Eight Years Without a Word
Eight Years Without a Word
Eight years under the same master, and we have never shared a language.
I go back to Japan on the first of October. There is a pop up to run in Tokyo and a great deal of work waiting. There is also a room I will go to, the way I have gone to it for eight years.
The Master
My tattoo master is Horitoshi I. He works in Tokyo. I have been getting tattooed by him for eight years.
We have no language in common. Not one. In eight years we have never had a conversation in the ordinary sense of the word.
It has never once been a problem, and I have thought about why for a long time.
What Happens Instead
The work is the conversation. You show up. You take your shirt off. He looks at what is already there and at what is not there yet, and he begins.
In the most traditional practice the master often chooses the design. You are not commissioning a picture. You are handing yourself to somebody who has spent a lifetime at one thing and trusting where they take it.
There is a full post on the journal about tebori and the history of Japanese tattooing, going back to the Edo period and the woodblock prints that gave the tradition its vocabulary. This one is not about that. This one is about what it is like to be on the mat.
Time Moves Differently
A full Japanese piece is measured in years. Nobody is in a hurry and nobody pretends otherwise.
That is the thing that changed how I think. Every culture I grew up in treats speed as a virtue. In that room, speed is not a virtue and it is not even a consideration. The only question is whether the thing is right.
I have carried that into everything. It is why a jacket takes eight months. It is why we wait for three tweeds to be pedalled out by hand on an island. It is why the corduroy goes through our own wash instead of coming straight off a finished roll.
Choosing Your People
The other thing I took from it is who you put yourself next to.
I try to stand beside people who are the very best in the world at one thing. A weaver in the Outer Hebrides. A sewing room in Okayama five generations deep. A chain stitch artisan with twenty five years at a single craft. A tattoo master in Tokyo.
None of them are quick. All of them are certain. Being near that is the best education there is, and you do not need a shared language to receive it.
October
So I will be in Tokyo. There will be three days in Ebisu with the line hanging in a room, and then there will be a morning where I go and lie down and say almost nothing for several hours.
Both of those are the same job, as far as I can tell.
A Way Of Life.
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Related Reading
Tebori and Irezumi: Japanese Tattoo History