Tetsuji Takechi | |
|---|---|
 Takechi at a "Takechi Kabuki" performance (between 1945 and 1955)[1] | |
| Born | Tetsuji Kawaguchi[1] 10 December 1912 Osaka, Japan |
| Died | 26 July 1988 (aged 75) |
| Alma mater | Kyoto National University |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1945–1987 |
Tetsuji Takechi (武智 鉄二, Takechi Tetsuji, 10 December 1912 – 26 July 1988) was a Japanese theatrical and film director, critic, and author. First coming to prominence for his theatrical criticism, in the 1940s and 1950s he produced influential and popular experimental kabuki plays. Beginning in the mid-1950s, he continued his innovative theatrical work in noh, kyōgen and modern theater. In late 1956 and early 1957 he hosted a popular TV program, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, which featured his reinterpretations of Japanese stage classics.
In the 1960s, Takechi entered the film industry by producing controversial soft-core theatrical pornography. His 1964 film Daydream was the first big-budget, mainstream pink film released in Japan. After the release of his 1965 film Black Snow, the government arrested him on indecency charges. The trial became a public battle over censorship between Japan's intellectuals and the government. Takechi won the lawsuit, enabling the wave of softcore pink films which dominated Japan's domestic cinema during the 1960s and 1970s.[2] In the later 1960s, Takechi produced three more pink films.
Takechi did not work in film during most of the 1970s. In the 1980s, he remade Daydream twice, starring actress Kyōko Aizome in both films. The first Daydream remake (1981) is considered the first theatrical hardcore pornographic film in Japan. Though Takechi is largely unknown in Japan today, he was influential in both the cinema and the theater during his lifetime, and his innovations in kabuki were felt for decades. He also helped shape the future of the pink film in Japan through his battles against governmental censorship, earning him the titles, "The Father of Pink" and "The Father of Japanese Porn."[3][4]
- ^ a b "Age 75: 武智鉄二 / Tetsuji Takechi" (in Japanese). Art Random. 6 December 2005. Archived from the original on 4 March 2009. Retrieved 3 December 2008.
本名川口鐵二。
- ^ Firsching, Robert. "Kuroi Yuki". Allmovie. Archived from the original on 19 July 2012. Retrieved 29 October 2007.
The resultant obscenity trial... ended with a landmark decision which allowed complete narrative freedom in Japanese films. This development paved the way for the thousands of softcore pinku eiga and S & M films which would define Japanese exploitation cinema until... the late '80s...
- ^ Weisser, Thomas; Yuko Mihara Weisser (1998). Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films. Miami: Vital Books : Asian Cult Cinema Publications. pp. 67, 102. ISBN 1-889288-52-7.
- ^ Salz, Jonah (2007). "Contesting Authority through Comic Disruption: Mixed Marriages as Metaphor in Postwar Kyogen Experiments". In Hiroshi Nara (ed.). Inexorable Modernity: Japan's Grappling with Modernity in the Arts. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books. p. 132. ISBN 978-0-7391-1842-9.