Why you should experience Aprico in Tokyo, Japan.
Aprico is a polished civic performance complex where Kamata's entertainment heritage, concert culture, adaptable stagecraft and late-twentieth-century redevelopment occupy ground with an unusually deep connection to Japanese popular culture.
Set along the pedestrian streets east of Kamata Station near Daiichi Keihin and just steps from Aroma Square, the hall forms the cultural component of a redevelopment completed across the former Shochiku Kinema Kamata Studio property, embedding a contemporary performance venue within ground whose film production once attracted actors, directors and technicians to Kamata and helped establish the district as a nationally important entertainment center. A glass-fronted entrance opens into a five-story building whose principal auditorium rises through a large interior volume supported by extensive backstage and rehearsal facilities. The 1,477-seat main hall uses a proscenium stage and movable acoustic reflector to shift between orchestral concerts, opera, ballet, theater and other productions. The result is a civic arts complex whose scale and technical versatility continue Kamata's long association with performance on ground already embedded in the history of Japanese entertainment.
What you should know about Aprico.
Aprico is best known for standing on the former Shochiku Kinema Kamata Studio property, where one of the formative chapters of Japanese cinema unfolded between 1920 and 1936. Shochiku entered film production in 1920 and established the Kamata studio under an ambitious program influenced by contemporary American filmmaking. Director Kaoru Osanai and cinematographer Henry Kotani, who had worked in Hollywood, became important figures in the company's early effort to modernize Japanese screen production. Yasujiro Shimazu developed his career at Kamata and became a major practitioner of shomin-geki, films centered on the lives of ordinary people. Yasujiro Ozu joined Shochiku's Kamata operation in 1923 and directed Tokyo Chorus in 1931 and I Was Born, But… in 1932 during his years with the studio. Heinosuke Gosho directed The Neighbor's Wife and Mine in 1931, recognized as Japan's first successful feature-length sound film, within the same production culture. Actresses including Kinuyo Tanaka built major screen careers through Shochiku productions associated with Kamata. The studio's presence drew performers and film workers into surrounding neighborhoods and helped generate the phrase “Kamata modernism” around the district's interwar culture. Shochiku transferred production to Ofuna in 1936 as sound filmmaking increased the problems created by railway and industrial noise around Kamata. Sixteen years of filmmaking had already made the property one of the central production grounds of prewar Japanese cinema.
Redevelopment returned large-scale cultural activity to the former studio property during the 1990s. Yamashita Sekkei designed Aprico as part of the Aroma Square project, with Shimizu Corporation participating in design supervision and construction across the larger development. Construction reached completion in October 1998, producing a steel-reinforced-concrete cultural building with 10,991 square meters of floor area. Aprico opened on December 11, 1998 as a center for cultural and artistic activity operated for Ota residents. Its inaugural program included Ota Sanka, a choral suite performed by an 200-member citizens' chorus assembled for the opening celebrations. The principal auditorium contains 1,477 seats and an 18-meter-wide proscenium, supplemented by an orchestra pit and movable acoustic reflector engineered to support unamplified musical performance. A 175-seat small hall uses a lift-equipped stage that supports concerts, lectures and other configurations. Three divisible exhibition areas collectively provide 362 square meters, and two studios add rehearsal and production capacity elsewhere in the building. The architecture received a Lighting Promotion Award in 1999. Aprico reached its twentieth anniversary in 2018 with commemorative concerts, backstage tours and public programs, extending the cultural role established when Ota returned performance to the former cinema property.
How to fold Aprico into your trip.
Aprico works as the anchor for a daytime progression through a painter-designed museum devoted to large-scale Japanese art, a journalist's preserved residence containing the intellectual traces of modern publishing and a calligrapher's home preserving the working environment of a major twentieth-century artist.
Begin at Ryushi Memorial Museum, established in 1963 by painter Ryushi Kawabata to commemorate his receipt of the Order of Culture and his seventy-seventh year. Kawabata had studied Western painting before traveling to the United States in 1913, shifted to Japanese painting after his return and founded Seiryusha in 1929 after separating from the Nihon Bijutsuin. Approximately 140 of his works spanning the early Taisho period through the postwar years belong to the museum collection, and his former residence and self-designed studio survive across the road in Ryushi Park. Continue to Sanno Sodo Memorial Museum, preserving part of the residence where journalist and historian Tokutomi Soho lived from 1924 until 1943. Soho founded Minyusha and launched Kokumin no Tomo in 1887 before establishing Kokumin Shinbun in 1890, then began his 100-volume Kinsei Nihon Kokuminshi in 1918 and completed the final volume in 1952 at age 90. More than half of that vast historical work was written during his Sanno years, when his property also contained the Seikido Bunko of 100,000 Japanese and Chinese books. Conclude at Kumagai Tsuneko Memorial Museum, occupying the 1936 residence of calligrapher Tsuneko Kumagai. Kumagai studied under Takakage Okayama, received the Tonichi Daigo Award for Tosa Diary in 1933, became a director of the Japan Calligraphy Art Institute in 1951 and gave a calligraphy lecture to Crown Princess Michiko in 1965. The preserved house contains 170 of her works and retains the study where she practiced her art. The progression moves from Kawabata's purpose-built environment for ambitious Japanese painting through Soho's residence of historical scholarship into Kumagai's working home for kana calligraphy, extending Aprico's public performance culture through three highly personal settings created around artistic and intellectual production.
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