The Life and Aesthetic of Horiyoshi III, Japanese Tattoo Master | Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round

"Yoshii Shinobu's Second Round" is a QDaily column by Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who works in Chinese. A nijikai, or "second round," is the gathering Japanese office workers move on to after the first bar — attendance optional, and the talk looser and more open.

I have in my hands a photography collection about tattoos. The moment I opened it, a cool, low-burning allure took hold of me. A gorgeous, invented world laid out on skin — it exists as one with a person's body, yet it plainly carries a life of its own.

The photography collection Blue Image: Sudo Masato's Tattoo Photography (Shogakukan, 1985) presents the "works" of ten Japanese tattoo artists — that is, the various tattoos on men's bodies — and the artist with the most pieces in it is "Sandaime Horiyoshi," Horiyoshi III, a traditional Japanese tattoo master who is 73 this year. He is well known in Japan's tattoo world and better known outside it: a flower that blooms inside the wall and scents the street beyond. His studio in Yokohama, and the Tattoo History Museum he founded, receive a steady stream of tattoo enthusiasts from Japan and abroad, among them musicians such as the Red Hot Chili Peppers and David Bowie. In recent years, though, according to Nakano Mayumi, the museum's curator and Horiyoshi III's wife, the largest group of visitors has been Chinese: "I don't know why, but they all love having their picture taken with my husband."

Horiyoshi III is famous in China's tattoo world for a few reasons. First, people believe he is the Yamaguchi-gumi's own tattoo artist. Second, his skill is held to be in a class of its own — he reportedly never works from a sketch, drawing the design straight onto the client's body. Third, his traditional Japanese designs are exactingly thought out and carry a style all their own.

This time I was lucky enough to get an interview with him, at his studio in Yokohama. Yokohama is the most populous city in Japan, but his studio sits on the second floor of a Showa-era building in a quiet residential pocket, and next to the crowds around Yokohama Station it feels like another world entirely. A wooden sign carved with "Sandaime Horiyoshi" hangs outside the door, and in front of it sits a fox — the messenger of Inari, the god of agriculture and commerce worshipped all over Japan. I knocked, and Horiyoshi III himself appeared.

"You've come. Thanks for the trouble. Come in." His tone was warm, his movements offhand. But the moment I stepped inside he met my eyes, and it was not the gaze of a man past seventy. The place is not large: past a small anteroom is a tatami room of about 30 square meters, his studio, where clients lie down and endure the pain of being tattooed. We exchanged a few pleasantries; his speech was clipped and to the point, and, as I would find throughout the interview, laced with yakuza slang. It carried the dash of an older kind of man. Then he sat down straight on the tatami and gestured with one hand; I knelt on the tatami and bowed. That is how the interview began.

A Man of Chivalry

Horiyoshi III's birth name is Nakano Yoshihito. He was born in Showa 21 (1946) in Shimada, a town on the Oi River in Shizuoka Prefecture. His father made geta, wooden clogs; his grandfather was a man of ninkyo — the chivalrous outlaw code — active in the Meiji era. Nakano Yoshihito grew up in that grandfather's care.

"By the time I was born he'd already become a 'righteous man,' but in his younger days he was a yakuza, making his living running stalls at festivals and markets. So he put special weight on the way of a man and lived by it — he valued giri, loyalty and duty. I remember him telling me: whatever you do in the future is fine, but you must be the best in Japan at it — even if you become a thief, you'd better be the best damn thief in Japan. That's the kind of man he was. So later, when I decided against my parents' wishes to become a tattoo artist, I resolved to become one who would never lose to anyone."

After finishing middle school, Nakano Yoshihito left his parents' house and moved to Shimizu, a ward of Shizuoka, renting a room of under eight square meters. Some say he chose Shimizu because he was drawn to Shimizu Jirocho[1], the Meiji-era folk hero. When I put this to him directly, he waved a hand and said:

"No, no, that's completely made up. I certainly don't dislike Shimizu Jirocho — he really was a good man. He built harbors, ran land reclamation projects around Mount Fuji, founded Japan's first English-language private school; his contributions to the community are too many to list. But I moved to Shimizu because the wages were higher there. That's all. (laughs)"

"Back then, once you reached ninth grade, students were split into two tracks — the 'college-prep track' and the 'employment track.' I was in the latter. As graduation neared, the school hallway would be plastered with job postings, and I picked the one with the highest pay, in Shimizu. It was a subcontractor for Hitachi, Ltd. At the time Hitachi made its motor casings out of iron, and the castings that came out bad or were scrapped were gathered in one spot and smashed with a giant iron ball for recycling. The work was extremely dangerous — the ball hung in the air from a single hook, and if it fell and rolled your way, that was it, you were dead. Some castings were too thick, so you first had to drill through them with a power drill. Once a small metal shard hit me in the face and nearly blinded me. Later a fellow worker introduced me to another job, welding at a shipyard. I found out afterward that he only wanted the referral fee (laughs), but the pay was better than before and it wasn't as grueling, so I was satisfied."

