In the golden age of movies, there were cinemas in almost every small Japanese town. Attendance figures peaked in 1958 at 1.1 billion, when the nation had more than 7,000 movie theaters. However, since the spread of television in the 1960s admissions have fallen steadily, along with the number of theaters. Japan’s first multiplex opened in Ebina, Kanagawa Prefecture, in 1993, leading a trend that pushed many smaller theaters into extinction. The rise of the multiplex meant that in 2016 there were 3,472 screens nationwide, but only 427 of these belonged to ordinary picture houses. And as local cinemas disappeared from regional Japanese cities, so too did their hand-painted signs, which were once an everyday sight.

Apprenticeship on a US Base

Before multiplexes, many theaters used to have their own dedicated sign painters. Ōshita Takeo was one of them. Born in Aomori Prefecture in 1942, he started out at the age of 16, producing signs for the theater at the US air base in Misawa. This meant that he was often working on Hollywood films.

“New American movies were shown at the Misawa base theater before they went on general release. The soldiers took their families to see them. At first, when the older painters went drinking in the izakaya, I used to sketch the stars on paper while studying their photos in Sukurīn [the movie magazine Screen]. Then I’d wait until the others came back and they’d fix them up for me.”

From the beginning, reproducing faces accurately was important to Ōshita. He had always enjoyed painting, and in his first year at junior high school, he stunned his art teacher with a picture of a clenched fist. The teacher gave him a sheet of drawing paper every day and ensured he did not run out of materials. “Whenever I had a free moment, I was painting. But I made a fool of myself when I was asked to do a watercolor portrait of the head teacher for the school arts festival and it was a terrible likeness.”

He started work after he left junior high school. “Dad died in the war and the family didn’t have any money.” He says that he really wanted to be a baseball player. At 19, a connection got him a job in Mito as the sign painter for the Mito Tōei movie theater. “It was the only theater run directly by [major film corporation] Tōei in Ibaraki Prefecture. This was a time when being a sign painter under exclusive contract meant you knew you’d never starve.”

Working Until the Wee Hours

At Tōei, he was painting signs for yakuza movies with stars like Takakura Ken and Tsuruta Kōji almost every day. “When Takakura Ken was big, there’d be 1,700 spectators packed into a theater that was only meant to take 650, including standing room. Some people wouldn’t leave even after they’d seen the film once, which caused a major ruckus. I liked Takakura myself, and I’d get totally engrossed in the painting. His face was distinctive, so it was easy to do. But that soulful look of sorrow was what set him above all the standard stars.”

Between jobs for Tōei, other theaters asked Ōshita to paint just the faces of the actors for their own signs. He seemed to have earned a reputation for outstanding skills at reproducing visages and conveying their individual atmosphere. At 26, he went freelance. During the 1980s, he painted signs for all 11 of the theaters in Mito.

Each time, he put a checkered grid over the movie poster to transfer the pictures to an enlarged grid on the sign. He copied the design onto each square by pencil before adding color with acrylic paint. The standard signs were 2.4 meters high and 5.4 meters long, but some signs were different sizes. This meant he could not reproduce the poster exactly as it was. It also required experience to do a good job of adding layers of color with quick-drying paint. “Each sign took about a day and a half to complete. When I’d been doing it for a while, the right layout would jump into my head instantaneously.

“In my prime, I’d work with my wife every day until two or three in the morning.” After he got married at the age of 30 to Mitsue, who is three years younger, the couple tackled jobs as a team.

“My task was to stick the initial sketching paper on the sign. I’d do it with a baby strapped to my back,” Mitsue recalls. “Back then, the Japanese films changed every three days. They’d hang up the new signs the evening before opening. I was there on the truck too as we drove around all the theaters at night with a mountain of new signs piled up on the back. The job wasn’t just painting. You had to put up the signs and take them down as well.”

Ōshita spent all day every day painting signs, but still he says, “I was only satisfied with about one or two of them each year. All too often I’d paint a big X over my work and start over from scratch. But I never missed a deadline.” In later years, he used a projector to display the outlines for the design, which made things easier, but this technique did not work with extra-large posters.

Audrey Hepburn and Kirk Douglas

Into the 2000s, Mito’s theaters closed one by one in competition with incoming multiplexes. After Mito Tōei shut down in 2006 and the mini theater Mito Theater Seiyū followed in 2008, there were no more regular sign-painting jobs.

Producing panels for events came to form the greater part of Ōshita’s work. However, some 20 years earlier he had begun painting portraits of stars in his free time. The more than 100 portraits created to date assemble a parade of Japanese and international actors past and present from Takakura Ken, Ishihara Yūjirō, and Atsumi Kiyoshi to Audrey Hepburn, Alain Delon, Bruce Willis, and Johnny Depp.

“I put most effort into getting the resemblance right and creating a soft, gentle look.” He says he is happiest when he gets the layering of paint right so the skin color is the same as the image he is working from. He is a fan of Audrey Hepburn, and has seen Roman Holiday nearly 10 times, including on video. Unfortunately, he has never had the chance to do a sign for one of her movies, but he has painted several portraits of her. He also likes Kirk Douglas. He enjoys Gunfight at the OK Corral in particular, in which Douglas played Western legend Doc Holliday, and he once painted a sign for the film.

Some of Ōshita’s movie star portraits are displayed on the walls outside Yokohama’s Cinema Novecento, a tiny movie theater with just 28 seats that mainly shows classic films.