highest-ranking courtesans were unlikely to get tattoos. Like samurai, many adhered to the Confucian ideals common at the time—namely that an individual receives their body from their parents and, out of filial piety, it should not be desecrated with permanent markings. These pledge tattoos were not part of daily life for the majority of men and women at the time, but were part of the country’s burgeoning underground subculture.
With the increase of passion-driven tattoos, there were bound to be mistakes; moxibustion techniques using dried leaves were developed to burn and blister out unwanted tattoos, leaving a scar to mark a love gone sour. Some pleasure-quarter patrons would apparently try to get courtesans to remove the names of other lovers and have theirs inserted instead.
These melodramatic love tattoos were, in a small, permanent way, more than hot-blooded expressions: they were acts of rebellion against a domineering and stratified society that was bent on exercising control, even if it failed to always do so. Tattoos were personal and private, offering freedom and expression. They were a perfect way to raise a middle finger at the country’s Confucian morals.
Not all script tattoos were pacts between lovers. There were also religious pledges and personal mottoes. Just like today, early irezumi enthusiasts—artisans, actors, gamblers, or the roving weapon-wielding chivalrous men known as otokodate—wanted those words to live by with them at all times, whether they were proclamations to God or a simple turn of phrase.
The motivations haven’t changed. Today, while bad kanji tattoos are mocked online as marks of shame, good ones are anything but, showing the grace and gravitas of the script itself. Yet as the 1700s gave way to the 1800s, Japanese tattoos would make a remarkable transformation: going from “scarlet letters” to designs of beauty that evoked fear and awe. This corresponds to the rapid success of Japanese woodblock prints from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries—a golden epoch in mass-market art. Art was flourishing not only on paper, but also on the skin. Embarrassing punitive tattoos would be covered up and embellished with decorative designs and symbols, and Japan’s pictorial tattoo tradition would flower.
The Tebori Tradition
Often called “hand-poked” in English, tebori (手彫り) is Japan’s traditional method of tattooing.
Today, some tattooers in Japan, including some of the country’s most famous, prefer the tattoo machine to tebori—as do many Japanese irezumi enthusiasts—simply for the amount of time it saves. But others, like Hori Magoshi of Osaka (now known as Hori Shige V), carry on the tebori tradition.
Tebori uses a tool called a nomi that is made from a slender piece of bamboo; needles, called hari in Japanese, are affixed with tightly wound silk string at the tip. The tool sometimes has a grip at the end for the tattooer to hold while inserting the ink. Horiyoshi III developed a steel nomi with needle tips that can be easily removed and sterilized. Hori Magoshi, however, makes his tools with bamboo, needles, silk string, and glue. He must sharpen the tattoo needles for each client, and spends between 20 and 30 minutes making each tool.
“For shading, I usually make tebori tools with 27 needles, and for coloring, I make tools with 18 needles,” says Hori Magoshi, adding that number of needles can change depending on the tattoo. Besides crafting his own tools, he also mixes his own ink from pigment.
“This way of working makes my prep time much longer,” he says, “but I feel like it brings me closer to irezumi.” Even if the color and shading is done by tebori, Hori Magoshi still does the sujibori (outlining) with a tattoo machine, saying, “It’s much smoother and takes far less time.”
Hori Magoshi prepares his tools for a client.
Ink is inserted into the skin one poke at a time.
The tools of the trade.
TYPES OF TEBORI
Tebori is the general catchall word for tattooing done by hand. Within tebori, there are different styles based on the way the tools are held or the way ink is inserted.
HANEBORI A tebori technique often used for shading, in which the needles are inserted in the skin and then slightly flicked upward while the tool is pulled back. This widens the puncture wound, allowing more ink to enter the skin and, as a side effect, causes more bleeding.
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