The International Theater was an Asakusa landmark whose significance for Hideo Harada lay not only in its public fame but in the fatal family memory attached to the boulevard outside it. The theater itself was eventually demolished and replaced by a large hotel; the street, however, remains fixed in Harada’s recollection as the place where his parents died. Its changing physical presence gives the location a double meaning: a site transformed by the city and a private landmark that time has not erased.

A landmark in Asakusa

The International Theater stood within the Asakusa district that shaped Harada’s childhood. Its famous high-kicking line-dancers were part of its public identity, although Harada had not seen much of their performances as a child. The building mattered to him less as a destination than as a backdrop to ordinary life: it loomed over his daily comings and goings until he was twelve. In memory, its place in the neighborhood was therefore both prominent and familiar, bound to the streets through which he moved with his parents.

The theater also anchored a geography Harada found difficult to revisit. On an adult visit to Asakusa, he was willing to walk through the temple grounds and the entertainment district immediately to their west, but avoided neighborhoods most closely associated with his childhood. He had not previously turned toward the International Theater, the streets around Honganji Temple, or Tawara-machi Station. Although he knew that Tokyo’s changing streets could not look much as they had more than thirty years earlier, the possibility of encountering a surviving trace of the past still frightened him. The theater thus belonged to a wider map of remembered places that he approached cautiously rather than treating Asakusa as a single, readily accessible destination.

The accident and Harada’s childhood memory

In January, a car struck Harada’s parents as his father rode his mother on the back of his bicycle in front of the International Theater. Both died at the scene, and the hit-and-run vehicle was never found. Harada had been twelve. His uncle later speculated that the vehicle might have been a jeep belonging to the American Occupation, which could explain why the police did not pursue it; Harada, however, had been told that the couple were hit by a black sedan. The differing accounts leave the vehicle unidentified, while the location of the collision remains clear in Harada’s memory.

The theater was not itself the place where his parents died, but its position beside the boulevard made it inseparable from that final childhood scene. Harada remembers the pavement stained with his parents’ blood on the wide road in front of the building, a short distance toward Tawara-machi Station. The association turns a celebrated entertainment venue into an involuntary memorial marker. Its ordinary role in the neighborhood and the private tragedy on the street beside it coexist without resolving one another: the theater had been a backdrop to family life before becoming the landmark that locates its abrupt end.

Return, avoidance, and urban change

During a later walk through Asakusa, Harada recognizes that continuing down the street toward the Toei Cinema would bring the International Theater into view on his left. What he would actually see, he knows, is the high-rise hotel built after the theater was torn down. He turns back rather than face that sight. The decision is not simply avoidance of a building; the replacement would confront him with the changed landscape at the precise point where his childhood memory is most painful. The modern hotel makes the theater’s disappearance visible, but it cannot displace the earlier scene Harada carries with him.

The visit also shows how place can summon emotion before a remembered scene is fully encountered. Harada fears that familiar streets might break through the restraint he has maintained since his parents’ deaths and leave him overwhelmed by grief. He tries to steady himself by recalling that the International Theater has long since given way to a hotel, as if the knowledge of redevelopment could make the past less immediate. Yet this rational reminder does not make him proceed. He turns away, and the location remains powerful in part through what he cannot bring himself to revisit.

The theater’s continuing significance

The International Theater’s role extends beyond the first recollection of the accident. Harada later returns to the old district through Tawara-machi Station to meet the remarkable couple who resemble his deceased parents. His attachment to the neighborhood persists even when doubts make the midsummer streets seem shabby and the journey difficult. On another visit, he and Mamiya find that the apartment building where the couple had lived has been demolished; the empty, weed-covered lot seems strikingly out of place among the surrounding structures. That site is distinct from the International Theater, but its disappearance echoes the theater’s replacement: the physical settings connected with Harada’s encounters and memories do not remain available indefinitely.

After finding the former apartment site empty, Harada and Mamiya pray with incense and flowers. Harada recalls that two years have passed since he last visited the family grave in Aichi, where his parents’ ashes are buried, and resolves to bring the chopsticks his parents used at their last meal on a future visit. This later act of remembrance does not take place at the theater, but it shows how the loss attached to the Asakusa streets continues to shape his relationship with his parents. The theater survives in the narrative as a remembered location rather than a surviving building: the city has substituted a hotel for the landmark, while Harada’s recollection preserves the boulevard, the journey toward Tawara-machi Station, and the family history bound to them.