JAPAN’S TATTOO ART, IN CLASSIC WOODBLOCK PRINTS

Ukiyo-e artists produced woodblock prints incorporating depictions of tattooed bodies that told personal stories of their own.

Edward M. Gómez

Utagawa Kunisada I (also known as “Toyokuni III”), Rooster: Actor Kawarazaki Gonjūrō I as Danshichi, from
the series A Collection of Popular Birds in Accordance with Your 
Wishes, 1860, woodblock print, ink and color on paper, 14 1/4 x 9 15/16 inches (William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, photo © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

If, as Christianity teaches, the human body is a temple of a holy spirit or of an individual’s own soul, or, as Confucianism advises, the body should be regarded as a precious gift from parents to a child, then is adorning such a vessel with tattoos a way of decorating or defiling it? If tattoos are a form of artistic expression, what do they say about those whose bodies display them, or, conversely, about those viewers who find them unattractive or offensive?

These are some of the questions that percolate provocatively around the edges of the art historian Sarah E. Thompson’s insightful examination of the history of tattoos in the art and popular culture of Japan in her new book, Tattoos in Japanese Prints, which has just been published by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Thompson, a specialist in Japanese art, has worked as a curator in that field at the MFA since 2004. The museum is widely known for its superb collection of classical Japanese artworks (sculptures, prints, paintings, swords, masks, and more), the largest of its kind outside Japan; in 1890, the MFA became the first American museum to establish a collection of Japanese art and to create a post for a curator specializing in the field. Its holdings were enriched by the institution’s acquisitions of troves of objects amassed in Japan by such pioneering, 19th-century, Western collector-researchers as the Americans Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, an art historian, and William Sturgis Bigelow, a physician, both of whom spent many years living in Japan.

All of the mostly 19th-century ukiyo-e woodblock prints that are reproduced in Thompson’s book come from the MFA’s collection. Tattoos in Japanese Prints focuses on how tattoos are portrayed in that distinctive genre but it is also offers a visual essay in the way one art form depicted another, noting that, as Japanese tattooing evolved, its artists were influenced by popular ukiyo-e imagery, too.

“Elaborate Japanese tattoos can resemble colorful garments,” Thompson writes in the new book, “covering the body from the neck to the elbows and knees, sometimes with a bare strip down the center of the chest so that the tattoos can be concealed with clothing or partially or fully revealed, as desired.” She points out that, when it comes to inking the body, many tattoo aficionados “consider the Japanese tradition to be the very finest in the world for its detail, complexity, and compositional skill.”……

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