Tachikawa Cinema City Guide: Tokyo’s First Multiplex and Its Big Sound

Near Tachikawa Station is a cinema whose bass shakes the building. It began with a silent-film narrator and became Tokyo’s first multiplex. Why does it survive?

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

Have you ever heard a film not with your ears but with your stomach? Have you felt the creak of tank tracks through the back of your seat?

A few minutes’ walk from the North Exit of Tachikawa Station, in western Tokyo, there is a cinema like that. It is called Cinema City. Its large subwoofers spew out bass until the whole building seems to tremble, in screenings it calls gokujō bakuon jōei, roughly “supreme thunderous-sound screenings,” and among film lovers its name is known across Japan. The theatre’s planning manager has told the magazine Weekly ASCII that customers come from as far away as Hokkaido and Okinawa, the two ends of the country.

I should confess that I never thought of Tachikawa as a film town. The station is big, but you pass through it to change trains. And as for films, every multiplex shows the same ones.

When I started digging, though, I found that in the mid-twentieth century Tachikawa had ten cinemas, and that in the early 1990s the city was for a while left without a single one. The cinema that stepped into that gap had been started by one benshi, a silent-film narrator, and had grown up in a theatre built with money pooled by local shopkeepers. It became Tokyo’s first multiplex, was surrounded by the big national chains in the 2000s, and stayed by the station anyway. In an age when you can stream any film at home, why do people travel all the way to Tachikawa to bathe in sound? With that question in mind, I walk down the steps from the North Exit’s elevated deck.

What Tachikawa Cinema City is: two buildings by the station, Cinema One and Cinema Two

Cinema City is made up of two buildings. According to the access page of the official website, Cinema One is at 2-8-5 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, a 5-minute walk from JR Tachikawa Station and 3 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita Station on the Tama Monorail. Cinema Two is at 2-42-26 Akebonocho, 6 minutes from JR Tachikawa Station and 2 minutes from Tachikawa-Kita. The two are a short walk apart.

The official site describes Cinema One as “Tokyo’s first cinema complex and a THX-certified theatre,” and adds that it “holds a record that shows the cultural maturity of Tachikawa.” To declare your own town’s level of cultural maturity in a cinema’s information page: I don’t dislike that kind of pride.

Of Cinema Two, the site says that when the film ends, the lights between the seats come up slowly, as if to cherish the afterglow. Your view is not blocked by the head in front of you, and the armrests are wide. Each auditorium has a different seat rake, so each film looks slightly different depending on where it is shown. The largest, a studio, has 382 seats. Most of the thunderous-sound screenings have been held here in Cinema Two.

One more line in the official FAQ is easy to miss but should not be. Cinema City’s trailers, it says, are very short, about five minutes, so please arrive in time for the start. Anyone who has sat through endless trailers after the advertised start time, only to find that their enthusiasm has gone cold by the time the main feature begins, will trust this cinema on that line alone. It does mean one less excuse for being late, which is a pity.

So where did this cinema come from? The story goes back to the days when films had no sound.

The narrator’s cinema, and Tachikawa, “the town of movies”

Tachikawa Billboard, a website run by a local council for culture-and-arts town-making, begins Cinema City’s history with one benshi.

His name was Kenkichi Kawate. The benshi were the people whose job was to tell the story and voice the dialogue alongside silent films, a profession that was a fixture of Japanese cinemas before the talkies. When sound films spread and he lost his work, Kawate opened a cinema in central Tokyo, but then came the Second World War. He moved to Tachikawa and opened a cinema there.

The cinema of a man who once gave voices to silent films would later become one of the cinemas in Japan most obsessed with sound. History sometimes writes plots that are a little too neat.

The first cinema in Tachikawa is said to have opened in 1925. According to the same Tachikawa Billboard, a man named Kichizo Namiki opened the Kinema Tachikawa on what is now Cinema-dori street.

After the war, Tachikawa became a base town. According to the Machi Archives, a local-history series by Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, Tachikawa Airfield was requisitioned by the US military after Japan’s surrender, and street stalls and black markets lined the station’s North Exit. When the Korean War began in 1950, business with American servicemen lifted the local economy. (The base matters here because it shaped the town for decades, which is why it keeps appearing in this series.)

In that bustle, cinemas multiplied. The Tachikawa Federation of Shopping Streets writes that Tachikawa, once known as “the town of movies,” had ten cinemas. The Machi Archives records the line-up of the 1960s. At the North Exit: Cinema Tachikawa, Tachikawa Central, Tachikawa Shochiku and Tachikawa Chuo. At the South Exit: Tachikawa Meigaza, Tachikawa Nikkatsu, Tachikawa Daiei, Toei Tachikawa Minamiza, Tachikawa Toho, and Tachikawa Shintoho, later the Tachikawa Nishikiza. Nikkatsu, Daiei, Toei, Toho, Shochiku: the names of Japan’s great film studios were all there on the two sides of the station. Older people in Tachikawa might recall, from any one of these names, the face of the person whose hand they held in the dark. Younger readers might imagine a town where you came out of the ticket gates and turned left or right depending on which studio’s film you wanted. It was as if a multiplex’s screen directory had spilled out of the building and across the station.

