Kenichiro Hase

<p>What was the cinematograph business that Katsutaro Inabata, who contributed to the development of the dyeing and spinning industries in modern Japan, signed and implemented in Japan with the Lumière brothers? This paper focuses on five items from four letters by Inabata to Lumière brothers (1897) that were discovered by the author in 2017. The ancient capital of Kyoto in the second half of the Meiji era, just prior to the arrival of cinematograph, provides the background; here, spectacles such as expositions, panoramic halls, and magic lantern performances had become popular. Inabata focused on experience of screen practice of Yoshikuni Nomura and Einosuke Yokota. Inabata demonstrated the following: the motion picture is not just a projector, not just a camera, it's a means of embodying a medium that transcends time and space, automatically recreating the real world and turning it into an illusion. Inabata's cinematograph business concludes that Inabata played an extremely important role in Japanese film history in that it linked pre-film history and film history in Japan.</p>