episodeJapan outlaws it
1872 — and legal again in 1948
1,872 – 1,948 · Banned at the opening of Meiji; legalised under the occupation
What it is
Japan banned tattooing while presenting itself to the world, and foreigners immediately travelled there to be tattooed.
The long version
The ban was about image. The practice continued underground, tattooists worked on visiting sailors and princes, and the association with criminality that the ban created outlasted the ban by three generations. Osaka's mayor was still surveying city employees about their tattoos in 2012, and the courts found against him.
The Ryukyus got their own prohibition in 1899, aimed at hajichi on women's hands. Taiwan's Atayal were banned from facial tattooing in 1930 by the same administration.
Inference — three bans, one state, sixty years, and each one targets the marks of a people being absorbed. The Meiji ban is usually told as a story about respectability. Seen with the other two, it is a story about who gets to look like themselves.
Connected to
- Irezumi What was banned.
- Hajichi And who else.
- Atayal ptasan And who else again.
Named here by
- Irezumi The ban that made it criminal.
Where each claim comes from
| Field | Tier | Source | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| default | cited | Irezumi — Wikipedia (en) | |
| text_th | inference | written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated |
Sources
- Irezumi — Wikipedia (en)
- Meiji era — Wikipedia (en)
- Atayal people — Wikipedia (en)
cited Cited — a named source, linked · harvested Harvested — fetched from an open dataset, with its licence · tradition Tradition — general knowledge of the tradition, hedged · inference Inference — this project's own reasoning from the above · field Field — someone stood there