It was during this period that Nakano Yoshihito got his first tattoo, at 21. Some of that came from his surroundings: the wooden apartment building he lived in was full of yakuza fresh out of prison and dead-serious craftsmen, and not one of them was without a tattoo. He had also carried a private fascination with tattoos since childhood:

"Back then ordinary households didn't have their own bathrooms, so after a day's work everyone would take a small towel to the sentō, the public bathhouse. One day — I must have still been in elementary school — I was bathing when a man stood up out of the tub right in front of me, and his whole body was covered in tattoos. I was stunned. It was so cool, truly incredible. That shock stayed with me. Once I started earning my own money, I looked at a lot of pictures and a lot of tattoos, and I liked Horiyoshi I's style best, so I asked him to do the celestial maiden on my back. Now I have a celestial maiden and a dragon back there — the work of the first and second generations."

Three Visits to the Master's Door

The young Nakano Yoshihito sought out Horiyoshi I and settled on him as a father figure, and it all began with one "small matter."

He had already taught himself to tattoo and could work on others with homemade tools; word of mouth among his friends was good, and he could easily make a living at it. But self-taught technique and knowledge hit a ceiling soon enough — color control, handling — and Nakano Yoshihito badly wanted to find Horiyoshi I and learn "real tattooing" from the ground up. Not knowing where to start, he wrote Horiyoshi I a letter, and got no reply. He tried again by chikki, a delivery service the Japan National Railways once ran, and then by direct courier. Still nothing. After stewing for more than a month, in the biting cold of February, he decided to go and talk to Horiyoshi I face to face.

"He actually heard me out quite seriously. At the end Horiyoshi I asked: an apprentice doesn't earn money — could I accept that? I said money didn't matter to me. Horiyoshi I said a man who could already make a living from tattooing and still wanted to come and apprentice was a man he could trust."

"So that settled it — I could be his apprentice. But I was still working elsewhere and had to sort that out first. What troubled me most was that my boss there was a good man and we got along well, so I could never bring myself to tell him to his face that I was quitting. In the end I left him a letter with my thanks and my apologies, explaining what I wanted to do with my life. I heard later that the boss was pleased when he read it, because most young people who quit just vanish without a word."

"In April, carrying nothing but a Boston bag — the kind with a rectangular bottom, made of stiff fabric — with 70,000 yen inside, my entire worldly wealth, I arrived at Horiyoshi I's house in Yokohama. He happened to be out that day. His wife, whom everyone called 'big sister,' phoned someone on my behalf and said into the receiver: your apprentice is here. Being called an apprentice right off the bat — my heart was pounding. Horiyoshi I rode back on his motorcycle and took me to his studio. The moment I saw it and realized I could finally become a real tattoo artist, I was overcome. He put me up on the second floor of the studio. The staircase was incredibly steep — I've never seen one that steep since — and upstairs was a four-tatami-mat room. Half of it was taken up by the drum set Horiyoshi II, Horiyoshi I's son, used for his band. On the remaining two mats was a thin mattress, some cheap polyurethane foam thing, with a summer futon and a pillow on top. All of it brand new. Horiyoshi I told me he'd bought it because I was coming. Looking at that mattress, I was overwhelmed with gratitude — I'd drifted around and slept in a lot of places, and nobody had ever been that good to me. That was the moment I decided to give him the rest of my life."

In the spring of 1971, with the cherry blossoms in full bloom, 25-year-old Nakano Yoshihito formally entered Horiyoshi I's tutelage and stepped into the world of Japanese tattooing.

Life as an Apprentice

After years of drifting, Nakano Yoshihito had finally found a good master, but being his apprentice was no easy thing. Asked about that period, Horiyoshi III sums up his main memory in one line: getting yelled at.

"I really did get yelled at every single day, whatever I did. For instance, Horiyoshi I said we'd have Sunday off, and I was thrilled — I went out to have fun. That night he called and asked, furious, where I'd been. I said I'd gone to see a movie, and he snapped: 'You idiot! A customer came in today!' I thought, but you're the one who told me I could take the day off. I didn't talk back. Another time, in summer, I came back to my room after work and took a bath. Horiyoshi I called right then, and I didn't hear it. After my bath he called again and asked what I'd been doing — I said bathing. He said, 'How luxurious of you. A customer just came in over here.' What I wanted to say was: can't a man take a bath after a hard day's work in summer? All it earned me was an apology from my own mouth. That's how the older generation was — whatever they said was right, and when they were wrong they were still right. That's just how it was."

Being yelled at did not mean being disliked. Horiyoshi I had quite a few apprentices then; some couldn't stand the daily scolding and slipped away, and others he simply threw out.

"Once Horiyoshi I told me to go talk another apprentice into leaving. The kid wasn't bad — he never talked back, and Horiyoshi I had never even yelled at him. I really didn't want to do it, but I had no choice. I took him to a coffee shop and said: Horiyoshi I wants you to reconsider. He said okay, and left. Whenever something was awkward, the old man handed it to me. When his mood was bad he'd yell at me, but I think that was how he showed he cared. It was the only way he knew."

