Ryoma Uno, a Japanese American tattoo artist based on Oahu, describes his professional journey as “weird.”
As a young student in Tokyo, he was fascinated by the Western world — punk rock, heavy metal, motorcycles like Harley-Davidsons, and naturally, the tattoos that his idols proudly flashed. When he moved to Hawaii at 13 with his family, he strived to put his Japanese identity behind him, prioritizing his new life in America.
He eventually became a tattoo artist, working in multiple Western styles — until a life-changing trip back to Japan at the age of 26 upended his career trajectory.
“My entire life, I’ve been trying to push away who I am as a human being,” Uno said. “It’s the one thing I can’t change, the blood that runs within me. I’m Japanese.”
Ryoma Uno, also known as Tatsutoshi, tattoos a client at the Pacific Ink & Art Expo in Honolulu. Uno uses a traditional Japanese style form of tattooing done by hand called tebori. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)
Uno found a Japanese tattoo master who would teach him a completely new form of art. And he never looked back.
Today, Uno or Tatsutoshi — Uno’s name as a tattooist — practices Japanese tebori tattoos in Hawaii. Translated from Japanese as “hand-carved,” tebori is a technique of pushing ink into the skin by hand using a needle attached to a thin stick-like tool.
Many of his clients have worked with him for years. The designs, intricately laden with Japanese folklore and symbolism, stretch from people’s arms through their torso to their legs. It takes weeks, if not months, to plan the design for a full back piece or body suit. Filling up that human canvas then takes years of dedication.
It’s an endeavor that local clients in the islands happily undertake for the same reason as Uno’s career switch: to reconnect with their Asian heritage.
“As a fourth-generation Japanese American, I do feel like a lot of our culture gets lost,” said Kai Tachino, one of Uno’s clients who began work on his tattoo of a koi swimming upstream two months ago.
For Tachino, connecting with his ancestors’ culture by learning the meanings of the Japanese designs before they are inscribed on his skin forever was reason enough to make a yearslong commitment.
While the tattoo industry has long been met with legal and social restrictions in East Asian countries like Japan and China, immigrants and their descendants from these countries have helped mold a vibrant tattoo culture in the islands like no other in the United States.
The Islands’ Reverence Toward Tattoos
Hawaii has a long and rich tattoo culture that dates back centuries — long before the Hawaiian Kingdom or its overthrow.
Waves of Asian immigrants, beginning in the 19th century, brought their own tattooing traditions to the islands, helping forge a unique tattoo industry in the modern era.
Today, tattoo artists in America cite Norman Keith Collins, a Hawaii-based tattooist better known as “Sailor Jerry,” as the pioneer of modern tattoos.
“Sailor Jerry is essentially considered the godfather of American traditional tattooing,” Uno said.
Along with advancing some of the best practices in tattooing, such as using sterile equipment, the Navy veteran is remembered by many as being the first Western artist to incorporate Asian art into American traditional tattoos during the mid-20th century.
Old Ironside Tattoo in Chinatown was reopened in 2014 to carry on Sailor Jerry’s legacy, incorporating Japanese art into American traditional tattoos. (Suah Cho/Civil Beat/2024)
Old Ironside Tattoo’s portfolio includes many of the original Sailor Jerry styles. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)
Hari Seda, who reopened Sailor Jerry’s tattoo shop in Chinatown in 2014, has carried on Sailor Jerry’s legacy and tattoo style.
Seda said that Hawaii’s tattoo culture directly reflects the islands’ population. According to Seda, the deep-rooted Polynesian tattoo culture met with Japanese and naval influences to create a “collage of tattoo cultures.”
While nationwide data from the Pew Research Center show that Asians are less than half as likely to have tattoos as white, Black, and Hispanic populations, Asian tattoos are one of the most sought-after styles in Hawaii.
Many younger Asian Americans in Hawaii view tattoos as a symbol of identity, directly influenced by the Polynesian interpretation of this skin-deep art, said Frank Dennis, a Korean American client of Uno’s.
