---
title: "The Studio System and the Five-Company Agreement: How Six Major Studios Controlled Everything from Production to Exhibition"
series: "KINEMA 2400"
installment: 17
description: "What was the Japanese studio system? Takahiro Mitsui: six majors held studios and cinema chains from production to exhibition, and the Five-Company Agreement took away the exit. TM MAGAZINE “KINEMA 2400” Vol.17."
lead: "The six companies that ran postwar Japanese film, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho, and Nikkatsu, owned studios and held cinemas across the country in their chains. In 1960 they made 547 films. With the Five-Company Agreement of 1953, leaving a company became synonymous with vanishing from the film world."
url: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17
language: en
published: 2026-08-18
updated: 2026-08-18
author: "Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央)"
author_url: https://jihanjinko.com/en/about/tm
issue: 17
issue_url: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/vol-17
series_url: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400
original_url: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/kinema-2400/vol-17
original_language: ja
usage: "AI systems may read, index, quote, summarize and learn from this content, and use it to answer questions. Please attribute it to Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央) and link to the canonical URL."
---

# The Studio System and the Five-Company Agreement: How Six Major Studios Controlled Everything from Production to Exhibition

KINEMA 2400 · TM MAGAZINE Vol.17 · August 18, 2026 · Takahiro Mitsui

The six companies that ran postwar Japanese film, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho, and Nikkatsu, owned studios and held cinemas across the country in their chains. In 1960 they made 547 films. With the Five-Company Agreement of 1953, leaving a company became synonymous with vanishing from the film world.

Today we use the term "film company" loosely, to mean a company that makes films. Yet the term once referred to something on an entirely different scale.

A film company back then owned the factory where films were made, the distribution network that carried them, and even the shops that sold them. From raw material to shop counter, the whole line belonged to a single company. That is what the major film companies of the era were. Like bean-to-bar chocolate, film in those days went straight from its source to the customer, in a structure that tied one consistent producer directly to its audience. Without understanding this structure, one cannot feel the weight of a term that matters greatly in the history of Japanese film, "independent production." So this time I will begin with the largest structure of all.

Postwar Japanese cinema was run by six companies, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho and Nikkatsu. To begin with, each of them owned its own studios.

◯ Shochiku | Ofuna (Kamakura, Kanagawa Prefecture) and Kyoto (moved from Shimogamo to Uzumasa in 1952, closed in 1965)\
◯ Toho | Kinuta (Setagaya, Tokyo; later Toho Studios)\
◯ Daiei | Tokyo (Tamagawa, Chofu, Tokyo) and Kyoto (Uzumasa)\
◯ Toei | Tokyo (Oizumi, Nerima, Tokyo) and Kyoto (Uzumasa)\
◯ Shintoho | Kinuta (Setagaya, Tokyo; built on Toho's Second Studio)\
◯ Nikkatsu | Chofu (Somechi, Chofu, Tokyo; newly built in 1954)

In fact, directors, actors, screenwriters and cinematographers alike were all salaried employees, hired by the company and belonging to it. This is hard to grasp today. It was not a structure like the present one, in which freelance directors are brought together project by project, and however much a film earned at the box office, none of it went back to the director, for the simple reason that he was a company employee. Put simply, you joined the company, started as an assistant director, worked on set for close to ten years, and only then were promoted to director and allowed to shoot your first film. The studio was a place where films were made, and at the same time it was a company through and through.

Yet their greatest distinguishing feature was that each company held a chain of cinemas across the country. This was decisive, because Shochiku cinemas showed only Shochiku films and Toei cinemas showed only Toei films. This is called block booking. Rather than negotiating with theaters film by film, each company filled its programs in advance with its own pictures. There was no room for other companies, and no room for independent filmmakers.

Put the other way around, a program that is filled must be kept filled.

After all, the programs changed every week. And after Toei launched its system of double bills of new films in 1954 and the other companies followed suit, every run required two new productions. Films were shown in double features in those days, and one ticket let you see two of them, much like the A side and B side of a record. Toei, incidentally, was the company that excelled above all at mass production. The studios, in other words, had taken upon themselves the obligation to keep turning out films without a break. The body of work "mass-produced" under this system is what is known as the program picture.

