Company history

Toho was, from the start, a real-estate idea dressed as a theatre. In August 1932 Ichizo Kobayashi, the founder of the Hankyu railway, set up the Tokyo Takarazuka Theatre in Hibiya. In Osaka he had built a fortune by lining a rail corridor with theatres and department stores that earned admissions and land rents together; in Tokyo, where he owned no railway, he transplanted the idea onto the most expensive land in the city. The Tokyo Takarazuka opened on New Year’s Day 1934, and a business magazine of the day cast it as an ambush — a new entertainment quarter conjured in Marunouchi, in the gap left by the older pleasure districts, aimed straight at the heartland of the rival Shochiku.

Over the next decade Kobayashi assembled a studio to feed his theatres. In 1937 he merged four film-related firms — among them the Photo Chemical Laboratory and JO Studio — into Toho Eiga, acquiring the ability to make pictures; a 1943 merger produced Toho Co., Ltd., which now ran production, distribution, exhibition and stage theatre under a single roof, a vertically integrated film major to stand beside Shochiku and Daiei. The vertical integration, and the land beneath it, were the whole design.

Two events fixed the company’s character. In 1948 a savage retrenchment — 1,200 layoffs — triggered the Third Toho Dispute, in which the studio was occupied by the union for months; management framed the cull, which targeted Communist union members among the actors and staff, as life-saving surgery, and it held. Then, having listed on the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya exchanges in 1949, Toho showed its other face: rebuilding after the war, Kobayashi valued the Nihon Gekijo alone at $1M (¥360m), the reflex of a landlord more than a showman. In 1954 the first Godzilla, directed by Ishiro Honda with effects by Eiji Tsuburaya, drew 9.6 million admissions and founded a franchise that has run for more than seventy years — the longest continuously running film franchise in the Guinness records.

The 1960s brought the crisis that made Toho what it is. Television gutted the audience — Japanese cinema admissions fell from a 1958 peak of more than 1.1 billion a year — and every studio was forced to retrench. Toho cut its film output and poured resources into the prime land it held in Hibiya, Yurakucho and Shinjuku. A 1962 magazine study found that Toho alone sailed through the industry’s decline in comfort, because Masa Shimizu ran its theatres with the rationality of a department store and a property firm, leasing out stairwells, walls and every reusable metre of a building — a method the press dubbed “Shimizu-style high utilization.” A half-year profit of $1.4M (¥500m) to $1.7M (¥600m) could be met by rents alone, so a weak season at the box office no longer moved the company’s results.

The pivot had a date: a real-estate committee set up in 1958 to redevelop idle theatre space. Out of it came a run of integrated buildings that reversed the old design — office tenants as the main lease, with a cinema and small shops folded into the lower floors as a device to pull crowds past the rent-paying tenants above. The Kokusai Building and a rebuilt Imperial Theatre opened with Mitsubishi Estate in 1966; the Yurakucho Center Building (Marion) followed in 1984 and the Toho Hibiya Building in 1987. By 1971 land and building rents were already about a tenth of all revenue, and the screens were confined to the first two floors while seven or eight tenths of the space went to shops and restaurants.

That rent base, together with the Imperial Theatre’s year-round musicals, gave Toho an earnings floor its rivals lacked. Film and property came to earn in roughly equal measure, with the theatre business a smaller, steadier third pillar. “I close whatever doesn’t make money,” Shimizu said, and he ran the theatres to a balance sheet. Where Shochiku would later be forced to sell its Ofuna studio, Toho, cushioned by rent, was never made to gut its film-making — and the “a film major kept alive by real estate” model took shape here as the template others would be measured against.

As single-screen cinemas gave way to multiplexes, Toho bought Virgin Cinemas Japan in 2003 and renamed it TOHO Cinemas, giving it a national multiplex chain. It then pulled the group together: the exhibition arm was carved out into TOHO Cinemas in 2006, regional operators were merged, and through the 2010s Toho took Toho Real Estate, Toho-Towa and other affiliates fully in-house, folding the property company back into the parent by 2017. Rather than become a holding company, Toho kept running the three businesses — film, theatre and real estate — directly, betting that speed of decision mattered more than structure.

The deeper change was in what Toho was willing to risk. Historically it had earned a distribution fee on other companies’ films; from the mid-2010s the TOHO animation label put Toho’s own money into TV-anime production committees, capturing the merchandising and sequel rights a series throws off as it grows. Shin Godzilla (2016), Hideaki Anno’s reboot, took $75.8M (¥8bn) at the box office and proved the domestic weight of an IP Toho owned. By the year to February 2020 the shift showed in the accounts: operating profit from the film business reached about 1.8 times that of real estate, the first clear sign that the decades-old balance was tipping toward film and anime — and toward the risk, and reward, of producing rather than distributing.

The trough came first. The year to February 2020 had been a record — film profit already running ahead of real estate — when the pandemic shut the cinemas. What pulled Toho back out was not a building but a film: Demon Slayer: Mugen Train grossed $378.3M (¥40bn) at home in late 2020 and about $484.2M (¥52bn) worldwide, the top-grossing film on the planet that year, made through a production committee Toho had backed from the series’ start. A run of anime built the same way — Jujutsu Kaisen, Spy × Family, My Hero Academia — turned the TOHO animation model into the engine of the whole company’s growth. The old balance in which real estate steadied the box office had inverted: film and anime were now the volatile, larger, faster-growing half.

From there Toho pushed both upstream and abroad. In 2024 it bought the anime studio Science SARU, taking production itself in-house rather than only funding it, and acquired the North American distributor GKIDS to carry its titles overseas; Godzilla Minus One (2023) — whose visual-effects Academy Award the following spring made the character a global draw — had already pointed the way. In 2025 the near-debt-free company set out a three-year plan, MTP2028, with a $668.2M (¥100bn) war chest for strategic investment, most of it earmarked for content and the Godzilla franchise, alongside a raised dividend and share buybacks. The capital that Ichizo Kobayashi’s real-estate model had quietly accumulated over ninety years — some $3.2B (¥478bn) of equity against almost no debt — was, at last, being spent to grow the production side it had for so long made safe to neglect.