What Does It Mean to Preserve a Film? — The Work of Japan's National Film Archive
What 100 Million Yen Means
On June 25, 2026, the National Film Archive of Japan (NFAJ) launched a crowdfunding campaign with a target of 100 million yen. Within the first ten hours, 4.28 million yen had been pledged.
The reason is a budget cut. The institution's operating grant for fiscal 2026 was slashed by 44% from the previous year, down to 358.56 million yen. The Japanese government had announced a policy of reducing public funding dependency for national museums and galleries. A curator at NFAJ stated that if this continues, "it could become a matter of survival."
My first reaction to this news was the obvious one: it's wrong to make a national institution beg for money through crowdfunding. That reaction feels correct. But I also realized I barely knew what NFAJ actually does. It seemed worth understanding that first.
90,875 Reels
NFAJ opened in 1970 as the Film Center of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and was reorganized into an independent national film institution in 2018. It is Japan's only national film archive.
As of March 2026, the collection holds 90,875 film items — ranging from silent-era features to newsreels, documentary films, and fiction films from every decade since. Beyond film reels, the archive also holds posters, scripts, still photographs, and projection equipment.
The number 90,875 sounds large. But the more revealing figure is what wasn't saved.
The survival rate of Japanese films made in the 1910s is estimated at 0.2%. That means 99.8% of Japanese cinema from that era no longer exists. The primary film stock of the silent era — nitrocellulose — was highly flammable, and vast quantities burned in fires. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed enormous amounts of footage. American silent films have fared only marginally better: roughly 75% are gone. In Germany, an estimated 80–90% of silent-era films are scattered or lost.
Film disappears if left alone. Only deliberate effort preserves it.
2°C and the Smell of Vinegar
Even films that survived can still be lost — if no one tends to them.
The specific threat is called vinegar syndrome. Acetate film, which replaced nitrate stock from the 1950s onward, is vulnerable to hydrolysis when exposed to fluctuating temperature and humidity. As it breaks down, the film releases acetic acid — producing a sharp, vinegary smell, followed by warping, stickiness, and eventually complete deterioration. The process is contagious: degrading reels accelerate the decay of nearby stored film.
NFAJ stores its collection at 2–10°C with 35–40% relative humidity in dedicated preservation vaults. The second preservation building, completed in 2011, has capacity for approximately 266,000 canisters and was designed with anti-vinegar syndrome airflow systems from the ground up.
This is unglamorous work. No one applauds it. No one watches a reel being placed in cold storage. But without it, the film rots. Preservation begins with not letting things decay.
Restoration as Decipherment
Collection and cold storage are only part of the work. NFAJ also restores films — recovering damaged or incomplete prints to something closer to their original state.
Daisuke Ito's Zanjin Zanba Ken (1929) was discovered in a deteriorated 9.5mm print — a home-use format, far smaller than standard theatrical film. NFAJ digitally scanned the footage, used automated restoration software combined with manual frame-by-frame work to remove scratches and stabilize the image, and produced a restored 35mm print in 2003. A film that had survived only on a narrow spool of deteriorating home-movie stock was returned to theatrical form.
Teinosuke Kinugasa's A Page of Madness (1926) presented a different challenge. A nitrate print discovered at Kinugasa's own residence turned out to contain color tinting — blue tones applied to specific scenes during the original processing. Restoring those colors required the highly specialized skills of darkroom technicians who could read the faded chemical information in the film's emulsion.
Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) had lost its original negative entirely. Working from the best surviving print, NFAJ conducted a digital restoration — correcting scratches, focus degradation, and density loss to produce a version closer to the film's original theatrical appearance. The joint Japan-US restoration effort received the 2009 National Society of Film Critics Heritage Award.
What these projects share is that restoration is never purely technical. Deciding whether a missing scene was cut deliberately or lost to damage requires film history knowledge and archival research. Reading what remains in a deteriorated print — and making defensible decisions about what to repair and how — is closer to decipherment than engineering.
Films That Can Now Be Seen
There is a dimension of NFAJ's work that gets less attention: screenings.
Preserved and restored films don't serve their purpose locked in a vault. NFAJ regularly programs public screenings at its venue in Kyobashi, Tokyo — silent film screenings with live benshi narrators and musicians, restored-version premieres, thematic retrospectives. These screenings make visible films that have no commercial distribution, no DVD release, no streaming presence. Films that exist in name in film history books but cannot otherwise be seen.
The archive also maintains publicly searchable databases of its collection, allowing researchers, filmmakers, and scholars to access its holdings. Preservation has a purpose: films exist to be watched, studied, remembered. A collection accessible only to insiders is a different kind of loss.
Why the State Should Bear This
The question of why the state should fund this kind of institution is worth asking directly.
Private film companies keep archives too. But commercially worthless films, restorations that cost more than they earn, research-oriented access to materials — these cannot be sustained by market logic. Preserving things that generate no profit requires an institution that doesn't need to. That is what a national archive is for.
Films also carry a character that exceeds private ownership. Kurosawa's Rashomon belongs to its rights holders, but it is also a record of Japanese culture at a specific historical moment. There is a coherent argument that preserving it as part of humanity's memory is a responsibility the state should accept.
NFAJ is a member of FIAF (International Federation of Film Archives) and participates in international networks for locating and repatriating lost films held abroad. A national institution embedded in a global infrastructure of film heritage preservation.
The Contradiction, and the Case for Supporting It Anyway
The discomfort with a national institution running a crowdfunding campaign is legitimate.
The 100 million yen target, even if met, patches a portion of this year's cut. It does nothing about next year. It does not address the structural policy pushing national cultural institutions toward self-funding. Crowdfunding risks legitimizing the logic of "citizens can cover what the state cuts."
And yet: 4.28 million yen in ten hours.
People who learned what NFAJ does chose to support it. That is a signal. Whether it moves policy is uncertain. But the visible scale of public support for cultural preservation is itself a political statement — evidence of a constituency the government may be underestimating.
The value of preserving film cannot be measured by markets. That's precisely why the question of who should be responsible for it is, inescapably, political.
NFAJ's crowdfunding campaign runs until September 23 on READYFOR. Support tiers begin at 5,000 yen. Returns include online lectures by NFAJ researchers, name listing in publications, and original goods.
Understanding what they do is a reasonable place to start.