Ordinarily a new apprentice isn't allowed to touch the tools at all. He can only catch fragments of his master's technique between cleaning, tidying the room, running errands and looking after clients, and piece it together over years of stolen glances. But because Nakano Yoshihito already had the grounding and the experience, he was allowed to take part in some of the work not long after joining.

"At first I only did the simple things — shading the darkest parts of a gradient, drawing thick outlines. The whole process was done by hand, no electric equipment at all. A few months later Horiyoshi I told me to do more, and little by little I could do full-body pieces. When I finished one myself, I wanted to ask him whether it was actually any good, but he'd never tell me anything. He'd look, all right, but all he'd say was 'Hm.' Sometimes what I'd done was clearly no good, practically a failure, and I'd ask him exactly what was wrong, and the only answer was another 'Hm.' You could only guess from his face and the sound of his voice what that 'Hm' meant. You had to use your own head. Every day, the same 'conversation,' over and over."

There was no electric tattoo machine back then. The only way to do a Japanese tattoo was tebori, hand-poking: a long needle held in the right hand, braced against the side of the left thumb, driving an ink-soaked tip into the skin again and again. This way of putting pigment into the body is usually divided into two kinds — imotsuki, a light repeated tapping of the needle, and hanebari, a flick of the tip that makes a crackling sound — but to Horiyoshi III these are, at most, "the basics of the basics."

"To this day there's no book, no material, for learning tebori properly. You can only learn it by word of mouth, following a master. So let me tell you, plenty of tattoo artists today say they know tebori, but all they have is imotsuki and hanebari, the basics — that doesn't count as knowing tebori. There are many more techniques: tatebari, the vertical needle; yokobari, the horizontal needle; kadobari, the angle needle; urabari, the back needle; hineri, the twist, and others. You combine several of them to get shading worth the name. And shading itself has four gradations: usuzumi, light ink; nakazumi, mid ink; honzumi, full black; and akebono, the fade. I doubt there are more than a handful of people in Japan who can command all of it freely."

By Horiyoshi III's account, an apprentice's life was not only work, meals and sleep. In this interview he smiled most when he remembered the hot-blooded moments of his youth.

"Once I got into a fight on the street in Isezakicho, where Horiyoshi I's studio was — a real brawl, I nearly killed the guy. I saw him start convulsing on the ground and knew it was bad, so I flagged a taxi and fled. To throw off any police who might come after me, I switched taxis several times and didn't get back to my room until night. The first thing I did the next morning was check the newspaper for a report of a murder in Isezakicho. About a week later, the old man suddenly told me not to go around fighting. He said we tattoo artists aren't street thugs, we're skilled professionals, so we have to take care of our bodies or we can't work. I listened, and I stopped fighting. To this day I wonder whether he knew the man in that fight was me, or whether it was a coincidence. Maybe he knew."

"Another time, Horiyoshi I's daughter came to me out of the blue and said she wanted a tattoo. Think about it — the master's own daughter. I didn't dare touch her. But she said if I wouldn't do it she'd go to Horikin, Horiyoshi I's rival. I had no choice but to tattoo her. A few days later Horiyoshi I discovered his daughter had a tattoo I'd done, and he came and gave me a furious dressing-down. I didn't explain myself, and I didn't mention Horikin. Tattooing his daughter was wrong of me, whatever the reason — it wasn't right, and in a situation like that a man doesn't make excuses. If you did wrong, you own it."

Children Never Understand a Parent's Heart

One day Horiyoshi I called Nakano Yoshihito over. Expecting another scolding, he was handed a bank passbook instead. "There's a million yen in there," Horiyoshi I said. Nakano Yoshihito had no idea what was happening and simply stood there stunned.

"As an apprentice my cut was ten percent. My rate then was 1,500 yen a session, so I'd keep 150 yen from a session and the rest went to Horiyoshi I. Next to the tattoo tools there was a small box, and when a client finished he'd put a tip in it — back then we didn't call it a tip, we called it 'cigarette money.' It worked out to about ten percent too. That custom is gone now, but in those days going to get a tattoo and not leaving a tip was a deeply shameful thing. So whether they were yakuza or craftsmen, once the tattoo was done they'd settle the fee and then add a bit more. Every so often the old man would come by and ask whether what was in the box was tip money, and once I nodded he'd take it away. I thought, how can he be so cold, confiscating even the tips. It never occurred to me that he was quietly saving that money for me. When I opened the passbook I saw the money hadn't gone in all at once but a little each week, over several years. And since the tips were split three ways between Horiyoshi I, Horiyoshi II and me, it wasn't much at a time. I didn't dare touch something that precious. That's how I first learned what saving money was. Before that I had no concept of it — whatever was in my hand, I spent. Ah, people back then did things with such style. Now you'd insist on knowing the split in advance, how much would be put aside for you, or the other person would get suspicious. But people of that generation didn't say a word. They just quietly saved it for you and handed it over once it hit a million. That was their aesthetic."

Actions teach more than words; children grow up watching their parents' backs. When Nakano Yoshihito later took on apprentices of his own, he began saving money for them too.