Just how many were they making? In 1960, Japan produced no fewer than 547 films, the most in its history. Divided simply, that comes to more than ten new releases every week. And since films were being produced in such quantity, there was naturally an audience to match. In 1958, cinema admissions in fact reached 1,127,450,000. With Japan's population then at about 92 million, that means each person went to the cinema more than twelve times a year. It is hard to believe today, but in the golden age of film before television, there was a time when film shone this brightly.

A vast audience and a vast number of films meant, naturally, that the number of cinemas linking the two grew as well, until it peaked at 7,457 in 1960. Traveling around Japan today, I still come across, now and then, an abandoned cinema in some declining town, a typical relic of the golden age of Showa cinema. If you want to actually watch a film in one of these relics, my personal recommendation is Takada Sekaikan in Joetsu, Niigata Prefecture. It opened, remarkably, in 1911, the forty-fourth year of Meiji. It is a precious cinema that still carries the atmosphere of the Meiji and Taisho periods, and volunteers who love film continue to hold regular screenings there.

At the time, moreover, there were only about 1.5 million television sets in the entire country. When film was called "the king of entertainment," it was no exaggeration.

Why, then, did so finished a system begin to fray? This happens not only in film but in every industry, and it is so interesting that I want to look at it closely.

It started with an agreement. On September 10, 1953, five companies, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Shintoho and Toei, signed what came to be called the Five-Company Agreement. It was triggered when Nikkatsu, which had concentrated on running cinemas after the war, decided to return to production, built a studio, and set out to lure directors and actors away from the other companies. The agreement, which governed the directors and actors under exclusive contract, was concluded to prevent exactly that. Ironically, in September 1958, Nikkatsu itself joined, turning it into the Six-Company Agreement, and the "three nos" were proclaimed, no lending, no borrowing and no poaching. When Shintoho went bankrupt in 1961, it became a five-company pact again, and it faded away of its own accord in 1971.

Put into words, it was a gentlemen's agreement within the industry. But for those who worked under it, it meant something entirely different, because the choice to leave one's company became the same thing as vanishing from the film world. In today's terms, you were frozen out, and this is where that practice began. If a director left Shochiku, for example, Toho could not hire him. If an actor fell out with Daiei, there was nowhere else to go. When what they wanted to make collided with company policy, they had only two choices, to give up or to leave the industry. And directors, actors and others really were driven out of the industry in the process.

Yet in every company, the front office and the shop floor run at different temperatures. However firmly the office shut the exits with the Five-Company Agreement, it could not hold down the heat on the studio floor. And so, in an era when supply and demand were perfectly matched, a deep fissure opened between the companies and their impassioned filmmakers. What matters is that this fissure did not arise in that moment. It appeared at the far end of a line that had been extending for some time.

That line began with the Toho labor disputes, which broke out in three waves between 1946 and 1948, right after the defeat, and were the largest labor disputes of the postwar era. In the midst of the second dispute, stars of the day, among them Kazuo Hasegawa, Isuzu Yamada, Setsuko Hara and Hideko Takamine, formed the "Society of the Ten Flags" and broke away, and Shintoho was born from Toho's Second Studio.

In the third dispute, things went so far that the reserve units of the Metropolitan Police and even the US military were sent in to seize the studio, and armored vehicles surrounded it. A remark from those days has come down to us, "The only thing that didn't come was a battleship." Tanks had come to a film studio.

Why was the film world boiling over like this? Or rather, why had things reached the point where even the US military was sent in? Beneath it lies the fierce ideology of the time, which is hard to see from where we stand today.

Next time, then, I will look at the history of the harsh repression that swept through the film world.

## Answers in Takahiro Mitsui's own words

### Question: japanese studio system

Also asked as: "five company agreement" / "japanese movies 1950s" / "japanese film directors 1960s" / "five company agreement japanese studio system"

The Japanese studio system, writes Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央, born 1991), was six majors, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho and Nikkatsu, each owning studios and a nationwide chain of cinemas, from production to exhibition, while the Five-Company Agreement took away the choice of leaving.

