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246 Y. OSAWA [J. S. M. P. E.
be wired. These additional installations will very likely be made within the next two years. Of the approximately 1000 theaters already wired, only 10 per cent are equipped with either Western Electric or RCA reproducers. About 40 theaters have the Tobis-Klangfilm system, and the remaining 85 per cent have divers other sound systems, both American and Japanese, of rather poor quality.
The average admission fee of a Japanese movie house is 50 sen in the first-run week in the big cities, and 30 to 20 sen in the smaller towns. After the second run, the fee usually drops to 20 to 10 sen. Although the admission fees are low, a good first-run theater with a "hit" program can earn a gross of 20,000 to 30,000 yen in the first week. A very popular film just recently earned a gross of 80,000 yen in a two weeks' run in one theater in Osaka, which was deemed exceptionally good.
The program always consists of two feature pictures with one or two shorts, thus making one performance about three hours long. The theater usually runs four performances a day.
Japanese movie fans can be separated into two distinct categories : the class audience and the mass audience. There seems to be no middle ground between them. Therefore, a Japanese picture must be either an exceedingly fine film of the highest quality, which will be ardently admired by the student and the intellectual classes patronizing the better theaters in the big cities; or it must be a low-level picture with much excitement or pathos which will win strong support from the lower working class constituting the bulk of the movie audience in the smaller towns and in the country. Among the former, such films as The Chorus of a Million produced by Victor Japan and J. O. Studio, and Botchan by PCL, have been recent successes; for the latter class, love themes or sword fighting plays (corresponding to the Wild West pictures) have always been popular.
Foreign films are generally patronized only by the student and the intellectual classes, except wild animal pictures, which are very popular among all classes. During 1934, 340 foreign feature pictures were released in Japan (80 per cent American and 20 per cent English and European), this number being the highest in the last five years.
With the advent of talkies, the language barrier was at first believed to be a very serious obstacle. In fact, with the early pictures, an interpreter, called a Benshi, standing upon the stage in the dark, shouted a translation of the dialog along with the original sound, thus making it nearly impossible for either the original dialog or the