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Safe to say there isn’t another country bar Japan where a handful of top directors, including celebrated auteurs and an Oscar winner, learned their craft in adult films. Or perhaps even anywhere else in the world where that is imaginable.

But when cinemagoing plunged in parallel with the penetration of television sets into homes in the 1960s, it was so-called Pink Eiga that kept large parts of the movie industry afloat for decades, nurturing a generation of directors, scriptwriters and other filmmaking crew.

Usually between 60 and 70 minutes long, shot on 35mm and released in theaters, often on triple bills, the low-budget productions gave directors a lot of freedom provided they delivered the prescribed number of sex scenes.

In 1964, with the eyes of the world on Japan as it reemerged onto the world stage after World War Two as host of Tokyo Olympics,...

Apart from being one of the most artistic and artful pink films ever to come out of the Japanese movie industry, “Daydream” is a historic production for a number of reasons, and not just due to the controversy that followed its release. Takechi’s second work was the first erotic movie to have a big budget and a wide release, courtesy of Shochiku, who gave it a major publicity campaign that ended up in commercial success. Furthermore, it was released both in 1964 and in 1966 in the US, with the second version including added red-tinted footage shot by distributor Joseph Green. However, the problems started appearing quite early for Tetsuji Takechi. Junichiro Tanizaki, the revered author of the story the script was based upon, was not happy at all with the result, while the filmmaker also faced issues with the Japanese Censorship Board, particularly for the depiction of pubic hair in the film,...