; "Inside Toho Archive’s mission to save Japan’s cinematic memory")
Inside Toho Archive’s mission to save Japan’s cinematic memory
The goal of restoration is not to artificially upscale but to return the film to the condition it was in “the very first day it appeared in the world,” says Nobushige Toshima, president and sales division manager of Toho Archive. | SEBASTIEN RAINERI
Jul 24, 2026
In the residential neighborhood of Seijo, Setagaya Ward, a small team of 25 people at Toho Archive is working to preserve a physical record of Japanese film history.
Toho Archive’s catalog reads like a syllabus of Japanese film history: Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” the original “Godzilla” series, Kenji Mizoguchi’s “The Life of Oharu” and Mikio Naruse’s “Floating Clouds” as well as beloved animated franchises such as “Doraemon” and “Detective Conan.”
Although the organization was officially established in December 2023, it has a much longer lineage as the direct successor to Tokyo Laboratory, a film-processing house that was founded in 1955 and pioneered the world’s first “gin-nokoshi” (literally, “silver retention”; also known as bleach bypass) coloring technique.
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