"But not one of them lasted that long. Before I could put a million aside for any of them, they'd left. So all the money I'd saved for them came back to me (laughs). Still, I don't want to complain, because when I was young I didn't understand how much the old man had been thinking of me either. It's just as the saying goes — children never understand their parents' hearts."

The Master's Illness, and Taking On His Name

Nakano Yoshihito's time working alongside Horiyoshi I was in fact not long, because Horiyoshi I fell ill and went into hospital. After that Nakano Yoshihito visited him every day; he was the only person in the master's family willing to go. Each day after lunch he bought two meat buns at a convenience store and headed to the hospital. There was a caretaker in the ward looking after Horiyoshi I; Nakano Yoshihito would hand over the buns and talk with his master for an hour. At that point the studio had only him working in it, and since he had no reputation yet, clients were pitifully few. Those days were quiet — drawing in the morning, visiting his master in the afternoon, then reading and drawing some more — and every time Nakano Yoshihito appeared in the ward, Horiyoshi I would ask him:

Horiyoshi I: Nakano, did you get any work today?

Nakano Yoshihito: Ah, no, not today.

Horiyoshi I: Is that so... how could that be.

In 1979 (Showa 54) Horiyoshi I raised the matter of succession — that Nakano Yoshihito should inherit the professional name Horiyoshi and become Horiyoshi III — and Nakano Yoshihito hesitated.

"Horiyoshi II started learning at fifteen and already had a name by then, while I only started really learning at twenty-five. With a gap like that in experience, I didn't dare take the name of Horiyoshi III. Horiyoshi II was drifting around elsewhere at the time, and I asked the old man what would happen if my elder brother came back. He said, lightly, 'Then he can be your apprentice.' Hearing that made me even less willing to take it."

When Nakano Yoshihito first became an apprentice, Horiyoshi I had no intention of passing the name to him. He had once told Nakano Yoshihito that when he'd mastered tattooing he could go open a shop in Fukagawa, a district in Tokyo's Koto Ward. Horiyoshi I had worked construction around Fukagawa in his younger years and knew there were plenty of yakuza there — no shortage of customers. "But the way a life arranges itself is strange and unfathomable; nobody can see the bottom of it. Somehow I ended up as Horiyoshi III."

"When Horiyoshi II came back, he came to talk to me. We sat in a coffee shop and he asked me straight out whether I really meant to take the name. He'd had apprentices of his own before and every one of them had left, so I think he'd grown a little distrustful of apprentices in general — which is understandable."

But even while Horiyoshi II was away from his father, Nakano Yoshihito never betrayed his senior's trust; he went on caring for Horiyoshi I as he always had, and in the end Horiyoshi II had to accept him. Not long after Nakano Yoshihito took the name, Horiyoshi II left the tattoo world altogether, for reasons Nakano Yoshihito puts down to the tangle of relationships in the trade: "The tattoo world is complicated. It's not like today — back then a lot of clients were yakuza, and sometimes a tattoo artist got used by them, or caught between two sides. It was exhausting. Horiyoshi II probably couldn't take it and didn't want to do it anymore."

When Horiyoshi I raised the succession, he also asked Nakano Yoshihito to take care of what would come after his death — meaning his wife. "Relatives can't be relied on, but an outsider will take responsibility, don't you think?" his master asked. Nakano Yoshihito could only nod and say "hai." "That one 'hai' was the iron chain that bound me here. The 'hai' I said that day, the thin mattress, and the million yen — those three things decided everything for me. Without them I might well have left."

To this day he still hands about a tenth of his income to Horiyoshi I's widow. Keeping his word matters enormously to Nakano Yoshihito, a lesson he took from his grandfather as a child:

"Even a spoken promise mattered more to my grandfather than anything. One day when I was a boy I was doing homework at home after school. I was bored, glancing at the clock, then the textbook, then around the room, unable to sit still. My grandfather saw me like that and asked whether I had plans with friends. I didn't, but I wanted to know what would happen if I did, so I told him yes, I had plans. The next moment he was shouting: 'Homework or plans — which one matters more!?' And he sent me straight out. He taught me how much a promise is worth, and I never forgot it. To this day I take promises extremely seriously. When I was young I'd drink with friends until dawn, and the next morning I'd rack my brain certain I'd promised somebody something, without being able to remember what. Few households had a phone then, so I'd bike over to my friend's house just to ask what we'd agreed the night before. Only then could I go to work with an easy mind."

Go Where the People Are

Nakano Yoshihito inherited the professional name and became Horiyoshi III at thirty-three, and then almost no clients came — so few that he nearly took a side job.

"There really were no clients — one or two a month, and only two or three calls asking. To make ends meet I even thought about opening an adult toy shop. Just as I was working out the plan, the newspaper carried a report about a thug who broke into an adult toy shop and beat the old woman minding it to death on the spot. I knew at once I could never open a shop like that. If anything happened, it would stain the Horiyoshi name. So there was only one road left: go and find clients. There's a Japanese saying — to find a person, look where the people are; to find rice, look where the rice is. So to find tattoo clients, you go where people gather. The ones who liked getting tattooed were mostly yakuza, and they were in the entertainment districts, so every night I'd walk the bars and the snacks, the little family-run bars. Some bars have glass windows, and if I spotted a face I knew through the glass I'd go in and say hello."

