Rare Japanese Star Wars Posters

One of the opportunities Celebration Japan recently offered fans and collectors from the U.S. and abroad was a chance to learn about the little-known field of Japanese Star Wars collecting. While Japanese Star Wars collectibles have long been coveted by collectors for their strong eye appeal and often whimsical inventiveness, we really know very little about their history or cultural significance. As any collector will tell you, half if not most of a collectible's appeal is the story that goes with it.

In a panel focused exclusively on Japanese Star Wars posters and movie materials, host Hideyuki Takizawa shared some of the more obscure pieces from his collection, shedding some light on an area of the hobby that has remained mysteriously vague to most Westerners.

The following represents a slide-by-slide review of the Japanese poster collecting panel:

This poster represents the first time we see Star Wars mentioned on a poster in Japan. Printed by 20th Century Fox Japan to showcase their line-up of movies for 1976, this poster includes a blurb for The Star Wars in the third row, evidence that Fox believed it would be able to release the film late that year (there are similar U.S. pieces also suggesting a 1976 release date).

Because this is such an early listing, The Star Wars had not yet received its Katakana title -- that is, one that spells out the words phonetically as it sounds in English. Here, it received the traditional Japanese Kanji title "Wakusei-Daisenso", which roughly translates to "Planets Big War". Note the generic galaxy photo to suggest a science fiction movie.

Here is a transit poster that would have been posted inside passenger train cars. Because these occupied just one half of a traditional-sized horizontal frame, these are often referred to as "half-posters". A theater's venue information, dates, and timetables were deliberately printed on the lower portion of the poster to fall within the sightline of passengers (since they were often mounted high up over the windows).

This is a transit half-poster for an OS Ltd. theater, listing release date (June 24) and admission price (¥1,200).

Here are just six examples of transit poster variations -- Takizawa has found at least 30 different variations just for the first film alone.

Several examples of similar transit posters for The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, and a 1982 re-release of the original Star Wars. Because few of these venue-specific transit posters were saved, gathering a complete set containing all variations is a nearly impossible task, even for someone living in Japan.

Occasionally, a theater's venue information was printed on a separate sheet of paper -- in this case, for a Return of the Jedi release at Kyoto's prestigious Empire Theater.

Some of these secondary poster attachments list the Star Wars film title along with other venue information, essentially making them Star Wars posters themselves. Very rare, these are often found in lots with several other film titles. This example comes from the Fukushima Prefecture north of Tokyo.