Abstract
There were about 10,000 movie theaters in postwar Japan. There are an abundance of books andmagazines on the subject of movies, and academicresearch is being conducted from various angles, butthere is little research on movie theaters, which arescreening facilities, and even basic information aboutmovie theaters outside of major cities is missing. This paper reports methods and studies involved in creating the database of film theaters called“Memories of the Lost Cinema” e.g., extracting basic information from each year’s “cinema directory” and comprehensively collecting information on movie theaters from local materials held by over 700 public libraries. The database is published under an open license, and it will be the first step toward academic research. As an example of its use, this article introduces the former sites of movie theaters in Aichi Prefecture and existing examples of movie theater buildings in the Tokai, Hokuriku-Koshinetsu, and Kinki regions, as well as describes archiving activities such as creating Wikipedia articles on movie theaters.
