Young in Japan quietly chip away at a taboo on tattoos
Ayaka Kizu, a web TOKYO — designer in Tokyo, stood by her office desk one recent day, peeling Band-Aids off an apple-size portion of her right arm. A meeting with clients had ended, so she was now free to reveal what lay underneath: a tattoo of a multicolored unicorn.
Kizu, 28, is one of a growing number of young people who are bucking Japan’s long-standing taboos against tattoos, which remain identified with organized crime even as the Japanese mob has faded and body art has become widely popular in the West.
Inspired by Japanese influencers and foreign celebrities, Kizu decided at 19 to get a tattoo of a crescent moon on her right thigh, an homage to her favorite manga series, Sugar Sugar Rune. She has since gotten five more.
As she has cycled through jobs since college, including public relations at a big traditional firm and sales work in a department store, she has had to get creative to conceal her tattoos, whose display remains essentially forbidden in all but the most liberal of workplaces. That means, for instance, that she must leave her hair down to cover the ink behind her ears.
“It’s a pain, but as long as I hide them when doing business, I don’t mind,” she said. “I wanted to be fashionable. I just decided to go for it.”
With each scroll of their phones, young Japanese have become more exposed to tattoos worn by famous singers and models, chipping away at the stigma against body art and emboldening them to challenge entrenched social expectations about their appearance.
Around 1.4 million Japanese
adults have tattoos, almost double the number from 2014, according to Yoshimi Yamamoto, a cultural anthropologist at Tsuru University who studies traditional “hajichi” tattoos worn on the hands of Okinawan women.
In 2020, tattooing took a huge leap toward broader acceptance when Japan’s Supreme Court ruled that it could be performed by people other than licensed medical professionals. Sixty percent of people in their 20s and younger believe that general rules regarding tattoos should be relaxed, according to a survey conducted last year by an information technology company.
In big cities like Tokyo and Osaka, visible tattoos are becoming more commonplace among food service workers, retail employees and those in the fashion industry. In the back alleys of Shinjuku, a buzzing Tokyo neighborhood, Takafumi Seto, 34, wears a T-shirt that shows off his red and black inked sleeve while he works as a barista at a trendy cafe.
Seto got most of his tattoos after moving to Tokyo 10 years ago from the suburbs
of western Japan, where he still gets stares when he visits his family. His grandmother doesn’t know about his tattoos, so he sees her only in the winter, when he can wear long sleeves.
“I think that the hurdle to getting a tattoo has gone down,” he said. “On Instagram, people show off their ink. Tattoos are OK now. It’s that kind of generation.”
Hiroki Kakehashi, 44, a tattoo artist who has won a cult following among women in their 20s for his coin-size fineline tattoos, said his clients now came from a broader range of professions: government workers, high school teachers, nurses.
“They’re often in places that can be hidden, but more people have tattoos than you would imagine,” Kakehashi said.
Tattoos have a long history in Japan, and they were important to women in Indigenous Okinawan and Ainu communities. Their association with organized crime goes back about 400 years. They were used to brand criminals on their arms or foreheads with marks that varied by region and crime.