Tattoos in Japan have a history stretching back to at least 300 A.D., when men tattooed their faces and bodies as part of everyday cultural life. That acceptance, however, did not last. During the Kofun period, tattoos shifted from a social norm to a mark of punishment. Criminals and murderers were tattooed as a way to identify and shame them — a practice mirroring the Roman Empire’s use of body markings on enslaved people. By 720 A.D., Japan was formally using tattoos to punish criminals. Those who bore them were cut off from their families and pushed out of society entirely.
The Edo period (1603–1868) brought a dramatic reversal. A Chinese novel called Suikoden, which portrayed tattooed men as heroic figures, spread through Japan and changed public perception. Woodblock print artists — already skilled at detailed imagery — transitioned into tattooing, bringing their craft directly onto skin. The art form that emerged became known as irezumi. Wealthy merchants, banned by law from wearing jewelry or fine clothing, used elaborate body tattoos to display their status instead.
Horse grooms, known as betto, were among the most visibly tattooed workers of the era. Photographs from the 1870s show these men covered in dense, full-body designs — a striking record of how deeply irezumi had embedded itself into certain working-class communities by the late Edo period.
Tattooing was not exclusive to men. In Okinawa, it was primarily a female custom. Adult women wore hand tattoos called hajichi, applied using awamori alcohol and ink. These tattoos carried deep personal and cultural meaning. That practice ended abruptly when the Meiji government, seeking to modernize Japan and present a “civilized” image to Western colonial powers, imposed a nationwide ban on tattoos in 1872. The government saw tattoos as a barrier to being taken seriously on the world stage. Anti-tattooing ordinances were enforced most aggressively in Hokkaido in the north and Okinawa in the south, regions where foreign merchants and diplomats frequently traveled. Several Okinawan women were arrested for breaking the ban. Tokyo extended the prohibition to surrounding islands in 1899.
Despite the ban, irezumi never disappeared. Photographers like Felice Beato documented tattooed Japanese men during the 1880s, preserving images of full back pieces and body suits that represented years of painstaking work. The art continued underground throughout the Meiji era.
By the 1890s, full-body tattoo suits — covering the torso, arms, and legs — were documented extensively through photography. These images show the extraordinary level of detail that irezumi artists achieved, with mythological figures, waves, dragons, and warriors rendered across entire bodies.
Artist Tokumitsu Uchida was one of the most prominent tattoo masters of his era. His father, Goro Uchida, is regarded as one of the greatest irezumi artists in Japanese history. Photographs from 1900 show Tokumitsu at work on female clients, continuing a tradition that survived despite decades of legal prohibition.
By the 1940s, tattoos remained closely tied to gamblers and those outside mainstream society. Full-body tattoos running from shoulder to foot were a mark of commitment to that world — both as identity and as defiance of the law that still technically banned the practice.
In 1948, U.S. occupation forces lifted the ban on tattoos that had been in place since the Meiji era. Japanese tattoo artists began attracting international attention, and irezumi gained recognition in the West as a serious art form. Yet within Japan, a strong social stigma persisted. As artist Yamamoto noted plainly: “Japanese people have forgotten their tattoo history.”
The 1955 photographs of Tokumitsu Uchida at work reveal the full irezumi process — from transferring a design with a water brush to finishing a complete back piece. These images capture a living craft that had survived criminal stigma, government bans, and wartime upheaval across more than a millennium.
