Kishiwada Toho Central Theater

The Kishiwada Central was the first movie theater to operate in Osaka after the fallout of Japan during the final stages of World War II. Opening after the death of the war in September 1945, the 355-seat single-screener was located in a two-story wooden building located diagonally across from the west exit of Kishiwada Station on the Nankai Electric Railway Nankai Main Line.

Central Pictures, which distributed screening prints to the theater, began releasing American features on February 28, 1946 with Walter Pidgeon in “Madame Curie” and Deanna Durbin in “His Butler’s Sister”. The Central Pictures company didn’t last long, and the company was dissolved on December 27, 1951, forcing the theater to flip to a Daiei and Shintoho house.

Following the short-lived boom of various Kishiwada theaters between 1957 and 1960, the area once had a total of nine movie theaters but almost half were closed between 1961 and 1962, dropping the number of theaters there to four. The Kishiwada Theater, at the time managed by Yamatsune Kogyo, saw a change in management from Yoshida Tsunesaburo to Naito Yoshikazu in 1962.

In 1966, it became a Toho house, and was renamed the Kishiwada Toho Central Theater, and began screening both Toho and foreign features. At the same time, the Kishiwada Denkikan nearby began screening mostly Shochiku and foreign features.

After the nearby Kishiwada Denkikan closed in 1974, the Toho held on a little longer until closing the following year in 1975. In its later years, it housed a pachinko parlor called Olympic on the site of the theater, but that building was demolished in the early-2010’s.

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