Horiyoshi III: Big brother, hello! Long time no see.

Big brother: Hey! Long time no see. Come, sit down — how's it going lately?

Horiyoshi III: Not good at all, I'm about to starve. Big brother, could you introduce me to someone?

Big brother: Sure, next time I'll send one of the young guys your way.

Through this kind of "effort," Horiyoshi III's clientele slowly grew. At the studio, if he spotted another artist's work on a client's body, he'd say so and take a photograph to study later. Even waiting for clients he wouldn't put down his brush; his sketches papered the walls of the small room. "There's supposedly a hardworking tattoo artist over in Yokohama" became a line passed around the streets, and it made his name. "So you see, you can't take the old sayings lightly — they're really true. If you want to find something, you have to look in the right place. I learned something else from it too: when life hits a low point you need to go out more, not shrink back or shut yourself behind a door and sulk."

"You really worked hard," I said, offhand. Horiyoshi III looked me straight in the eye:

"That's true. I doubt young people today put in that kind of effort. I pushed myself that hard not for money or fame but for Horiyoshi I. In the hospital room he'd ask whether I'd had any work that day, and hearing me say no he'd sigh, 'Is that so...' That sound, ah, it broke my heart. I truly didn't want him sad or disappointed because of me. That was the main reason I worked so hard and studied so hard."

"Of course, working on your skill benefits you in the end. But the starting point is the other person. Take a man who works himself to the bone out there — it's to make his wife happy, to bring more money home to her. You're the same, aren't you: you write because it's your life and your self-realization, and in the end every job comes back to yourself. But to realize yourself there has to be a third party. If people love your book you're happy; if it doesn't sell you're sad — so you work. I'm the same."

"Mr. Nakano, the Shoes! Look at the Shoes!"

On the subject of tips, Horiyoshi III later told me another good story. As his skill improved, the price of a session went from 1,500 yen at the start up to 3,000, and by the time he took the professional name it had reached 5,000[2].

"Horiyoshi I told me even Horiyoshi II hadn't dared charge that much. But I thought my skill was good enough, so I held at 5,000 yen, and eventually people accepted it. I told you the tip clients gave was about ten percent — but that was the standard for ordinary clients. With the yakuza big brothers it was especially generous."

Gambling was the main business of yakuza members then; they gambled every day until dawn. After closing up in the small hours, the senior man in the group would grab a fistful of cash from the terasen box — terasen is yakuza slang for the organizer's cut — and hand it around, 20,000 yen a day per man being nothing unusual, and they'd bring that money in to get "carved."

"These clients would usually turn up around noon for a tattoo. When it was done they'd pay me 5,000 yen and then hand me another 10,000 as a tip. The tip was double the fee — that was their arithmetic. For me 5,000 was plenty, and I wouldn't take the tip. So the clients found a way around me. Resting after the tattoo, one would point at a shirt hanging in the room and ask, 'Hey, is that shirt yours?' Asking with real relish, as though the thing fascinated him. I'd say yes, and on his way out he'd stuff a 10,000-yen note into the shirt pocket. Next time I knew better and hid the shirt, to make clear I really wouldn't take the tip. So then he took a liking to my shoes. On his way out he asked, 'Are these your shoes?' I said yes, and just as he closed the door he said: 'Mr. Nakano, the shoes! Look at the shoes!' And off he went. The guys back then were something. A lot of fun, and full of style."

Their free hand with money had to do with yakuza tradition as well. As the saying goes, an Edokko — an old Tokyoite — never lets his money sit overnight; money a big brother handed out in the morning was to be spent that same day. To them "planned spending" or "saving" was a joke, the kind of thing that got you looked down on by your peers.

"Of course a small part of it would be kept back, or things got inconvenient, but they really did spend freely. When money was tight, or they needed a lump sum, they'd sometimes consider going to prison for it. The police would occasionally come to raid an illegal gambling den, but there was an understanding on both sides — the police would quietly tip the gang off beforehand. Once the group got word, they'd pick one man to stay behind at the den on purpose on the day the police came. For the man arrested that way, the boss would put money aside — say 10,000 yen a day. After a two-year sentence, think how much that comes to. Several million yen. At that era's prices, converted to today's, it could be worth more than 10 million yen. So at the studio I often heard the young ones talking among themselves about whether they should volunteer next time. Of course, if you go looking for trouble on your own the group won't help you at all — but if you do it for the group and your brothers, they'll take care of you."

In Horiyoshi III's mind, genuine, traditional yakuza and the so-called gurentai — delinquent youth gangs indifferent to morality and quick to violence — are two clearly different things. Because he dealt more closely with the former, he has particular admiration for the yakuza's spirit of mutual support and care.