In 1951, the year Cinema City’s company profile gives as its “founding,” Kawate rented the Tachikawa Central Theatre at the North Exit and began showing films. According to Tachikawa Billboard, this theatre had been built with investment from local shopkeepers and residents, and that “landlord and tenant” relationship continues to this day. The Machi Archives notes a photograph from around 1954 showing the Tachikawa Central Theatre near the Akebono Bridge over the Midorikawa stream.

Kawate’s cinemas were not only at the North Exit. According to Tachikawa Billboard, there was also a cinema at the South Exit, called the Meigaza or the Engeikan, which Kawate took over after the war. The Federation of Shopping Streets writes that the Tachikawa Meigaza, opened in the Taisho era (1912–1926), closed its doors in 1986 because of land readjustment at the South Exit. I could not confirm whether the “Meigaza” in the two sources is the same building. But both make clear that this was a town where films played on both sides of the station.

In 1955 Kawate built the Tachikawa Chuo Theatre on the west side of the Central. The following year a different company built the Tachikawa Shochiku. Three cinemas stood shoulder to shoulder in one corner of the North Exit.

But the lights went out one by one. According to the list in the Machi Archives, Tachikawa Nikkatsu closed in 1969; Cinema Tachikawa, descended from the town’s very first cinema, in 1976; Tachikawa Toho around 1978; Tachikawa Daiei and the Nishikiza around 1981; Toei Tachikawa Minamiza in 1982. The Tachikawa Meigaza at the South Exit closed in 1986. As the Showa era (1926–1989) neared its end, the darkness on both sides of the station shrank, little by little.

Still, the three cinemas at the North Exit survived. A former silent-film narrator renting a theatre that the townspeople had paid for, and showing films in it: this is the root of today’s Cinema City. Tachikawa’s station-front cinema belonged to the town from the start. That fact would later matter a great deal.

Land readjustment, and Tokyo’s first multiplex

In 1992, according to Tachikawa Billboard, large-scale land readjustment at the North Exit and the plan for Faret Tachikawa, a new district of offices and shops, meant that the three cinemas in that area would also be moved into a building. The Machi Archives writes that the strip above the culverted Midorikawa stream, where the Tachikawa Central and the others stood, became Faret Tachikawa in the redevelopment. And where the three cinemas once were, Cinema City’s Cinema One stands today.

The Machi Archives notes it in a single, casual line: after the three cinemas closed in 1992, for a time there were no cinemas at all in Tachikawa. “The town of movies,” which had once counted ten, had zero. For that period, people in Tachikawa must have had to take a train to see a film.

Even so, the three cinemas did not leave town. They came back on the same spot, gathered into one building.

That is how Cinema City, Tokyo’s first cinema complex, was born. A Weekly ASCII feature dates its opening to 1994 and reports that it was the first modern-style multiplex in Tokyo, and home to the first THX theatre built by Japanese hands. THX is a certification system that checks how faithfully a cinema reproduces a film’s sound and picture against a set standard. According to an article on AV Watch, a Japanese audio-visual news site, the first THX-certified theatre in Japan was in Ebina, Kanagawa, in 1993, and the next was Cinema City in Tachikawa.

For a while after it opened, the wind was at its back. In the AV Watch article, the theatre’s planning manager, who joined as a part-timer in 1997, recalls that there were hardly any multiplexes around then, and that it was an era when you succeeded without doing anything.

Then the wind changed. Big chains moved into neighbouring Akishima and Fuchu, and took the audience away. The Weekly ASCII article says that in the early 2000s Cinema City found itself surrounded by major multiplexes. National-chain capital on one side, a single local company on the other, and the same films showing everywhere at the same price. A local cinema fading away at this point is a story seen all over Japan.

Tachikawa’s cinema did not fade. To find out why, we have to walk into a second building, which opened in 2004.

The Numbers: Cinema City

• 1925 — the year Tachikawa’s first cinema is said to have opened. Cinema City’s obsession with sound did not yet exist even in outline. There was no sound.
• 10 — the number of cinemas in Tachikawa in the 1960s, when it was called “the town of movies.” By the time you made up your mind, the last show had started.
• 0 — the number of cinemas in the city for a while after the three at the North Exit closed in 1992. A short winter for the town of movies.
• 1951 — the year Cinema City’s company was founded. Its landlords were the town’s shopkeepers.
• 382 — seats in Cinema Two’s a studio. 382 people at once, their stomachs shaken by the same bass note.
• About 5 minutes — the length of the trailers, says the official site. Turn up late and you really will be late.
• 100 million yen — the investment in sound equipment, as reported by TV Tokyo’s neighbourhood show Adomachikku Tengoku. Paying it back one ticket at a time comes to a dizzying number.

A building just for films: Cinema Two

On AV Watch there is a column by the film director Shinji Higuchi. In it, the theatre’s planning manager says that Cinema Two, opened in 2004, was a building not combined with any shopping complex, so that it could be built for films alone, without constraints.

