Tetsuji Takechi
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.
Tetsuji Takechi
26 July 1988 (aged 75)
- Kabuki director, theorist and critic
- theatre director
- film director
- author
- actor
1945–1987
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]
Life and career[edit]
Early life[edit]
Tetsuji Takechi was born Tetsuji Kawaguchi in Osaka on 10 December 1912 to a family headed by a wealthy industrialist.[1][5] He studied economics at Kyoto National University and graduated in 1936.[6] Takechi first became known for his criticism and theoretical writings on the theater.[7] In 1939 he began publishing a journal, Stage Review in which he printed his writings on the theater.[8] In the early 1940s, he began publishing collections of these writings in book form.[9][10] When World War II came to an end, Takechi used his inheritance from his father to establish a theatrical troupe.[5] Under his direction, the Takechi Kabuki, as the group was known, put Takechi's theatrical ideas into practise by giving innovative and popular performances of kabuki classics in Osaka from 1945 to 1955.[11]
Takechi Kabuki[edit]
The immediate post-World War II era was a difficult time for kabuki. Besides the devastation caused to major Japanese cities as a result of the war, the popular trend was to reject the styles and thoughts of the past, kabuki among them.[7] Also, during the early years of the Allied Occupation of Japan, the occupying authorities banned kabuki as feudalistic and detrimental to the public morals, though by 1947 this ban was lifted. Other traditional forms of theater, such as noh and bunraku, seen as less flamboyant and violent than kabuki, received less attention from Occupation censors.[12] Kabuki scholars credit Takechi's innovative productions of the kabuki classics with bringing about a rebirth of interest in the kabuki in the Kansai region after this low point in kabuki history.[11] Takechi revitalized kabuki by reaching out to the other theatrical forms—noh, kyōgen, and the modern theater and dance—for new ideas and collaboration. He broke through long-established barriers which existed between these theatrical forms, and even between kabuki schools, to create an energetic new form of kabuki. Despite his maverick nature, Takechi gave great attention to the classic kabuki texts, and emphasized to his actors the need to inhabit the roles they played. His approach to a new interpretation of the old texts was to "psychologize" them.[13] By bringing out the psychology already present in the classic texts, Takechi felt that actors could interpret their roles with vitality and energy which he felt was lacking in contemporary performances.[14] Of the many popular young stars of the kabuki who performed under Takechi, Nakamura Ganjiro III (born 1931) was the leading figure. At first known as Nakamura Senjaku, this period in Osaka kabuki became known as the "Age of Senjaku" in his honor.[11]
Theater work after Takechi Kabuki[edit]
Takechi's innovations in kabuki brought him to the attention of the Shigeyama family, a longtime major force in comic kyōgen plays. With the Shigeyamas, Takechi created and directed the kyōgen, Susugigawa (The Washing River), in 1953. Based on a medieval French farce, this play became the first new kyōgen to enter the traditional repertoire in a century.[15] Takechi saw in kyōgen a more direct link to a native Japanese folk theatrical tradition, and through the kyōgen wanted to link these folk traditions with the modern theater. As a Western analogy of his intentions, Takechi pointed to the works of Ibsen and Tennessee Williams which had their roots in the classical theater of Racine, Molière and Shakespeare.[16]
In 1954, Takechi followed Susugigawa with a noh-kyōgen version of Junji Kinoshita's Yūzuru. Yūzuru is one of the most successful Japanese post-World War II plays, having received over a thousand performances at schools and theaters both within Japan and internationally since its debut in 1949.[17] Composer Ikuma Dan wrote an opera version of the play in 1952. Since its premiere, Dan's opera has been performed more than 550 times, making it possibly the most popular opera written in Japanese.[18] Dan was recruited to write the original music for Takechi's production of the play. Dan combined the noh-style solo vocal lines with a Western orchestra and chorus.[19] On the same program as Yūzuru was another Takechi-directed kyōgen, Higashi wa Higashi (East is East), a parody of the kyōgen style. Among the innovations Takechi made in this play was the inclusion of a former Takarazuka actress in the usually all-male kyōgen cast. In the ultra-conservative noh and kyōgen communities, simply appearing in a rival school's production could result in an actor's excommunication from the profession. Because of the public attention drawn through Takechi's relentless publicity work and communication with the media, punitive actions against actors who worked with Takechi were avoided.[20]
Besides his work as a theatrical theorist and director, Takechi occasionally appeared in acting roles on the stage and screen. In his series of essays, Chronicles of My Life in the 20th Century, American author and translator of Japanese literature, Donald Keene mentions his own study of kyōgen at this time. In 1956, Keene appeared in a performance of the kyōgen play Chidori with Takechi in the role of the sake shop owner, before an audience including such prominent authors as Tanizaki, Yasunari Kawabata and Yukio Mishima.[21]
Writing that "every form of art" should be popular with the public,[22] Takechi next sought to rejuvenate noh in a similar manner with which he had kabuki and kyōgen. He worked with the avant-garde group Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), which had been founded by composers Tōru Takemitsu, Jōji Yuasa and other artists in 1951. One of Takechi's more notable productions with the group was a 1955 noh version of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (1912).[23]