"Whether it's the simulated parent-child relationship or the traditional 'three obediences of women' — obeying her father before marriage, her husband after marriage, her son after her husband's death — at bottom it's all care for one another. In the yakuza world that tradition survives to this day. If a disaster hits anywhere in Japan, their headquarters immediately contacts branches across the country, and they use every means — sea, land and air, boats, trucks, planes — to get daily necessities into the disaster zone. Food, water, diapers, sanitary pads, everything. They get there far earlier than the government's relief effort. When people are suffering, they're the first to move. The essence of what we call ninkyo lies in that spirit of mutual support, but the mainstream media never reports it. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011 — the same both times, yakuza from all over the country helping civilians. I even heard about a yakuza boss who, when the Fukushima nuclear accident happened, took one man with him to help and put in 10 million yen of his own money. People like that don't use Twitter or write blogs, and of course the media doesn't report it — only the few people around them ever know. The yakuza don't publicize any of it."

"That aesthetic of that era is thinning out now." Horiyoshi III's devotion to this unseen yakuza aesthetic, and to the sentiment that it is often the lowliest who prove the most righteous, comes from two things: this is his own sense of loyalty and duty, and this way of thinking connects directly to tattooing.

"Young people today start with tattoos in obvious places, the arms or the neck. The moment they take their clothes off, the back, the part that's normally hidden, has nothing on it at all. That isn't an aesthetic, it's an ugly-thetic. In the old days people got tattooed in the inconspicuous places first and only worked their way toward the places others could see. Back then, if you had a tattoo on your arm and nothing on your back, people would certainly laugh at you."

Since we were on the subject of yakuza, I took the chance to put to him the claim that he is the "Yamaguchi-gumi's own tattoo artist," and again he waved it away: "I don't belong exclusively to any one group."

"As everyone knows, the Yamaguchi-gumi split into three groups in recent years — the Sixth Generation, Kobe and Ninkyo. If a tattoo artist belonged exclusively to one group and tattooed only its members, and that group later split again, some of those tattoos would have no way to be continued, and his client base would suffer. What's more, belonging exclusively to one yakuza organization means reporting your every movement up the chain — if I wanted to go compete in a tattoo contest overseas, I'd have to tell them before I left and report again when I came back."

He went on, smiling: "Chinese friends all seem to love this 'Yamaguchi-gumi's own artist' line — they bring it up with me constantly. Of course, among my clients there are people from the Yamaguchi-gumi and from other groups, people from the sex industry, young people, foreigners. As long as they're not minors, I'll take anyone."

Japanese Tattooing and Foreigners

Traditional Japanese tattoos, Horiyoshi III says, never used many colors: in the past there were only ink black, vermilion and brown. Blue and yellow came later, but within a year or two the blue would darken and the yellow would turn brown, ruining the look. So even as an apprentice he had started hunting for pigments.

"There weren't many pigments for traditional Japanese tattooing, only black, red and brown. The raw material for red, honshu, is mercury sulfide, a compound of sulfur and mercury, and afterward people would run a fever. A fever of 38.5°C, for three days and nights. Getting tattooed in the old days was brutal. I heard later that there were a few pigment makers around Kansai, near Osaka, but truly none near Tokyo. My ambition was at its peak then — I wanted to make tattoos different from everyone else's, more beautiful — so I went out looking for pigments every day. I'd ask other tattoo artists too, but that was trade-secret territory, so they wouldn't tell me. Eventually someone happened to say that Shimbashi, in Tokyo's Minato Ward, was worth a look, and on that one word I went to find the manufacturer. It took several months of asking all over Shimbashi, but I really did find a lake-blue pigment, an especially beautiful one. I tried it on my own leg first, and once I was sure there was no problem I used it on clients. These days, though, most of the pigments used at the studio are made overseas."

Horiyoshi III believes in the virtues of traditional tebori — finer detail, far more vivid color, slower to fade — but tattoo technique overseas has been advancing quickly too. And because of the liver failure he has lived with for years, he now has to spend several days a week lying down for dialysis; on hand-poking alone his body could no longer carry him through a large piece, so he also uses an electric tattoo machine.

From Horiyoshi III's Instagram. A tattoo done almost entirely free hand; at the start you can't tell what the final image will be. "Koi, dragons, snakes — the designs are all in my head, I just draw them straight onto the client's body. Anyone can copy the designs and the style, but this kind of free-hand work, it seems nobody else can do. This dragon could keep going right across the whole body, joined into one piece."

From Horiyoshi III's Instagram, the traditional hand-poking method. "Where others take two or three hours, I need only thirty or forty minutes. It's easier on the client that way. In this process I use several of the techniques I just described. Otherwise it wouldn't go this fast."

Asked about the differences between tattooing overseas and traditional Japanese tattooing, he dwelt not on design or technique but mainly on the spiritual side.

"When I entered the Horiyoshi lineage I carried a yakuza sense of loyalty. I thought, since I'd become an apprentice I should do right by it, and one day make my master proud. What's called 'planting pine and cedar'[3]. So one day I noticed a newly opened tattoo studio nearby, not far from Horiyoshi I's place. I went and tattled about it, and his reaction was completely flat. He said, don't bother about it — if there's someone with lower skill nearby, it only makes ours look better. Hearing that, I was won over. How cool. Now, when my wife tells me a new tattoo studio has opened somewhere in Yokohama, I copy Horiyoshi I and say the same line back to her. (laughs)"

The Nishi Ward area of Yokohama, Horiyoshi III says, falls within the Horiyoshi lineage's territory, and by rights other tattoo artists aren't supposed to open studios there.

