Kagawa: Japan Cinephile’s House Reborn as Cinema Warehouse; 1,300 DVDs, 1,000 Film Books Open to Public

The Yomiuri Shimbun

10:37 JST, July 13, 2025

UTAZU, Kagawa — The home of a late cinephile in Utazu, Kagawa Prefecture, has been reborn as a community space housing about 1,300 DVDs and 1,000 movie-related books amassed over decades.

These items belong to the collection of Junji Nagao, who served as the town’s superintendent for a decade from 1994. A former elementary school teacher, Nagao began frequenting movie theaters at a young age. In 2019 he died at the age of 88. His sister, who has managed the house, decided to open it to the public, as she felt his large collection was too good to just dispose of.

With the help of former students and acquaintances of Nagao’s, she spent about a year on renovations until the space reopened as KineKura (Cinema warehouse) Nagao-tei in May. The walls of the earthen warehouse-style building are lined with shelves of DVDs of classic films from years past.

The collection comprises films mainly spanning the 1940s to 1990s, including those by such masters as Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, with a wide range of genres including comedy, romance, westerns, horror and animation. Among them are also more relatively recent works such as “Titanic” and the Lord of the Rings series.

Visitors can come and watch DVDs on a projector or read reviews Nagao contributed to a monthly magazine for over a decade.

Reservations are required with a ¥2,000 fee for four hours of use.