In October 1955 he directed Mishima's modern noh play, The Damask Drum in a theater-in-the-round production at Osaka's Sankei Hall.[24] Mishima, dubious of Takechi's experimental approach to classical theater, later commented that he felt like a father allowing a disreputable plastic surgeon to operate on his child.[25] Also at Sankei Hall, Takechi directed Mishima's Sotoba Komachi, set as an opera by composer Mareo Ishiketa, in 1956.[24]
The controversy created by Takechi's experiments with noh made international headlines in 1956. The International News Service reported that Takechi had introduced elements of burlesque and striptease into the slow, stylised artform.[26] Confirming that Takechi's methods did make the artform popular, his "Burlesque Noh" productions at Tokyo's Nichigeki Music Hall played to a consistently full house. Again, however, the leaders of the conservative Noh Society of Tokyo threatened any performer who participated in Takechi's productions with excommunication.[27]
From 4 December 1956 to 26 February 1957, Takechi served as the host of the Nippon Television program, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour. The show featured the Takechi Kabuki's interpretations of such Japanese stage classics as Chūshingura, and was also known for pushing the limits of the coverage of sexual subjects on television for its time.[5][28] Takechi directed two more kabuki performances for the Nissei Theater in Tokyo, not long after it was opened in 1963. Though these would be his last kabuki productions, Takechi's influence on the art form continued to be felt for decades after his departure for the cinema.[11]
Entrance into the cinema[edit]
In the early 1960s, Takechi turned from the stage to the cinema. Though the mainstream film industry considered Takechi an amateur and an outsider, he would continue to produce ground-breaking films sporadically for the rest of his life.[29] Some of the innovations and trends in Japanese erotic cinema which Takechi's films pioneered include big-budgets and releases, literary and artistic aspirations,[30] fogging,[31] political themes,[32] and theatrical hardcore.[33]
Takechi ran afoul of the government throughout his film career. The Weissers, in their Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films, even characterize Takechi's entire film career as "a personal war with Eirin" (the Japanese film-rating board).[34] Turning from the Edo period art form of kabuki to another popular Edo period form of expression, pornography, Takechi decided to enter the film industry through the new genre of low-budget, independent softcore sex-films that were becoming popular in Japan. These films were called eroductions at this time, but are now more commonly referred to as pink films.[35]
Takechi's first film was A Night in Japan: Woman, Woman, Woman Story (Nihon no yoru: Onna onna onna monogatari, 1963), a sex-documentary in the mondo style popular at the time. The film focused on the women of Japan's night life and included scenes of a nude noh performance, strippers, and geisha. Produced independently, Shochiku studios distributed the film, allowing it an international audience. It was released in West Germany on 6 March 1964 as Frauen unter nackter Sonne (alle Frauen Japans).[36] In the U.S., it opened in Los Angeles under the title Women... Oh, Women! on 18 September 1964.[37] Later that year, Takechi appeared in an acting role in director Kaneto Shindō's Mother (1963).
Legacy[edit]
Jasper Sharp points out that the Japanese and western views of Takechi's legacy are quite different. While western sources assess him as a major figure in the early development of the pink film, many current Japanese sources on the subject ignore his work. Sharp notes, however, that during his lifetime, he was covered prominently in Japanese sources. He speculates that his legacy has been largely forgotten in his homeland partly because of his status as an outsider in the Japanese film communities—both mainstream and pink. Since his films were self-produced and distributed by major film companies rather than through the eroduction circuit, they are not technically pink films. Also, his right-wing political background conflicts with the generally revolutionary stance more often associated with the pink film. Since his death in 1988, the lack of a studio or other publicist, or coverage by writers on the pink film has kept his work out of the public's eye in Japan. In the west, however, some of Takechi's films, such as Daydream were shown during their first runs, reviewed by major publications such as Variety, and have been preserved and remained available to genre audiences on home video releases.[69]
During his lifetime, Takechi's innovations and contributions to Japanese theater in general and to kabuki specifically were influential for decades. His theoretical work, as well as his mentoring of several important stars, helped bring about a rebirth in kabuki after World War II.[11] His contributions to cinema were much more controversial. Considered a dilettante outsider by much of the film industry, and suspected of racism and nationalism by others,[5] his work was nevertheless defended by the younger generation of filmmakers such as Seijun Suzuki and Nagisa Oshima.[52] Though his films are today unknown to most Japanese filmgoers, through his career-long fight against censorship, the taboos which his films helped break, and the creative freedom which he helped enable, he remains an important figure in Japanese cinema.[5]