Nikkatsu Theatre

The Nagoya Nikkatsu Theater located on 1-10 Minamiise-cho, Naka-ku, Nagoya, Aichi Prefecture, actually first opened as the Nikkatsu Stadium in 1948 as a special events house, hosting boxing matches, dances, and other shows.

It was converted into a movie theater and opened its doors on July 10, 1952 with James Mason in “The Desert Fox: The Story Of Rommel” as a first-run foreign house including American films, housing 1,256 seats. In January 1955, the theater became Nikkatsu’s first model theater nationwide and became the flagship theater in Nagoya. Some notable films the theater ran at the time include a handful of John Wayne and Danny Kaye films. The Nagoya Nikkatsu Theater originally screened American and foreign films at first, but Japanese Nikkatsu films were added later in its history, bringing in a mixed policy.

During the third quarter of the 1950s, Nikkatsu was already streamlining its theater management at the time by limiting its directly operated theaters to only those it owned and switching its leased theaters to management by Taiyo Enterprises. As of September 1957, Nikkatsu had 42 theaters under its umbrella, including 28 directly managed theaters, 13 managed by Taiyo Enterprises, and only one theater run by a separate company.

On October 1, 1963, Nikkatsu reached an agreement with Takenaka Corporation to sell Nagoya Nikkatsu, and several weeks later on October 26, 1963, the Nagoya Nikkatsu Theatre closed for the final time. Its former foreign film programming immediately moved to the Asahi Kaikan.