Rokku: Where Japan Built Its First Skyscraper and First Cinema

Rokku, the sixth district of Asakusa, is where Japan built both its first Western-style skyscraper and its first permanent cinema, and the fact that almost nothing of that entertainment core survives is the truest part of its story. Stand in the district today and there is no single grand monument to point at. There are arcades, pachinko halls, a few theaters, some modern shops. Yet this ordinary-looking stretch, a short walk west of Sensoji, was once the loudest engine of mass entertainment in the country. It produced the tallest building Japan had ever seen, and the first hall built to show moving pictures and nothing else. Then, within a few decades, it lost both. To understand Rokku, you have to look at absence and read it as evidence.

The Twelve Storeys

The tower everyone remembered was formally the Ryounkaku, but the neighborhood called it Asakusa Junikai, the Twelve Storeys. It opened on the eleventh of November, 1890, and rose 68.58 meters over twelve floors of red brick built over a wood frame, in a renaissance revival style. It was Japan's first Western-style skyscraper. The design came from a Scottish engineer named W. K. Burton, who worked in Japan during the Meiji period. For a city that had, until recently, measured its skyline in temple roofs and fire towers, the effect was almost unimaginable. For the price of a ticket, ordinary people could ride up and look down on their own city, seeing Tokyo from above for the first time in their lives.

The tower carried Japan's first electric elevator, designed by Ichisuke Fujioka. It should have been the marvel inside the marvel. Instead it lasted only about half a year before authorities shut it down over safety concerns. That detail says a great deal about the Ryounkaku's whole character. It was a spectacle first and a piece of infrastructure second, a place people came to be astonished rather than to conduct business. Visitors climbed the stairs and kept coming anyway. The tower became shorthand for Asakusa itself, the place to see and be seen, printed on postcards and woodblock prints, folded into novels and songs.

Its end was sudden and total. On the first of September, 1923, the Great Kanto earthquake tore through Tokyo and sheared off the tower's upper floors. The damaged brick shell was too dangerous to leave standing, and on the twenty-third of that same month it was brought down with explosives. Japan's first skyscraper had lasted thirty-three years. Nothing of it stands in Rokku now. If you did not know to look for the memory, you would walk straight past the ground where it stood.

The First Cinema

The second landmark that defines Rokku is the Denkikan. In October of 1903 it became Japan's first permanent cinema, a hall dedicated to showing films and nothing else. Before that, moving pictures in Japan were a traveling novelty, shown in rented halls between other acts, part of a variety bill. The Denkikan changed the arrangement. It committed a building to the medium, treating cinema as a standing public amusement rather than a passing curiosity. That commitment, made in a district already crowded with theaters and sideshows, helped fix Asakusa as the birthplace of Japanese film culture.

The name mattered as much as the building. Denkikan means, roughly, electric hall, and it grew so famous that cinemas across the country borrowed it for their own marquees. The Kumamoto Denkikan, far to the southwest, is one that carried the name for generations. So the word for "movie theater" in much of early twentieth-century Japan was, in effect, a place in Rokku. The original Denkikan kept showing films until 1976, a run of more than seventy years, before the site was eventually redeveloped. A historical model of it is now kept at the Edo-Tokyo Museum, which is a fitting fate for a building whose real legacy was an idea rather than a structure.

Reading An Absence

Put the two together and the pattern of Rokku becomes clear. The same sacred temple approach that begins at the Thunder Gate, over more than two and a half centuries, spun off an entire pleasure district a few streets to the west. That district gave Japan its first skyscraper and its first movie theater within about thirteen years of each other. The incense drifting from Sensoji and the flicker of the country's earliest dedicated film screen came from the same neighborhood, feeding the same crowds of pilgrims and pleasure-seekers who had always mixed prayer with amusement in Asakusa.

This is why Rokku rewards a slow, attentive walk more than a photograph. There is little to frame in a picture. What is here is the shape of a place that invented forms of mass entertainment and then survived the loss of the very buildings that made it famous. The earthquake took the tower. The century took the cinema. The district kept going, absorbing pachinko parlors and modern arcades the way it once absorbed opera houses and sideshows. Entertainment in Asakusa has always been restless, always ready to tear down last decade's marvel for the next one.

When you stand in Rokku, you are walking through the memory of where a great deal of modern Japanese amusement was, in many ways, first made permanent. The absence of the Twelve Storeys and the Denkikan is not a gap in the story. It is the story. This is the plebeian, ever-reinventing heart of the low city, and it does its most important remembering out loud, in the noise of the machines that replaced the ones before them.

To walk Rokku in sequence, from the Thunder Gate through Sensoji and out to the Sumida River where the whole neighborhood began, follow the full self-guided route in Tokyo.

Sources

• Ryounkaku, Wikipedia. Opening date, 68.58-meter height, twelve storeys, first Western-style skyscraper, W. K. Burton as designer, Fujioka's electric elevator, and the 1923 earthquake damage and demolition.
• Denkikan, Wikipedia. October 1903 conversion to Japan's first dedicated movie theater, the spread of the Denkikan name to other cities, and the 1976 closure.
• Roamer tour transcript, "Asakusa: The People's Capital," Stop 5 (Rokku). Fact-audited primary narration for this self-guided walk.
• GO TOKYO official travel guide, Tokyo Metropolitan Government. Context on Asakusa as an entertainment and temple district.