The sound concept was to faithfully reproduce the sound of the recording studios where film soundtracks are made. That is why the auditoriums are called “studios.” At first there was no sound-absorbing material in the walls; the design went all the way towards music rather than conventional cinema, and drew criticism from within the industry, he says.

According to the same article, in the mid-2000s the theatre changed its strategy. It would leave the general mass audience to the big chains and aim to be “a multiplex for people who love films.” It stopped trying to be liked by everyone, and tried instead to be loved deeply by someone.

The first clue came from Michael Jackson. Cinema City’s official news site writes that in 2009, ahead of the release of This Is It, the documentary built from rehearsals for concerts that never took place, the theatre thought hard about what it could do, and the result was gokujō onkyō jōei, “supreme-sound screenings”: “screening a single film after carefully adjusting the sound for it.” The theatre proudly calls this a screening format born for the first time in the history of cinemas. According to the Weekly ASCII article, one customer saw the film fifty times. Fifty times. You would learn the rehearsal schedule before you learned the lyrics.

Tuning the sound is the job of a sound engineer. According to the AV Watch article, for This Is It in 2011, the theatre’s sound designer and consultant, 増旭 (whose name we give in Japanese, as we could not confirm its reading), adjusted each channel using the volume of a concert PA system as his reference. He describes the work like this: “It’s not directing; it’s polishing.” No tricks such as raising and lowering the volume over time. Just making the sound the filmmakers originally wanted ring correctly in this room.

In the Weekly ASCII article, the head of the theatre’s planning office says that tuning the sound for one film takes about three hours. “Live-style screenings,” where the audience may clap, cheer and sing along, also began with This Is It in 2009, and were later held for the anime film K-On! The Movie. The same article mentions a customer who saw the thunderous-sound Godzilla 25 times. The smallest auditorium, it says, can be rented for 15,000 yen, making the cinema a place where fans can hold their own screenings. Given that, as we will see, the spark for the thunderous-sound screenings was a fans’ private screening, it all hangs together.

Wanderer’s Quiz

Cinema City’s official news describes its approach, which goes beyond simply raising the volume to tuning the sound in detail, as 立川流, “the Tachikawa school,” and adds a footnote about how to read those three characters. Kanji can often be read in more than one way. Which reading does the theatre ask for?

• A. Rissen-ryū
• B. Tachikawa-ryū
• C. Tatekawa-ryū

The answer comes near the end of this article.

Polished sound, before long, began to shake the building.

The thunderous-sound screenings began with Godzilla

According to the AV Watch article, the first thunderous-sound screening was the 2014 Godzilla. The theatre asked for sound that would make you feel Godzilla was right in front of you, and the same sound designer proposed adding subwoofers. The a studio already had four “650-P” subwoofers, a model developed for Apocalypse Now, and two more were rented on top. In the Weekly ASCII article, the trigger is said to have been a private loud screening of Pacific Rim, organised by a group of fans, which went down a storm. The customers lit the fuse first, and the theatre took them seriously.

On 20 June 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road opened. According to the official news, Cinema City installed an “1100-LFC” subwoofer, which emits ferociously powerful bass, for this film alone. The theatre itself writes that it bet an absurdly large sum on a sequel coming thirty years after its predecessor, a film that by any normal reckoning had no hope of becoming a hit. The bet sent film fans into a frenzy, and six months later the theatre even installed line-array speakers, because it wanted to recreate in the cinema the Doof Wagon, the vehicle in the film stacked with countless speakers. A cinema buying equipment because it was inspired by a car in a film. Normally it is the other way round.

Then, on 21 November of the same year, Girls und Panzer der Film opened, the movie of an anime series about high-school girls who fight tank battles as a sport. According to the official news, the film’s sound director Yoshikazu Iwanami, along with those in charge of its sound effects and mixing, came to Cinema City in person to take part in the sound tuning. Iwanami wrote that the result deserved to be called “Senshasaround Final,” a pun on sensha, the Japanese word for “tank,” and Sensurround, the name of an old system of rumbling cinema sound effects. He went so far as to say, “It may be the loudest film in the history of Japanese cinema.” In the same post, the theatre wrote that the building shakes like crazy.

This screening made the theatre’s name known across Japan. Today the official news says: “When you say Garupan [the fans’ nickname for Girls und Panzer], you mean Cinema City,” and adds that it strives to live up to that title. In December 2025 a screening marked the tenth anniversary of the film, and for Part 5 of Girls und Panzer das Finale, released on 9 October 2026, Iwanami delivered a “sound name” specifically for this theatre’s screenings. A sound director thinking up a name for the sound, every time, for one cinema in Tachikawa. The official news calls it “the customary naming.”

An official post explaining the difference between the a and b studios contains this passage. Since the equipment and architecture differ, there are clear differences; but since both are tuned optimally for each film, the gap is not as great as that between tonkotsu (pork-bone) ramen and miso ramen. It is more like two bowls of tonkotsu, one of them a touch saltier, with less back fat and a cleaner finish. A metaphor offered by way of explanation, and suddenly I was hungry. My stomach rumbled, with no help from the bass.

But this cinema’s story of sound is not short enough to end on a ramen metaphor. The next thing they set to work on was invisible.