Ink Before the Ban: The Tattoo in Old Japan, Part One
Ink Before the Ban: The Tattoo in Old Japan, Part One
Punishment ink, woodblock heroes, and the tattooed firemen of Edo.
Older Than the Records
Tattooing in Japan is older than Japan's own written history. Clay figures pulled out of prehistoric sites, the dogu and the haniwa, carry incised marks on their faces and bodies that many scholars read as tattoos. Chinese chroniclers writing about the people they called Wa described a tattooed population roughly seventeen hundred years ago. In the north, Ainu women wore tattoos around the mouth and on the hands, marks tied to maturity and to belief, and that practice ran on for centuries.
So the ink came first. Everything that happened later happened to it.
Then It Became a Sentence
In the early 1700s the Tokugawa authorities made tattooing a punishment. It replaced cutting off noses and ears, which tells you something about the standards of the day. A thief got bands around the arm. Some regions marked the forehead with a character. Each district used its own design, so a mark told you not only that a man had been convicted but where. A second offense could carry death.
This is the part most people miss. In Japan the tattoo was a sentence before it was an art. Men walked around branded for life, and they wanted those marks gone. You cannot remove a tattoo with a needle. You can only cover it. So they covered it, larger and better, and the art of concealment was born out of shame.
The Book That Changed Everything
In 1827 the woodblock artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi began publishing his series on the one hundred and eight heroes of the Suikoden, the Chinese tale of bandits who take on a corrupt government. He drew them covered in dragons, tigers, carp, flowers, gods. Edo lost its mind for it. Other artists followed. Kunisada put tattooed kabuki actors on paper. By the 1860s actors were walking the stage in kimono printed to look like skin.
Ordinary people wanted what was in the prints. The tattoo went from sentence to choice inside a generation.
The men who carved the woodblocks and the men who carved the skin were working the same trade with the same hands. The word tebori means carved by hand. Chisels for one, needles for the other, ink for both. Look at a good back piece and you are looking at a print that breathes.
Not the Samurai
Here is the correction worth making. The samurai class did not wear these bodysuits. Some old texts suggest warriors marked themselves so their bodies could be identified after a battle, which is a practical thing and not a decorative one. Indigo, not ink, was the warrior's mark. Armor padding, undergarments, the blue that strengthened cloth and kept insects out.
The tattooed men of Edo were the firemen, the laborers, the palanquin bearers, the gamblers, the street knights. By 1738 Edo employed more than eleven thousand firefighters for a million people. By 1850 there were around twenty four thousand of them. They fought fires in a wooden city by pulling houses down, soaked in water, and they were both heroes and trouble. They wore dragons and carp on their skin as armor against a job that killed men, and their padded coats were plain on the outside and printed on the inside, often to match the tattoos underneath. After a fire they turned the coats inside out and stood in the street in the good side.
There were merchants in it too. Sumptuary edicts told them not to display wealth, so some of them put the wealth on their bodies, under the clothes, where nobody could tax it or take it.
What I Take From It
I have been getting tattooed in Tokyo for years by the same man. One of the oldest still working in that city. We have no language between us and we have never needed one. What that room taught me is what the Edo firemen already knew. Marks that cost something are the only ones worth carrying, and the best work is done slowly by a person who has given his life to one thing.
That is the standard I hold cloth to. Indigo that carries a history. Cotton woven in a town that has been dyeing blue since the 1600s. A jacket built out of old cloth and visible stitching, because the repair is the story.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand BORO Jacket, crafted in Okayama, Japan
My Japan Indigo Print Cotton Bandana
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Botanical Indigo: The Oldest Blue, and the Jeans I Built Around It
Made in Seattle, Made in Japan: The Two Homes of Black Bear Brand