Tangemania

There was much loss of life and property when Typhoon Hagibis hit the Kanto region of Japan in mid-October 2019, but one piece of news that greatly affected me personally was the report that the vaults storing the valuable collections of the Kawasaki City Museum had been flooded in the storm. The Museum collection features not only archaeological artifacts from the region, but given the Museum’s long-standing commitment to preserving, studying, and displaying modern popular culture, one of the country’s best collections of film and manga. The Museum, which has had such film scholars as Makino Mamoru and Okumura Masaru on its curatorial staff, has a significant film collection. As we described in our Research Guide to Japanese Film Studies (and its Japanese update and translation), it is particularly strong in documentary, news films, video art, and TV commercials, and features the personal collections of Kumashiro Tatsumi, Jissoji Akio, and Kimura Takeo, among others. It would be a tremendous blow to Japanese film history if any of these materials were lost.