In the residential neighborhood of Seijo, Setagaya Ward, a small team of 25 people at Toho Archive is working to preserve a physical record of Japanese film history.
Toho Archive¡¯s catalog reads like a syllabus of Japanese film history: Akira Kurosawa¡¯s ¡°Seven Samurai,¡± the original ¡°Godzilla¡± series, Kenji Mizoguchi¡¯s ¡°The Life of Oharu¡± and Mikio Naruse¡¯s ¡°Floating Clouds¡± as well as beloved animated franchises such as ¡°Doraemon¡± and ¡°Detective Conan.¡±
Although the organization was officially established in December 2023, it has a much longer lineage as the direct successor to Tokyo Laboratory, a film-processing house that was founded in 1955 and pioneered the world¡¯s first ¡°gin-nokoshi¡± (literally, ¡°silver retention¡±; also known as bleach bypass) coloring technique.
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