Stacks of video and audio equipment — some decades old, others nearly extinct — fill an entire wall of Tokyo Koon’s office, a quiet space tucked away in the northern corner of Shibuya Ward. Silent television screens sandwiched between the electronics flicker with fading footage: a Shinto ritual, an old interview with a baseball coach, a long-forgotten TV series.
These moments, captured on fragile magnetic tape, are on borrowed time. Unless they are digitized soon, they may disappear forever.
“We used to receive around 10,000 tapes annually, but that’s gone up to around 40,000 to 50,000 now,” says Hideaki Matsunobu, executive director of Tokyo Koon, a company that provides audiovisual conservation and digitization services for municipalities, museums and individuals who want to preserve their film, video and audio collections.
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