In late 1956 and early 1957 he hosted a popular TV program, The Tetsuji Takechi Hour, which featured his reinterpretations of Japanese stage classics.

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.

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.

[11] Takechi's innovations in kabuki brought him to the attention of the Shigeyama family, a longtime major force in comic kyōgen plays.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

[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.

The film focused on the women of Japan's night life and included scenes of a nude noh performance, strippers, and geisha.

[30] Based on a 1926 short story by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki,[5] the film was a black comedy involving a series of sex scenes imagined by an artist under anesthesia in a dentist's office.

After being drugged, the artist watches helplessly from the other side of a window as the dentist tortures and performs a series of sexual acts on a female patient.

[43] Based on two short stories, "Kasanka Mangansui no Yume" and "Yanagiyu no Jiken" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, the film depicts the lurid and violently erotic dreams of a writer, his wife and his sister, after having spent a night out drinking and visiting sex shows.

[44] Takechi's Daydream had been considered a national embarrassment by the Japanese government because of its highly publicized release while the world was focused on the country for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

Film directors Nagisa Oshima and Seijun Suzuki and authors Yukio Mishima and Kōbō Abe testified in Takechi's defense at the trial.

Explicitly linking his interests in kabuki and pornography as forms of expression, in the July 1965 issue of the film journal Eiga Geijutsu, Takechi wrote: The censors are getting tough about Black Snow.

When they suppressed Kabuki plays during the Edo period, forbidding women to act, because of prostitution, and young actors, because of homosexuality, they said it was to preserve public morals.

[50]By shutting down Black Snow and prosecuting Takechi, Eirin had intended to suppress the new pink film genre,[51] but the trial had the exact opposite outcome.

[48] He also successfully countersued the government claiming that the accusation of indecency was politically motivated, due to the film's anti-American and anti-capitalist themes.

Though, as Japanese law required, sexual organs and pubic hair were fogged on screen, the Asahi Shimbun called it a breakthrough film, and Japan's first hardcore pornographic movie.

[33] Takechi took a novel, yet traditional approach to the fogging by covering the forbidden areas with floating images of topless female shamisen players.

[59] Unlike Takechi's earlier Dream of the Red Chamber, the full, uncensored version of Daydream 1981 did survive, and circulated underground in Japan.

[63] Because of the large budget involved in the production, the distributing studio submitted Courtesan to Eirin repeatedly, and agreed to every cut the reviewing board recommended.

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.

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.