"Others can't, and a disciple of the Horiyoshi lineage even less so, because that would be taking the food off your own family's table. When we tattoo artists open a studio, you used to have to keep a certain distance from other artists already established locally — at least three train stations. When you were preparing to open, you first spoke with the most senior master in the area, and if he accepted it you went and greeted the other local artists. Only then could you open. That was mandatory. We had a case here in Nishi Ward: a young tattoo artist came to me only just before he was due to open, and I said no. I'm the oldest one in this area, and if I say it's fine, the nearby artists have to accept the newcomer whether they want to or not. So I told this young man to go and ask the other artists and see if they'd nod. Not one of them accepted. He came back and told me, and that was that — he packed it in. He wasted a large sum of money that way."

It sounds harsh. And at that moment Horiyoshi III's voice went flat and cold: "The yakuza world can't accept that kind of behavior, and the craftsman's world can accept it even less. Otherwise there's no aesthetic left. What we're talking about is tattooing. It isn't the same as opening a ramen shop."

He went on: "A tattoo artist's territory used to be that wide. It's completely different now. You can't walk half an hour without hitting another studio, and they don't know each other and don't greet each other. Tattoo culture overseas flies the flag of freestyle, and it's made a mess of traditions that were already there. It's like the takeout bento shops — there's one here, and diagonally across the street another with what looks like the same name, only with 'original' tacked on. A few steps further and there's another takeout bento shop (laughs). They don't even understand why doing it that way is wrong. Maybe it's because the education system is different. Whatever you do, there's an order to it. You build the foundation first, study it properly, and only then move on to bigger things. Young people today are different — they want to go big from the start. You can't reach good quality that way. That's Japan today. Japanese young people don't get it, and young people overseas understand it even less. Nothing to be done."

The Only Heir

There's a claim circulating online that Horiyoshi III's only successor is a German man, a "fourth generation" heir. When I brought this up in the interview he was dumbfounded, visibly thrown: "What!? Who said that? Impossible, there's no such thing at all. My only heir is my son. Nobody else."

"There's something I want to say about apprentices. I've taken on quite a few over the years, seven at the peak. The way I see it, becoming an apprentice is like becoming a retainer in service to a lord. If anything happens to your lord, you drop everything and help. Ninkyo, yakuza, tattooing — the logic of the world I met when I was young worked like that, and to me it was simply how things were. You could call that relationship a simulated parent-child bond, a simulated brotherhood, because you treat the other man as your real father or your real brother. But once I had apprentices of my own I realized the world has changed. Finding someone who can understand that old logic of ours is now close to impossible."

"Modern people are like office workers: you do a bit of work for the company, take the corresponding pay, learn the skill you wanted and leave. Bye-bye. That's the style now. So none of my apprentices are left; every one of them went. There was one I thought highly of, and when he wanted to leave I tried to talk him into pushing on a bit longer. He said he wanted a day to think it over, and in the end he still went. All I could do was accept it. So... how to put it, human relationships now aren't built on trust anymore. I trust you, you trust me, we give everything for each other — none of that is possible now. It's gone completely."

"For instance, there was an apprentice whose eyesight wasn't good, so I had my wife take him to get glasses made and I paid for them. Or a new apprentice arrives, and my whole family and the other apprentices go out to eat together — whatever they want to eat or drink, I pick up the bill. When someone new came, that would go on for at least half a month to help him settle in. But usually they wouldn't say a word; the meals felt like a wake. At the most, meals alone cost 500,000 yen a month, about 30,000 yuan. I don't know how much I spent on apprentices over the years — one who stayed 15 years, I probably spent several million yen on him. But I won't go on about it, because that was mine to decide. And when I think about myself: what made me stay with Horiyoshi I was the mattress, the futon and the pillow. He died long ago, but I still look after his wife. Plenty of people tell me I've done enough and can stop, but this is my sense of duty."

A Promise to His Wife

In recent years Horiyoshi III has devoted himself to the annual Lone Wolf Exhibition, renamed the Tiger Wolf Exhibition in 2018, a two-person show he mounts each time with a fellow artist. This year the sixth Tiger Wolf Exhibition opened on October 10 at a gallery in Harajuku.

"When I married my wife I made her a promise. I said I probably couldn't become the most skilled tattoo artist in the world — there's always someone above you. But I would become one of the most famous. First famous in the Kanto region, around Tokyo, including Yokohama; then in Japan, then Asia, and finally at the world level. To make good on that, you have to do things other tattoo artists don't. That's the thinking behind the art books and the exhibitions. This October's Tiger Wolf Exhibition is with a Taiwanese artist, Horiyen, or Jess Yen, and we get on very well. You should come and see it — plenty of foreigners come, Korean, Russian, Australian, European and American, and Chinese too. My son happens to be in Shanghai and Hong Kong right now, in September 2018, for the tattoo shows there, but he'll be back in October for mine."

