Stacks of video and audio equipment ¡ª some decades old, others nearly extinct ¡ª fill an entire wall of Tokyo Koon¡¯s office, a quiet space tucked away in the northern corner of Shibuya Ward. Silent television screens sandwiched between the electronics flicker with fading footage: a Shinto ritual, an old interview with a baseball coach, a long-forgotten TV series.
These moments, captured on fragile magnetic tape, are on borrowed time. Unless they are digitized soon, they may disappear forever.
¡°We used to receive around 10,000 tapes annually, but that¡¯s gone up to around 40,000 to 50,000 now,¡± says Hideaki Matsunobu, executive director of Tokyo Koon, a company that provides audiovisual conservation and digitization services for municipalities, museums and individuals who want to preserve their film, video and audio collections.
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