CUL - Main Content

The Makino Collection was purchased by Columbia University in 2006, processing began in September 2008, and was finished in February 2016. The collection focuses on print materials mostly related to Japanese film that were collected over the course of fifty years by former documentary filmmaker and film researcher, Makino Mamoru.

Mr. Makino began collecting materials related to Japanese documentary film, and then expanded his collection to cover film theory, movements, censorship, and other film-related materials.  These include such themes as 1930s modernism, the proletarian film movement (Prokino), and prewar film regulations.  They cover various genres of film, including experimental film, educational film, documentary film, news film, amateur film, and animated film, among many others. 

The Collection contains over 1,000 pre-war scenarios.  There are also over 3,000 leaflets or handbills (chirashi) from regional movie theaters from the 1910s through the 1940s, as well as over 5,500 post-war movie theater programs and fliers.

Mr. Makino developed an early interest in film due to his purchase of a book written by Charlie Chaplin in a used bookstore.  Prewar materials in the Collection therefore include items related to Charlie Chaplin and his Japanese assistant, Kono Toraichi.  In addition, the Makino Collection contains valuable company documents and reports relating to major Japanese film production companies (film studios) including Tōhō (P.C.L.), Shōchiku, Nikkatsu, and independent film studios, as well as the complete works and personal collections of film critics, including Kishi Matsuo, Tanaka Jun’ichirō, Iwasaki Akira, Iijima Tadashi, and Yodogawa Nagaharu, photographs and albums once belonging to cameramen such as Miki Shigeru and Kikuchi Shū and materials related to the films they worked on with the documentary filmmaker Kamei Fumio. There are full runs of commercial film magazines and issues of harder to obtain minor film publications such as coterie magazines, university film research journals, and amateur film publications (kogata eiga).

Japan has cultivated a vibrant print culture related to cinema since the beginning of Japanese film production over a century ago.  Many of the print materials found in the Makino Collection - books, magazines, film scenarios, company documents, and ephemera - date to the early twentieth century.  Due to their ephemeral nature and association with popular culture, many of the texts and promotional materials from early Japanese cinema production and distribution were not collected by libraries and archives.  Although mainly a collection of materials related to Japanese film, Mr. Makino broadened his collection to include sources from Okinawa, China, Taiwan, the former colony of Manchuria, and South Korea.