Toho was founded by the Hankyu Railway in 1932 as the Tokyo-Takarazuka Theater Company by industrialist Ichizō Kobayashi. It managed much of the kabuki in Tokyo and, among other properties, the Tokyo Takarazuka Theater and the Imperial Garden Theater in Tokyo; Toho and Shochiku enjoyed a duopoly over theaters in Tokyo for many years. After several successful film exports to the United States during the 1950s, Toho opened the in Los Angeles to show its own films without selling to a distributor. It was known as the Toho Theatre from the late 1960s until the 1970s. Toho also had a theater in San Francisco and opened a theater in New York in 1963.