Despite its popularity, the park existed for only eight months, burning down in April 1911.[4][5] Luna Park was incinerated under suspicious circumstances[6] at roughly the same time that two theaters owned by Yoshizawa Shōten also succumbed to fire in Osaka.[7]
The trio of disasters struck Kawaura and his company at their most vulnerable time. The Japanese film industry was being besieged by inroads by a consortium of their American counterparts. Kawaura, tiring of the travails of working with Yoshizawa Shōten, sold the company to Shōkichi Umeya (owner of M. Pathe) for the equivalent of $375,000 USD.[8] Kawaura then decided to build a new Luna Park, not in Tokyo but in Osaka instead. The new park opened in 1912 and stayed in business until 1923.[9]
References
^Isolde Standish A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film (Continuum International Publishing Group 2006) ISBN0-8264-1790-6
^The Problem of Cinema - Swarming Ants and Elusive Villains: Zigomar and the Problem of Cinema in 1910s Japan
^Miodrag Mitrašinović, Total Landscape, Theme Parks, Public Space (Ashgate Publishing 2006) ISBN0-7546-4333-6
^Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton University Press 1982) ISBN0-691-00792-6
^Isolde Standish, A New History of Japanese Cinema: A Century of Narrative Film (Continuum International Publishing Group 2006) ISBN0-8264-1790-6
^David Richard Ambaras reports in Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press 2006, ISBN0-520-24579-2) that the popular park acquired a reputation for harboring juvenile delinquency, citing a 1911 article in New Review (Shin kóron), in which there were accounts in which local officials either ignored or supported the activities of pickpocketgangs in Asakura.
^Joseph L. Anderson and Donald Richie, The Japanese Film: Art and Industry (Princeton University Press 1982) ISBN0-691-00792-6
