The Outlaw Years: When Japan Banned the Tattoo, Part Two
The Outlaw Years: When Japan Banned the Tattoo, Part Two
Seventy six years underground, and the stigma that outlived the law.
A Country Deciding How to Look
The Tokugawa shogunate fell in 1868. Japan had been closed for over two hundred years and opened into a world of steam engines, telegraphs and gunboats. The new government wanted to be taken seriously, and it went through the culture looking for anything a foreign diplomat might call backward.
In 1872 it outlawed decorative tattooing. The same era abolished tattooing as criminal punishment. Both marks went off the books at once, which is worth sitting with. The state stopped branding men and forbade men from marking themselves, and both decisions came from the same wish to appear modern.
The Trade Went Into Back Rooms
The masters did not stop. They moved. Shops went behind doors, and the work continued in private houses and back rooms, which is exactly the condition that turns a craft inward and makes it precious to the few who know where to go.
Here is the part I love. While the government was hiding the tattoo from foreigners, foreigners were arriving specifically to get one. Western sailors found the masters in Yokohama. So did visiting royalty. The Duke of York, later King George V, went under the needle in Japan. So did the Russian heir who became Tsar Nicholas II. The cloth was banned at home and coveted abroad, which happens to good work more often than people admit.
1948, and the Trap Inside the Fix
After the war, under occupation, the ban was lifted. Japanese people could be tattooed again without breaking a law written against them.
But the same year brought the Medical Practitioners Act, and its language forbade anyone without a medical license from performing a medical practice. Decades later the health ministry took the position that putting pigment under skin with a needle was a medical act. The law that freed the tattoo left a door open that would be used against it, and it took until 2020 to close. That is the third part of this story.
Meanwhile the Reputation Hardened
Seventy six years of illegality left a residue that no repeal could rinse out. The men most willing to wear an illegal mark were the men already outside the law, and organized crime took the bodysuit as a uniform. It read as loyalty and as proof that a man could take pain.
Then the movies came. The gangster films of the 1960s put irezumi on screen for a mass audience and welded the tattoo to the yakuza in the public mind, at home and abroad. Bathhouses, gyms and pools posted rules. Employers made judgments. A man could lose work over his forearm.
None of it had much to do with the art. It had to do with a law that had ended and a memory that had not.
What This Taught Me About Value
I have watched this pattern in cloth all my life. Something honest gets pushed to the edge because it is inconvenient, difficult or out of fashion. It survives in the hands of a small number of people who refuse to quit. Then the rest of the world circles back and calls it heritage.
Selvedge denim went that way. Shuttle looms were slow and narrow and the industry walked away from them. Japan kept weaving. Now the whole world wants the cloth those looms make.
I build for the version of a thing that survives the fashion cycle. Charcoal denim woven for us in Japan. A jacket you can wear quietly for twenty years and never explain to anybody.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
The Black Bear Brand ONE CHARCOAL Jean Jacket
Black Bear Brand BLACK Cowboy Jeans
Related Reading
Ink Before the Ban: The Tattoo in Old Japan, Part One
Getting Tattooed in Tokyo: The Living Art of Irezumi
The Old American Machines in Japan: The Myth, the Truth, and Why the Craft Lives There