Tebori Now: The Japanese Tattoo in 2026, Part Three
Tebori Now: The Japanese Tattoo in 2026, Part Three
One man refused to pay a fine, and the law changed for everybody.
The Raid
In 2015 the Osaka police went after the tattoo industry. Not the crime-connected end of it, the ordinary end. Studios, working artists, dozens of them. Most were fined in summary proceedings and paid, because that is what sensible people do.
Taiki Masuda did not pay. He was fined for tattooing three customers without a medical license, and he decided to make the state prove that a tattoo was medicine.
Five Years
The Osaka District Court convicted him and fined him one hundred and fifty thousand yen. He appealed. In 2018 the Osaka High Court overturned the conviction, holding that decorative tattooing is not a medical practice. The prosecutors appealed that.
In September 2020 the Supreme Court of Japan settled it. Medical practice means acts of medical care or health guidance. Tattooing is neither, so the statute does not reach it. The court treated the tattoo as an artistic and cultural practice, and the basis for prosecuting artists fell away.
Five years, one man, and the whole trade got its footing back. He risked a criminal record so that the people who trained him would not have to hide.
Where the Craft Actually Stands
The numbers tell the recovery. Around two hundred artists were working in Japan in 1990. By 2014 the estimate was near three thousand. Tourists, executives, chefs, designers and artists all came to the work, and the organized crime association has faded as the customers changed.
The rules did not vanish. Plenty of onsen, gyms and pools still post their policies, and a tattooed traveler should check before turning up. Many places now allow cover patches, some have private baths, and a growing number simply do not care. The direction is clear even where the pace is slow.
There is also a gap now. Tattooing sits outside the medical framework and has no framework of its own, so the artists themselves are the ones setting the standards for sterilization and safety. In a craft culture that is not the worst outcome. The people who care most are holding the line.
Wabori, and Why the Hand Still Matters
Traditional Japanese work, wabori or horimono, runs back to the woodblock artists. Motifs are not decoration, they are a language. A dragon does not go just anywhere. Water moves in a direction. A back piece is planned as one composition and then built over years, session by session.
Tebori is the hand method. A rod, a bundle of needles, the skin held taut, ink worked in by the artist's own motion. It is slower than a machine. The shading it lays down is unlike anything a machine does, and the men who are great at it are great the way a master weaver is great: they have done nothing else.
My Own Room in Tokyo
My master has been marking me for years now. He is one of the oldest still working in that city. We share no language. Not a word. In all that time we have become close anyway, in a room where the only conversation is the work.
That room is where I learned my standard for everything else. Find the person who has given a life to one thing. Get in beside them. Do not rush it, do not cheapen it, and do not ask it to be convenient.
That is why our denim is woven on shuttle looms in Okayama by people whose families have been doing it for generations, and why our BORO pieces show every stitch of their repair. In Japan the mend is not a flaw. The mend is the record.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand BORO Jacket, crafted in Okayama, Japan
Black Bear Brand BORO Double Front Jeans
My Japan Indigo Print Cotton Bandana
Related Reading
The Outlaw Years: When Japan Banned the Tattoo, Part Two