About the studio
Toho was founded August 12, 1932 as the Tokyo-Takarazuka Theater Company by industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi, and it's grown into one of the giants of Japanese film, most famously as the studio behind Godzilla. Based in Chiyoda, Tokyo, and the core company of the massive Hankyu Hanshin Toho Group, Toho's role in anime is mostly as a distributor rather than a producer: it's the company that gets Studio Ghibli films, Doraemon movies (since 1980), and titles like Your Name and Suzume into Japanese theaters. *Worth clarifying: don't confuse the parent company Toho with TOHO animation, a separate label under its umbrella.* Nearly a century old, Toho is a genuine institution in Japanese entertainment, one of the Big Four studios alongside Shochiku, Toei, and Nikkatsu. Whether it's Godzilla stomping through Tokyo or Chihiro wandering into a spirit world, if it played in Japanese cinemas, Toho very likely put it there.