Travel Takada Sekaikan, Japan's oldest cinema

Takada Sekaikan, a two-story cinema that opened in 1911, is about a six-minute walk from Takada Station along a street lined with "gangi" wooden arcades. The cinema, one of the oldest in Japan, was initially a playhouse when a divisional headquarters of the Imperial Japanese Army was based here and brought vibrancy to the former castle town. The building is characterized by white walls and arched windows, as well as parapets designed with straight and curved lines to create a light and graceful feeling. The theatre has about 180 seats on the first and second floors. Particularly eye-catching are the ruling family emblem of the feudal Takada Domain at the centre of the boarded ceiling and the wooden handrails surrounding the second-floor seats. When the building was completed, the media described it as a large, white-colored, Renaissance-style theater. It was called Sekaikan when it started operating as a cinema five years later. Since then, it has been renamed to include Takada Toho Eiga Gekijo, Shochikukan, and Takada Daiei. The theatre slipped from the centre stage after it started exclusively playing pornography in the 1970s, making the place "unfavourable for children to go near," according to Michinari Ueno, 35, the theatre's manager since 2014.

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