‘Cinema’ can refer to a single film, a group of texts connected by place, theme, director, actor or time period, or to the film theatre itself. The Japanese terminology is not quite so flexible, as eigakan (film theatre) is quite distinct from eiga (film). Asking people about their memories of watching films in the postwar era often threw up recollections of particular cinema theatres, as much as memories of film content. Participants in my study often connected the film theatre to specific moments in their lifelong relation to cinema texts and cultures. Reflecting study participants’ structural approach to answering my survey and interview questions, I begin this account of film viewing in Western Japan by thinking about the cinema as place, both in the literal geographic sense and as a technology of emplacement, a means of situating oneself in the world.

The experiences related by participants in my study can be loosely organised into two groups, as the memories of those for whom film was the only moving picture entertainment available differ from the memories of those who had access to television as well as cinema. The memories of the generation born between 1930 and 1953, who grew up without television, are generally distinct from those of people born after 1953, who often had personal access to a television by age five to ten. The spread of television was uneven, informed by geographical area, degree of urbanisation and the wealth and class of the household in question. Yet by 1959, sales of television sets had reached 3.5 million, up from 1.5 million in 1958 (Kitaura 2020: 119).

Many study participants in the elder group connected questions about their memories of the cinema to the lack of television in their younger years. Most participants born between 1930 and 1953 prefaced their answer to my first question about their memories of visiting the cinema for the first time, and their impressions of their own lives and the wider social situation in that period, with the reminder that cinema was then the main source of popular entertainment.