch the double bill, but there's a reduced price for the last screening of the day. Not all the double bills are related by director, with some thematically linked double bills.
Interestingly, Shōchiku is the first theatre I've been to that explicitly allows you to buy food and drink from elsewhere and bring it in because they've only got vending machines at the cinema. I got some candy from a nearby FamilyMart before heading in.
The cinema has a screen that's placed fairly high, with very little incline to the way the seats are placed, and the cinema runs quite deep. If you're not so tall, there's a good chance the person in front of you is going to block some portion of the screen for you.
Typically for Kurosawa, Cloud is a confounding affair. I had no idea that it would be about a man selling counterfeit products online, but it slowly unravels into the mode of a slow thriller. Kurosawa is king at jumping between disparate tones and Cloud is similar in this regard, although I don't personally feel he is as successful here. There's a B-movie nature to the film that can be enjoyable, although for much of it I was wondering what kind of movie it really wants to be. It’s probably a little too serious and slow for an audience to fully escape into and enjoy B-movie trappings, but it does have a wild final act that feels oddly funny like a looney tunes cartoon.
109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku
This is the most expensive cinema I've ever bought a ticket for. It recently opened with the Toyko Kabukicho Tower skyscraper that was completed in 2023. I bought a ticket for Tony Takitani on 35mm which cost a whopping 4500 yen, but it felt like it was one of my few opportunities to watch a film on 35mm in my lifetime. Even so, that choice probably defeats the purpose of this cinema, which is a finely tuned soundsystem overseen by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto. Tangentially, I went to the Sakomoto exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, and the lines were out the building. Japanese people really like Ryuichi Sakamoto. I'm sure using Sakamoto's name to sign off on this sound system is also a great marketing tactic.
The Tokyo Kabukicho Tower has been described to me as a venture to gentrify the surrounding Kabukicho area which is famous for being home to Toho Shinjuku Tower which houses a Toho Cinemas outlet and a hotel with Godzilla's life-sized head popping up above it. It's also the most prominent red light district in Tokyo: full of host/hostess bars and progressively more explicit adult entertainment. It's also thronged with tourists hoping to soak up the Kabukicho vibes. The tower hopes to clean up the image of Kabukicho and also house these tourists, but its many floors felt especially vacant and the food options on its lower floors felt like another country's idea of what a Japanese food court should look like (just imagine any of the "Japanese food streets" in Singapore).
109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (what a mouthful) is one of the quietest cinemas I've ever stepped into. I was the first to enter the cinema for my screening and it was dead silent. It seemed fully soundproofed. However, I'd assume the 35mm print would barely utilise the breadth of what this supposedly premium sound system can offer. The seats reclined and were comfortable, with plenty of space to put whatever you've brought into the theatre. The concessions were equally expensive and fancy, but I did not partake after the sting of the ticket price.
As for Tony Takitani, I asked some friends if it was advisable to watch without subtitles and received a resounding "no". The film is nearly all voiceover and confusing doppelganger antics, with Issey Ogata (who one might recognise playing the Japanese man in Yi Yi) playing both his character and his character's father.
Despite my lack of understanding, Jun Ichikawa's film maintains a lonely tone of wistfulness as we watch this couple come together and still feel equally alone. Scenes frequently transition with slow lateral dolly glides that slide right into the next scene. The 35mm projection also greatly aided the film's sense of yearning and nostalgia.
After the screening, I stayed in the theatre for a little while longer to enjoy its silence.
Kawagoe: Scala-za
On a day trip from Tokyo, I visited Kawagoe on a cloudy and quiet day. While wandering the streets, known for preserving a smattering of buildings and streets in the Edo-style, I chance upon Scala-za, a small independent theater. What I thought would be a quick detour turned into me entering a screening of the 2024 independent film At The Bench, which happened be screening shortly after I had arrived.
The projector in the theatre has definitely seen better days, with the edges of the projection splotched with many dead blue pixels, with stray dead pixels finding themselves in the middle of the image. The image was shrunk to avoid the edges of the projection that were most affected by dead pixels, and the image was also a little soft– although that could be chalked up to the film being filmed in 16mm. Even with the theater’s poor projection, I was surprised by the relatively well attended afternoon screening and am largely jealous of Japan’s filmgoing audience. People yearn for cinema even in a theatre as dinky as Scala-za. Is it a search for culture or community?
Maybe it was a bad idea to watch a somewhat Rohmerian / Hamaguchi-esque film centred around conversations around the same park bench without any English subtitles, but it was a novel experience nonetheless. The film is structured with 5 short episodic vignettes as people have mostly 2-person conversations around this park bench. Most notably, there’s a middle section in which it is revealed that the park bench is some sort of alien as it communicates with its mothership. Somebody correct me if I am wrong!
Stubs
For fun, here are the ticket stubs from the films I saw:
Other Cinemas / Side quests
In my research, I discovered a few other cinemas that I did not managed to go to screenings for, but if you're using this as a sort of guide to Tokyo's cinemas they may be worth a look:
The National Film Archive of Japan has a theatre that plays old classics, and not just limited to Japan. I didn't manage to catch a screening but did check out the small permanent exhibition there. Every 30 minutes they play a montage of clips from (very) old films, think something like 1916’s Shoes. This montage is played on an old-school projector that you can step right next to. I had thought it was a new montage of clips, but the print is duplicated from a montage from the 50s, if I remember correctly, which is very cool.
In the middle of busy Shibuya is the recently opened Le Bunkamura theatre that plays independent films. They were playing a few Shinji Somai films during my time in Tokyo. Looks hip! It’s also a venue for other kinds of stage performances.
Shin-Bugeiza in Ikebukuro shows a variety of recent releases as well as older classic films. The programming looks pretty eclectic and interesting.
I also visited Yasujiro Ozu’s grave in nearby Kamakura. Here it is, surrounded by sake bottles:
Next time, we explore Kyoto. Talk soon.