was a Japanese industrialist and film pioneer.

Career

Born to a

Kyoto Kyoto (; Japanese: , ''Kyōto'' ), officially , is the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture in Japan. Located in the Kansai region on the island of Honshu, Kyoto forms a part of the Keihanshin metropolitan area along with Osaka and Kobe. , the ci ...

family that ran a long-standing

wagashi are traditional Japanese confections that are often served with green tea, especially the types made of ''mochi'', ''anko'' (azuki bean paste), and fruit. ''Wagashi'' are typically made from plant-based ingredients. History In Japan, the wor ...

store, Inabata attended the Kyoto-fu Shihan Gakkō (now the

Kyoto University of Education The is a national university in Kyoto, Japan. The school's predecessor was founded in 1876, and it was chartered as a university in 1949. History The Kyoto University of Education was established in 1949 from the merger of Kyōto shihan gakkō a ...

) and in 1877 earned a scholarship to attend the La Martinière technical school in Lyon. One of his classmates there was

Auguste Lumière Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière (19 October 1862 – 10 April 1954) was a French engineer, industrialist, biologist, and illusionist. During 1894–1895, he and his brother Louis invented an animated photographic camera and projectio ...

, who was later one of the inventors of the

cinematographe Cinematograph or kinematograph is an early term for several types of motion picture film mechanisms. The name was used for movie cameras as well as film projectors, or for complete systems that also provided means to print films (such as the Cin ...

. After studying weaving and dying technology for eight years, Inabata returned to Japan in 1885 and, after teaching others about what he learned, started his own company, Inabata Senryōten (later Inabata & Co., Ltd.), in 1890. He later moved the company to

Osaka is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third most populous city in Japan, following Special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a population of 2. ...

and focused his business on dying military uniforms. Achieving success, Inabata later served as president of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OCCI) from 1922 to 1934, and became a member of the House of Peers. A bronze statue of him still stands in front of the OCCI. Inabata was also instrumental in the founding of the Institut Franco-Japon du Kansai (currently l’Institut français du Japon – Kansai) in 1926.

Film business

When Inabata returned to France in 1896, he met Lumière again and learned about the motion picture apparatus that he and his brother Louis had developed. Interested in the business opportunity, Inabata returned to Japan with a cinematographe, fifty reels of film, and François-Constant Girel, a Lumière technician. They then offered "the first paid exhibition of what was then called 'jido shashin' oving pictures at the Nanchi Theater in Osaka on 15 February 1897. Although

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...

kinetoscope The Kinetoscope is an precursors of film, early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic ...

had been presented in

Kobe Kobe ( , ; officially , ) is the capital city of Hyōgo Prefecture Japan. With a population around 1.5 million, Kobe is Japan's seventh-largest city and the third-largest port city after Tokyo and Yokohama. It is located in Kansai region, whic ...

the previous year, that was not a device for projecting motion pictures, so Inabata's screening is regarded as Japan's "first projected film programme". Since the cinematographe could both project and shoot motion pictures, Inabata was also the first Japanese to be involved in the shooting of films, some of which featured him and his family. He soon found the film business distasteful, however, and handed it over to Einosuke Yokota, who later founded

Yokota Shōkai was a Japanese film studio active in the early years of cinema in Japan. Its origins can be traced back to when Einosuke Yokota received one of the first Lumiere cinematograph machines in Japan from Inabata Katsutarō to conduct traveling ex ...

, one of Japan's first film studios.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Inabata, Katsutaro Japanese businesspeople People from Kyoto 1862 births 1949 deaths Members of the House of Peers (Japan) Japanese film producers