“The golden age has passed”
In Tokyo, the legendary Iwanami Hall cinema and the French-speaking Omeisha bookstore will soon close their doors, in particular following the health crisis. The end of a certain cultural influence of France in the archipelago.
The Green Room by Francois Truffaut Jacquot of Nantes by Agnes Varda, wild grasses by Alain Resnais or even the Guardians by Xavier Beauvois. All these French-language films have in common that they were screened in the same Japanese art house cinema, the Iwanami Hall in Tokyo. “I remember that François Truffaut had come well before the day of the screening of the green room in our small cinema, to chain interviews with the press from morning to evening with a sandwich like any meal, so that the film finds its audience in Tokyo», remembers Ritsuko Iwanami, site manager.
The Iwanami Hall, inaugurated in 1968 as a multipurpose cultural space in Jimbocho, the Latin Quarter of Tokyo, had been essentially devoted to the seventh art since 1974. It is living its last months. Its founder, businessman Yujiro Iwanami (1919-2007), father of Ritsuko, said: “Don’t worry about finances.” “He was a patron, but today there is no longer any patron,” laments the septuagenarian. In 1978, when she returned from France where she studied for several years, she was recruited at Iwanami Hall to lend a hand. She never got out. Ritsuko Iwanami says she is saddened today, although she concedes he was “difficult to continue like this”.
Yakuzas
The Iwanami Hall, on the tenth floor of the building of the same name which houses other tenants and activities, takes the decision of the parent company, the real estate structure Iwanami Fudosan, hard. This “mini theater” as the Japanese say, will therefore close on July 29. “With the health crisis, the last two years have been really hard” underlines the voluble and dynamic cinephile who regrets that the Japanese State does not have a specific policy to support this sector. “Cinema is not seen as part of culture, but more as popular entertainment. When we started, in fact, the movie theaters were in the hands of the yakuza and we were told: “They will come and annoy you”. But they didn’t come.” The uniqueness of Iwanami Hall comes from Etsuko Takano, Ritsuko’s aunt. For this globe-trotter of the dark rooms of the planet and priestess of the Iwanami programming within what is nicknamed “the movie crew” (in Japaneseized French), the films were a window on the world. Born in 1929 in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, Etsuko found “the gaze of the Japanese in the archipelago is far too narrow”, she wanted to expand it, and the Iwanami Hall did it, with 271 films shown, from 65 countries and regions.
“The Movie Crew” (only two people at the start) aimed to screen in the Iwanami Hall films produced outside Europe and the United States, which had no other chance of arriving in Japan, such as European or French films absent from the major circuits. Then to offer the full versions of films that had been censored and finally to help Japanese films to go beyond borders. And many have discovered there, including recently, a unique space. “The first time I came to Iwanami Hall was to see Nostalgia for the Light and mother-of-pearl button, by the Chilean director Patricio Guzmán”, says Zoé Schellenbaum, a French art student in Japan, who fell under the spell of the place, to the point that she currently runs the counter several days a week. “It was I who, a few years later, very proud, welcomed the spectators for the screening of his latest work. : the Mountain range of dreams. Some came specially, but many out of habit, because they never miss the feature film showing each month. They had put on their mountain clothes, with their walking sticks, to show their joy at having once traveled the reliefs of Chile., she says, among many other anecdotes. The announced disappearance of the place was first “a shock, for me and the employees, then for the members, and beyond that for the moviegoers, the Francophiles too, even if the programming came from everywhere”, asks the boss Iwanami. And take a nostalgic look at a photo of Gérard Philippe and Jean-Paul Belmondo placed in the middle of a table covered with prizes and gifts received over the years by the cinema.
More than a month
In the lair of his compatriot Yukio Okuyama, black and white shots of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Proust or Malraux line the walls, and will soon be taken down. Same generation, same cultural passion, same epidemic reason, same radical decision. He too will close shop. The French bookstore Omeisha, founded in 1947 by Yukio’s father, will soon be no more. “The golden age of French literature in Japan is over”, deplores the one who received in 2012 in Paris from the hands of Frédéric Mitterrand, then Minister of Culture, the insignia of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters, for his contribution to the influence of the language of Molière in Japan. One month remains to liquidate the stock of novels, essays, French school books.
Its annex, the Rive Gauche bookstore, located on the site of the French Institute in Tokyo, has already emptied its shelves for a few months. “We benefited from subsidies and interest-free loans from the Japanese government during the crisis and from support on the French side, but too many reasons mean that this is no longer possible: the Covid crisis, the high cost of the euro against the yen, a year-on-year decline in the number of students studying French,” quotes Yukio Okuyama who had inherited the premises at the age of 22 after the death of his father, more than 45 years ago.