Japan's first movie theater

An electricity hall became Japan's first movie theater

The Denkikan no longer stands, but its site lies about 700 feet from here, in Tokyo's old Asakusa theater district. Before it showed films, the building was called Denyukan, a hall for X-ray sideshows built to amaze crowds with electricity. In October 1903, the film company Yoshizawa Shōten turned it into Japan's first theater built only for movies. That word "denki," meaning electricity, stuck in its new name: Denkikan.

Crowds came for the silent films and for the benshi, narrators who stood beside the screen explaining the story as it played. One of the most famous, Saburo Somei, performed here, his voice becoming part of the show itself. Denkikan became so well known that cinemas across Japan, from Hokkaido to Nagasaki, borrowed its name for themselves.

The Denkikan lent its name across Japan

In 1912, Yoshizawa Shōten merged with three rival studios to form Nikkatsu, and the Denkikan became one of its theaters. The building stayed a fixture of Asakusa Rokku, the strip of theaters and sideshows that drew crowds from across Tokyo. By 1933, photographs show the Denkikan standing tall on that street, the Teikokukan theater right beside it. By 1930, Asakusa held fourteen movie theaters, and the Denkikan was still one of the best known.

Studios traded ownership until the theater closed

Ownership kept shifting as Japan's film industry reshaped itself. In 1931, the Denkikan passed to a new company under Shochiku's control, then became a showcase for its successor, Shinko Kinema. When Shinko Kinema merged into what became Daiei in the early 1940s, the Denkikan went with it, screening that studio's new releases.

Daiei collapsed in November 1971, and Shochiku, which still held a stake, handed the theater to a subsidiary to keep it running. The Denkikan lasted five more years under that arrangement. On February 29, 1976, it closed for good, after 73 years as a movie house.

A flea market filled the theater's empty lot

After the theater closed, the site stood vacant. A flea market took over the empty ground, stalls filling the space where the screen once stood. In 1987, builders replaced it with a commercial and residential complex, the kind of mixed-use building common across Tokyo. A food court opened inside, on the ground floor where the old theater's entrance had been.

Shops and apartments now stand on the site

Asakusa Denkikan Pacific Court still stands on the spot today, with apartments above shops and the food court below. A scale model of the original Denkikan, built to match old photographs and records, is on permanent display at the Edo-Tokyo Museum across the river. Japanese filmmaker Kaizo Hayashi referenced the old theater in his 1986 film "To Sleep so as to Dream," a story about the silent-film era the Denkikan helped create. Novelist Yasunari Kawabata, too, wrote of this stretch of Asakusa at its liveliest, in his 1930 book "The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa."

The streets around you, 雷門通り and 公園通り, still carry some of that old theater-district energy, lined with restaurants that have outlasted every cinema that once stood here. Nakasei, a restaurant open since 1870, sits about 575 feet away, older than the Denkikan itself.