In Japan, there is a long history of tattoo culture and the first noted tattoos on humans was around 297 AD. It started off as decoration among men young and old but the Chinese always looked down upon it as a barbaric act and the Japanese soon acquired this mindset as well. Then in the 17th Century, tattoos in Japan started being used to mark and identify criminals and outcasts. Sometimes they even had tattoo lettering applied to their faces as a blatant mark of criminal affiliations. Being tattooed became a dishonor and was very shameful. Families and communities would look down upon these people and exclude them from general community life. 

The end of the 17th Century and the beginning of the 18th Century tattoos started being viewed as a form of art again and began gaining popularity among the middle and upper classes. As the arts began to flourish, tattoo art made it’s way into theatre advertisements, woodblock printing designs, and illustrations for novels. Then in the mid to late 18th Century, tattooing criminals became popular again. As criminal activity and tattoos were linked again, the middle and upper classes attraction to tattoos faded and only the lower class continued getting them. Around this time is when tattoos became heavily linked to the yakuza, members linked to organized crime (similar to the Mafia).

Tattoos became illegal for a time but then, as the circle goes, in 1948 they were legalized again. Because people still associated tattoos with criminals, tattoo artists made their living by tattooing foreign seamen for a while. In much of Japan now, tattoos are still looked down upon but it is becoming more widely accepted in the bigger cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto.