Tōhō Motion Picture Company

Tōhō Motion Picture Company, leading Japanese motion-picture studio.

The company was founded in 1936 by Kobayashi Ichizō, a former businessman who was the creator of an all-girl “opera troupe.” In 1932 he had organized the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre Corporation, subsequently acquiring several established theatres and building new and larger ones. His structures housed three or more separate theatres, a model that is still followed in Japan. In 1935 he gained control of two small companies, the PCL, a studio that had first used modern production methods, and the JO, a company that produced both features and advertising films. The next year the Tōhō Motion Picture Distribution Corporation was formed to distribute films produced by these two studios. Famed director Kurosawa Akira was one of the company’s earliest employees.

Tōhō was the foremost Japanese filmmaker during World War II. After the war, however, it experienced severe labour difficulties over unionization. By 1948 Tōhō had ended production and was acting as a distributor for the films of the Shintōhō Motion Picture Company, which had been financed by Tōhō in 1947. The studio reopened and in the 1950s introduced the first successful Japanese-developed wide-screen process, Tohoscope, similar to the American CinemaScope technique. During this period, Tōhō produced many of Kurosawa’s classic films, including Shichinin no samurai (1954; Seven Samurai) and Yojimbo (1961). The studio was perhaps best known, however, for its science fiction offerings, particularly in the kaiju (monster) genre. Most notable was Gojira (Godzilla), a colossal, irradiated, dinosaur-like beast that made its film debut in 1954. During the virtual collapse of the Japanese film industry in the 1970s, the company restructured its operations to reduce costs. The growth of the home video and DVD market added a new money source for Tōhō, and the licensing of Gojira for use in the Hollywood film Godzilla (1998) earned the studio tens of millions of dollars in royalties. In the 21st century, Tōhō remained a powerful player in the Japanese entertainment industry, both as a production house for its own films and as a distributor for smaller studios.