Each May, the University of Alberta celebrates Asian Heritage Month and the work of faculty, researchers, instructors and students who are demonstrating leadership in creating a world that is more equitable and inclusive — that uplifts the whole community, in all of its diversity.
In 2011, Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, a professor in the Department of Media Technology Studies in the Faculty of Arts, was working as a Japan studies fellow at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. This international cooperation was possible thanks to the Prince Takamado Japan Centre for Teaching and Research (PTJC), which worked with the Japan Foundation to secure funding for the fellowship.
Fifteen years on, this academic placement has led to an intriguing project for the U of A called “Hollywood Kyoto,” which uses its strengths in digital humanities to ensure a part of Japanese film history will live on in the digital world.
The PTJC was also instrumental in helping Geoffrey, who had previously published articles about the uniquely Japanese gambling obsession called pachinko, in becoming co-chair and organizer of the “Replaying Japan” International Japan Game Studies Conference, first held at the U of A in 2012, and in Kyoto the next year.
Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell, posing with a samurai cosplayer at the 2011 Uzumasa Sengoku Festival.
At Ritsumeikan, Geoffrey met Dr. Akinori Nakamura, a professor of image arts and sciences. The two colleagues became friends, and attended the 2011 Uzumasa Sengoku Festival together at a local landmark in Kyoto, the Toei Studio Park. This manga/anime/gaming and cosplay festival celebrated transmedia depictions of the Warring States period of Japanese history, from 1467-1600 C.E.
Founded by the eponymous film studio in 1975, the Toei Studio Park was a place where fans of samurai and other period piece cinema (known in Japanese as jidaigeki) could wear kimono, stroll through painstakingly re-created Edo-era street sets, and face off with ninja, ghosts and other tourist-friendly threats.
The park was extremely popular upon opening, attracting 1.6 million guests in its first year. The concept of a theme park was still relatively new to Japan in the late ‘70s, and Tokyo Disneyland was still years away from opening its doors in 1983.
Toei Studios itself was formed in 1951, and quickly made a name for itself filming jidaigeki pictures for the post-war “economic miracle” audience. Unlike more prestigious films produced by directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi at other studios, which reached worldwide critical acclaim at international festivals, Toei’s output was designed for working-class audiences, a weekly escape from the factory floor (and a chance to enjoy air conditioning and cold treats in Japan’s intense summers).
Filming scene for TV at Nihonbashi Bridge set.
As the jidaigeki genre waned in the 1960s, eventually moving from chanbara eiga (sword-fighting films, often featuring samurai) to the grittier ninkyo eiga (chivalric films, starring charismatic Yakuza), it made sense for Toei to try and diversify its revenue stream with a fun backlot experience for film fans.
While jidaigeki were falling out of fashion in theatres by the park’s opening date, though, on TV they were still cultural touchstones.
One of the Toei Studio Park’s biggest draws was that fans could watch the television production process live. Some of these shows had very long tenures, with Abarenbō Shōgun topping out at 831 episodes from 1978 to 2008, and the first series of Zenigata Heiji running for 888 episodes from 1966 to 1984. These long-running narratives were a training ground for many actors of the era, including Hiroyuki Sanada, much later to win western acclaim for his work in FX’s Shōgun (2024), and Fukumoto Seizō, who appeared with Sanada in The Last Samurai (2003), and was slain onscreen upwards of 50,000 times over the course of his career.
A comparison to the place these ongoing narratives held in Japanese society could be made with that of Coronation Street in the UK, which to date boasts 11,839 episodes and a similar behind-the-scenes studio attraction in Manchester. According to the Toei site, more than 2,000 films and 9,000 TV episodes were produced at the park over its lifespan.
In late 2023, Toei management decided to tear down the old jidaigeki sets and pivot the area towards a new style of experience, called Uzumasa Kyoto Village. This version of the attraction will rely more on actors and scripted scenes than the filmmaking-centric nature of the original park.
Competition with the nearby Universal Studios Japan and the COVID-19 pandemic were mentioned as catalysts for the change, but with this paradigm shift Akinori saw an opportunity to document the park ahead of the wrecking ball in early 2024. Geoffrey notes that while the impetus for what would become Hollywood Kyoto began with Akinori, the U of A had the “digital skills to pull together [such] a project.”
Cherry blossoms and Nihonbashi Bridge set.
With his Ritsumeikan team and high-powered camera equipment, Akinori moved quickly to photograph every building down to the cobblestones in early 2024, resulting in an archive of some 7,000 extremely high-definition shots. By using a technique known as photogrammetry, which derives reliable measurements of physical spaces from photographs, this reservoir of images was processed into a full VR space built in Unreal Engine 5.
Geoffrey and his team, helped on by another seed grant from the Prince Takamado Japan Centre, went to Kyoto to assist Ritsumeikan in compiling interviews with staff, selecting materials for further digital preservation, and building the Hollywood Kyoto website. “The seed grant allowed us to collaborate,” says Geoffrey. “Without it, this would just be a pipe dream.”
The site, which will host English and Japanese versions of the park’s history, explanations of jidaigeki and other important film terms, as well as interviews and photos from the park, will also feature a version of the 3D studio tour. This iteration of the digital park has been made with Unity, a cross-platform software engine for making video game worlds, and will be accessible through a browser. Unity was chosen for this project as the U of A has a lot of experience using the engine, and it has significant support for web-based applications.
In-progress demo of U of A’s web tour of the Toei Park.
Dr. Eric Kaltman and his team from the U of A’s Media and Technology Studies and Computing Science departments handled this part of the project, which is the main way in which people interested in the park after the fact will be able to experience the recreation. “Initially the high polygon count models were not disambiguated or separated,” says Eric. “This meant that the models included multiple buildings together, or roads / streets and other terrain features.
“Once we had the model scaled correctly, we worked from information provided by the Ritsumeikan team to locate and identify specific buildings and locations in the park so we could align information text and images with the model locations.”
As the original re-creation done by Ritsumeikan featured millions of polygons derived from the photogrammetry process, the Unity version has trimmed down the size of the images used by a substantial margin in order to have the experience run smoothly online without the need for VR equipment: “We managed to reduce the geometric complexity by around a factor of 10 to allow for web deployment,” says Eric.
Hollywood Kyoto has proven to be a great test of U of A’s digital capabilities, as Geoffrey notes. “This project has let us learn about integrating 3D modelling as a way of documenting spaces.” Eric highlighted the help provided by the Research Data Storage Service (RDSS) and the Arts Resource Centre (ARC), providing backup storage and easy data sharing, as well as support for website hosting and deployment. The team anticipates the site will go live before the end of the year.
In the end, while the Toei Park had to evolve due to shifting consumer tastes, tourism shifts and the needs of the billion-dollar corporation that directs it, thanks to the U of A and Ritsumeikan, the classic spirit of the place will live on digitally.
AloJapan.com