Movie Film "Momijigari"

Momijigari (1899): Watching Japan's Oldest Surviving Film

On a windy afternoon in November 1899, a small camera crew set up in an open lot behind the Kabuki-za theatre in Tokyo and asked two of the most celebrated stage actors of the Meiji era to perform a scene for a strange new device. The black-and-white footage they captured that day, just under four minutes long, has since become the oldest surviving Japanese-made film in existence. Known as Momijigari, or "Maple Viewing," it was designated an Important Cultural Property in 2009, the very first time a moving picture had ever received that honour in Japan. For overseas visitors with an interest in cinema, kabuki, or the broader story of Japan's encounter with modernity, the film and the institution that protects it offer a rare and moving window into the moment a nation first met itself on screen.

What the Film Shows

The footage records a single scene from the kabuki dance drama Momijigari, originally choreographed in 1887 and based on a much older Noh play. The samurai general Taira no Koremochi has travelled into the mountains of Shinano (modern Nagano Prefecture) to enjoy the autumn maple leaves. There he encounters Princess Sarashina, who invites him to drink with her. The princess, however, is no woman at all but a mountain demon in disguise, and the scene captured on film shows the moment the spell breaks and the two figures meet in stylised combat, the demon wielding a maple branch and Koremochi his sword.

The two performers were giants of their day. Ichikawa Danjūrō IX, then in his early sixties, takes the role of the demon-princess, while Onoe Kikugorō V plays the samurai. Both men were leaders of the Meiji-era kabuki revival and both would be dead within four years of the camera turning. The film is, in a very literal sense, the only surviving moving image of either actor at work.

Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a famous mishap. A sudden gust of wind blew one of Danjūrō's fans clean out of his hand mid-dance. Because film stock was scarce and Danjūrō refused a second take, the accident was preserved forever, and a costumed stagehand can be seen darting in to retrieve the prop. It is, by some accounts, the world's first cinematic blooper.

How the Film Came to Be Made

The cinematographer was Shibata Tsunekichi, a young technician working for the Konishi Photographic Store in Tokyo. He used an imported Gaumont camera and three reels of film. The shoot was the brainchild of Inoue Takejirō, the manager of the Kabuki-za theatre, who proposed recording the November production while it was still being staged inside.

Because film emulsions of the period were too slow for indoor stage lighting, an open-air platform was hastily built behind the theatre, in the garden of a teahouse called Bairin, and the actors performed in full costume under natural daylight. Danjūrō reportedly agreed to be filmed only on the strict condition that the footage would never be shown to the public during his lifetime; he worried that a moving picture might cheapen the live art he had spent decades perfecting.

Fate intervened. In the summer of 1903, Danjūrō fell ill and had to cancel a tour engagement at the Naka-za in Osaka. To avoid disappointing audiences, he allowed the film to be screened in his place. It ran for nearly a month. Danjūrō died that September, Kikugorō had died slightly earlier the same year, and the recording suddenly became something more than a curiosity. It was the only way anyone would ever see the two masters perform again.

Why It Was Designated an Important Cultural Property

For most of the twentieth century, films in Japan were not legally classified as cultural property at all. They were treated as entertainment products, valuable perhaps but not in the same category as paintings, sculptures, or temple architecture. That position began to shift in the 2000s as nations around the world started recognising cinema as heritage. Germany led the way in 2001 with Fritz Lang's Metropolis, France registered the entire surviving output of the Lumière brothers, and the United States designated the original three-strip negatives of The Wizard of Oz.

Japan's turn came on 10 July 2009, when the Council for Cultural Affairs designated Momijigari an Important Cultural Property. The specific item registered was a 35mm flammable nitrate duplicate negative produced in 1927 by the Nikkatsu film company, donated to what was then the National Film Center. At 342 feet and 13 frames, projected at the period-correct 16 frames per second, it runs for three minutes and fifty seconds. The decision opened the legal door for further film designations, and in the years since, two other early films have followed.

The case for designation rested on three pillars. First, the film is the oldest surviving moving image made by a Japanese cinematographer, marking the literal birth of Japanese cinema. Second, it preserves the only known footage of two of the most important kabuki actors of the Meiji period, making it a primary historical document for the performing arts. Third, the 1927 duplicate negative is itself a rare surviving example of early flammable film stock, valuable as a material artefact of cinema history.

Where It Lives Today

The original nitrate negative is held in climate-controlled storage at the Sagamihara Annex of the National Film Archive of Japan, in Kanagawa Prefecture. The annex, opened in 1986 and expanded with a dedicated third vault in 2014, is one of the most advanced film preservation facilities in Asia and is not open to the general public; nitrate film is chemically unstable and must be kept cold and away from foot traffic.

The institution that owns and curates the print, however, is very much open to visitors. The National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ) operates a public main building in the Kyobashi district of central Tokyo, just a few minutes on foot from Tokyo Station. The seventh-floor permanent exhibition, "Nihon Eiga: The History of Japanese Film," tells the story of Japanese cinema from its earliest days through to the present, and Momijigari features prominently in that narrative. The two on-site theatres screen films from the collection year-round, and visitors with English, Chinese, or Korean as a first language will find translated panels in the gallery.

Highlights for the Visitor

Although the original film is not on physical display, several experiences in Tokyo allow you to engage directly with its legacy. The seventh-floor gallery at NFAJ Kyobashi houses cameras, posters, costumes, and ephemera spanning more than a century of Japanese filmmaking, and is the natural starting point for anyone tracing the origins of the medium in Japan. Special exhibitions rotate through the year and frequently revisit the silent era.

For those who wish simply to watch the film, NFAJ has made a digitised version freely available through its online "Japanese Film in the Meiji Era" portal, and the work is also in the public domain on platforms such as YouTube. Watching it before or after a visit to the gallery transforms the experience: the small wooden cameras and brittle film cans on display take on a new weight when you have just seen what they captured.

A short walk from the archive brings you to the rebuilt Kabuki-za theatre in Ginza, the direct architectural successor to the venue behind which Momijigari was filmed in 1899. Catching even a single act of a contemporary kabuki performance there is the closest a modern visitor can come to experiencing what Shibata's camera was pointed at, more than a century ago.

Things to See Nearby

The Kyobashi neighbourhood sits at the edge of three of Tokyo's most rewarding districts for visitors. The Ginza shopping quarter, with its flagship department stores and the Kabuki-za, is a five-minute walk south. Tokyo Station and the red-brick Marunouchi business district are equally close to the north. The Bridgestone Museum of Art (Artizon Museum), one of Japan's finest collections of early modern Western and Japanese painting, is directly across the street from NFAJ. For visitors with a full day, the Tsukiji outer market and the Hama-rikyū Gardens are within easy walking distance, and the Imperial Palace East Garden lies just beyond the station.