Speaking of his son, Nakano Kazuyoshi, Horiyoshi III's eyes took on a touch of warmth. Nakano Kazuyoshi was born in 1984 and began learning to tattoo from his father right after finishing middle school; he already has extensive experience competing at tattoo contests at home and abroad. As the Japanese saying has it, let the child you love weather the storms — Horiyoshi III firmly backs his son going out to see the world.

"I drifted around after finishing middle school too. At fifteen I shared a rented room with a man of twenty-one who had a girlfriend, and she wrote him love letters constantly. He was very proud of it and would read them aloud to me now and then; I even saw the lipstick marks on the paper. Very romantic. But later, after she dumped him, he tried to kill himself. He survived, luckily, and the boss sent me to go find the woman. I roughly knew where she worked, so I biked over, and she wasn't there. The boss was furious: how could you be so stupid, if she's not there you have to ask where she's gone and when she'll be back! So, you see, there's a lot you can't experience sitting at home. I imagine my son is out there learning something right now."

It sounds like a hands-off approach, but at the Tiger Wolf Exhibition I noticed Nakano Kazuyoshi speaking to his parents in honorific Japanese. Horiyoshi III acknowledged it in the interview: "Very few families today have their children speaking to them in honorifics. We've been pretty strict with our son. My method is that when I catch him doing something wrong I say nothing at the time; I let it build up. Only when I really can't stand it anymore do I put a whole pile of things to him at once. That's why he's still a bit afraid of me. Scolding on the spot doesn't actually work that well."

Nakano Kazuyoshi's current title is sōryō, meaning heir, and Horiyoshi III has set no timetable for passing on the name. "That has to wait until he's ready himself. And even if he wants to inherit the family trade, if I don't think he's prepared, it can't happen. But whatever happens, the future Horiyoshi IV is him. There's no other possibility. Put that clearly in your article."

Still Breaking Through

Japanese martial arts have a philosophical idea, Shu-Ha-Ri, and Horiyoshi III has carried it into his tattoo career.

"The stage of study and practice is called shu. You lose yourself in books, in other people's tattoos, learning technique from your master. The reason I can now draw any design from memory is that during that stage I fixed all of them in my head and my hands. Once that stage passes you move to ha — using the skill and the wit you built up by your own effort to break past what came before. I think I'm in ha now. Holding exhibitions, collaborating with others, that's also a way of breaking past myself. This state is particularly interesting for a person — new ideas keep coming up in my head, and I actually have the skill to realize them. If I stay in ha for the rest of my life and never reach ri, I can accept that too. Honestly, I suspect ri wouldn't be nearly this much fun. Ri means going back to the beginning, back to shu, the original state. There'd be no point in that."

"These days I'm up before five. I love to draw, and tattooing is a joy too — there's no shortage of things I want to do. Every so often I meet someone like you, who comes all the way from abroad to interview me; when I was young I never imagined such a thing. Better not to drink every day, either. There are plenty of things in this world more fun than drinking (laughs)."

Notes

[1] Shimizu Jirocho (Shimizuno Jirochō, 1820–1893): a famous gambler from the end of the Edo period into the Meiji era, and boss of the Shimizu Ikka gang that ran the Shimizu area. He is the subject of many rōkyoku, a form of Japanese narrative singing, and of many films.

[2] According to Japanese government statistics, university graduates in the 1970s earned around 150,000 yen a month. Japanese wage levels have not changed dramatically over the past forty years or so: as of 2017, a university graduate's starting monthly salary was around 200,000 yen, about 12,200 yuan.

[3] "Planting pine and cedar" (matsu sugi o ueru): a gambler's term for the mindset or the act of working for, or sacrificing oneself for, one's boss and organization. In Japanese, "matsu" (pine) is a homophone for "waiting" — for a customer — and cedar grows very straight, higher than a rooftop; both are taken as auspicious.

Profile: Horiyoshi III

A renowned traditional Japanese tattoo master. Born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1946, he entered the Yokohama Horiyoshi lineage at 21 and inherited the professional name to become Horiyoshi III at 33. He has published four art books: 《百鬼図》 (Hyakki Zu, 1998), 《水滸列伝図譜》 (Suikoden Retsuden Zufu, 2001), 《幽霊鬼斗卅六釁圖》 (2007) and 《幻妖武者[五十八]魁圖風》 (2008), all with Nihon Shuppansha.

Official website: click here

Tattoo History Museum

Address: Imai Building 1F, 1-11-7 Hiranuma, Nishi Ward, Yokohama

Admission: 1,000 yen

Closed Tuesdays; generally open in the afternoons.

About the Author

Yoshii Shinobu, a Japanese writer who works in Chinese, lives in Beijing. She graduated from International Christian University in Japan in international relations. She has studied in Chengdu, farmed in southern France, and worked as an economic news editor in Taipei, Manila and Shanghai, among other places. She now writes full time and is the author of Bento Through the Four Seasons and Tokyo Bookstores, and was an editorial reviewer for the "MUJI Light Cooking" book series, among others.

Images in this article were provided by the author and the interview subject, with permission from museum curator Nakano Mayumi.