Dennis, an Army colonel, first moved to Oahu two decades ago. His tattoo in the works features the Asian myth of the Longmen or the Dragon Gate, a story of a carp leaping over the river’s current to become a dragon. He started getting work done on the piece 10 years ago and is about a third of the way through.
“I’ve got a long way to go,” Dennis said. “I’m in no hurry, though. It will be done whenever it’s done.”
Tatsutoshi, whose legal name is Ryoma Uno, uses a traditional Japanese style form of tattooing done by hand. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)
It was his familiarity with tattoos as a member of the military, his identity as an Asian American, and the state’s distinctive Asian qualities that led him to work on this project that will cover up most of his preexisting tattoos.
“There’s nowhere else in the United States that I’ve ever been where everyone looks like me and has my food,” Dennis said. “There’s a pan-Asian experience here.”
Making a distinction with flash tattoos — pre-prepared designs for rapid tattooing on walk-in customers — Dennis said that he and many other Asian Americans in Hawaii seek an experience that is far from ubiquity.
“People who collect tattoos or want to have that experience — that’s awesome as well. But this is a different experience,” Dennis said.
He said that the islands’ centuries-long tattoo culture, enriched with a sense of reverence and the understanding of tattoos holding mana or spiritual power, has guided Asian Americans here to view tattoos as a medium to connect with their Eastern heritage.
A Banned Practice
At the Pacific Ink & Art Expo in Honolulu earlier this month, Uno’s booth was surrounded by intrigued spectators, many of whom were witnessing this form of Japanese tattooing for the first time.
During the three-day event, Uno held sessions for a few of his regular clients, each taking well over three hours.
One of his featured clients was Micah Ito, a Hawaii local of Japanese ancestry who is working on his full-body suit depicting the Japanese tale of warrior monk Benkei — his first-ever tattoo.
“It will probably be the only tattoo I will get,” he said, adding that his tattoo journey that began during the pandemic.
Ito said that tattooing in Hawaii is more accepted than in other regions around the world and he wanted to reconnect with his Asian culture through Uno’s authentic Japanese tebori style — even though tattoos are at times seen in a bad light in tebori’s country of origin.
“When you actually look into the stories and everything that comes with it — the characters that Tatsutoshi puts on his clients — it has a lot more meaning than just the stigma that normal body suits come with,” Ito said.
The tray of the tools Uno uses to perform his hand-carved tebori tattoos is displayed at the expo in August. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)
In most East Asian countries, tattoos are either banned by law or still largely discouraged because of their history of gang and other criminal affiliations.
In South Korea, it is illegal to perform tattoos without a medical degree. From a strictly legal viewpoint, there is currently only one known valid tattoo artist in the country: a plastic surgeon who offers tattoo services at his clinic in Seoul.
Tattoos were also deemed medical practice in Japan until the country’s supreme court ruled for the first time in 2020 that artists without a medical degree could legally give tattoos as well. Social stigma around tattoos perseveres throughout the country, however, banning individuals with tattoos from most onsens and even some gyms and beaches.
China issued a ban on performing — and even encouraging — tattoos for minors two years ago.
But for some Asian Americans in Hawaii, tattoos are still seen as a way to forge a long-lost connection with their ancestral history, regardless of how they are perceived in Asia.
Whereas the notion of rebellion accounts for some of the negative connotations about tattoos in Asia, tattoos also serve as a reinforcement of one’s identity and inclusion within a group, said David Lane, a professor at Illinois State University researching the history and social implications behind tattoos.
“To some degree, there is even a religious aspect to getting tattooed for that ‘in-group’ and belonging,” Lane said, as he referred to how Christians during the Crusades got tattoos as they took pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
Throughout his career as a tebori artist, Uno has seen his clients transform into what their tattoos represent, living up to the cultural messages that the inscriptions on their bodies portray. He wishes to continue serving locals seeking this connection.
“I want to be someone who is for the community,” he said.
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Publish date : 2024-08-13 23:01:00
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