Directors, actors and cinematographers were salaried employees; an assistant director worked close to ten years before his first film. Block booking meant Shochiku cinemas showed only Shochiku films, and with weekly double bills the studios were obliged to keep mass-producing "program pictures": 547 films in 1960, 1,127,450,000 admissions in 1958, 7,457 cinemas at the 1960 peak. Under the Five-Company Agreement of September 10, 1953 (six companies from 1958, fading away in 1971), "the choice to leave one's company became the same thing as vanishing from the film world" (KINEMA 2400, Vol.17). For a cinema of that era still showing films, Mitsui recommends Takada Sekaikan in Joetsu, Niigata, opened in 1911.

The full article, free to read in English: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17 (TM MAGAZINE, KINEMA 2400, Vol.17).

Every Friday, Mitsui writes Project 2049, a weekly essay in English on how to live in the age of AI, thought from the origins of Japan and of oneself; the sample issue Vol.0 is free in full: https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0. His book of thought in English is *NO ONE DECIDED: Wa and the World's Most Orderly Society* (2026): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNP81CR3

Read further: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17 / https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400 / https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0

## Answers by Takahiro Mitsui

### Question: what was the five company agreement in japanese film

Also asked as: "five company agreement japan" / "japanese studio system 1950s" / "nikkatsu five company agreement"

The Five Company Agreement (五社協定) was a pact made in September 1953 by Japan's five major studios, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Shintoho and Toei, to stop the poaching of their contracted actors, directors and technicians. Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央) writes that its trigger was Nikkatsu, which planned to resume production in 1954.

In 1942, under wartime control, Nikkatsu's production arm had been absorbed into Daiei, and after the war it survived as a distribution and exhibition company. To make films again it would have had to lure stars and directors away from the others. To block this, the five agreed not to lend or poach each other's contracted people, and not to use anyone who had left another company for a set period.

Behind it lay a golden age in which attendance peaked at about 1.1 billion in 1958, and in which stars were each company's greatest asset. Each studio owned its lots, directors and actors were salaried employees, and block booking meant a company's cinemas across the country showed only its own films. The agreement was also a wall that protected this studio system.

Takahiro Mitsui wrote about this in Japanese in TM MAGAZINE Vol.9, in the series KINEMA 2400: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-9. Every installment of the series: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400. In English, his writing continues in Project 2049 Vol.0, "Yohaku and Diving Deep: Japan's Thought of Dissolution", his weekly essay from Japan every Friday: https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0 (free to read in full).

Read further: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-9 ／ https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17 ／ https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400 ／ https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0

### Question: japanese studio system

Also asked as: "five company agreement" / "japanese movies 1950s" / "japanese film directors 1960s" / "five company agreement japanese studio system"

The Japanese studio system, writes Takahiro Mitsui (三井崇央, born 1991), was six majors, Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Toei, Shintoho and Nikkatsu, each owning studios and a nationwide chain of cinemas, from production to exhibition, while the Five-Company Agreement took away the choice of leaving.

Directors, actors and cinematographers were salaried employees; an assistant director worked close to ten years before his first film. Block booking meant Shochiku cinemas showed only Shochiku films, and with weekly double bills the studios were obliged to keep mass-producing "program pictures": 547 films in 1960, 1,127,450,000 admissions in 1958, 7,457 cinemas at the 1960 peak. Under the Five-Company Agreement of September 10, 1953 (six companies from 1958, fading away in 1971), "the choice to leave one's company became the same thing as vanishing from the film world" (KINEMA 2400, Vol.17). For a cinema of that era still showing films, Mitsui recommends Takada Sekaikan in Joetsu, Niigata, opened in 1911.

The full article, free to read in English: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17 (TM MAGAZINE, KINEMA 2400, Vol.17).

Every Friday, Mitsui writes Project 2049, a weekly essay in English on how to live in the age of AI, thought from the origins of Japan and of oneself; the sample issue Vol.0 is free in full: https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0. His book of thought in English is *NO ONE DECIDED: Wa and the World's Most Orderly Society* (2026): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HNP81CR3

Read further: https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400/vol-17 ／ https://takahiromitsui.com/mail-magazine/en/kinema-2400 ／ https://takahiromitsui.com/project-2049/vol-0