NOW Live from the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center

This guest post was written by Jaclyn Sakura Knitter, an intern at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center in Fall 2014, on her capstone project for her internship. Learn more about our internships here.

Many of the most internationally popular and iconic tattoo styles come straight out of Asia. Some societies – such as the Maori of New Zealand, the Samoan in the South Pacific, and the Buddhist Monk of Southeast Asia – have deeply-rooted tattoo traditions. However, the practice of tattooing still carries heavy stigma in East Asia, where the art of permanently inking skin has a cross-cultural centuries-old connection with crime—from China’s Han Dynasty where the “Five Punishments” included forced tattooing of the face, to the infamously tattooed Japanese Yakuza gangs, to the “prison tattoos” of contemporary American culture. Today, South Korea has the strictest anti-tattoo policy in the region, with heavy fines for unlicensed parlors and a mandate that all tattoo artists must also be certified medical doctors.

With the American millennial generation’s obsession with tattoos (1 in 4 millennials in the U.S. has at least one tattoo, according to the Pew Research Center), a growing acceptance of tattoos has caught on, but many in the East Asian community in the U.S. continue to retain a long-standing association of permanent body art with organized crime.

The paradox of being a young Asian American in the era of the American tattoo-craze inspired me to investigate some ways in which tattoos have been adopted by Asian Americans in the United States as symbols of cultural preservation. Throughout Fall 2014, I focused much of my internship at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center on gaining insight into how people of historically anti-tattoo societies can de-stigmatize tattoos and celebrate their heritage by permanently inking their bodies.

Personal stories were a cornerstone of this project because even though each narrative was uniquely different, they all presented an initial fear of cultural judgment against tattoos along with an eventual acceptance by family members. In my own family, on my Japanese side, there is a strong distaste for the permanency of tattoos that has kept me out of tattoo parlors – at least when it comes to ink needles.

Other factors that shaped attitudes about tattoos emerged too, including how recently one’s family immigrated to the United States, the visibility of the tattoo, and the symbolic content of the image. Second-generation Asian Americans expressed greater difficulties than fourth-generation individuals with revealing their heritage tattoos to parents. Tattoos that demonstrated a higher level of cultural knowledge (understanding the meaning of a Chinese character, for instance) garnered greater acceptance from parents, despite their initial resistance to tattoos in general.

When Claudia*, a young second-generation American woman of Cantonese heritage, began showing her parents her tattoos after five years of secrecy, she felt the strain on her relationship with her parents. She has a tattoo of a colon cancer awareness ribbon with the Chinese character for ‘strength’ as a tribute to her grandmother, who has battled the illness. When her mother first saw the tattoo, she asked Claudia if she even knew what the character meant. To her mother’s surprise, Claudia explained the character’s meaning. “Even though it’s bad that I had a tattoo, she was happy that [Chinese culture is] something important to me, and to take into consideration her language,” Claudia told me.

Mari*, another young woman I spoke with, shared that getting a tattoo that represented her Japanese-Okinawan heritage “made me feel a little rebellious considering the social stigmas that surround tattoos. I think for older generations of Asian Americans, tattoos are also kind of a no-no.” She said, however, that her parents, who are third-generation Japanese Americans, “are not your traditional Japanese style parents. They pretty much understand that they raised me to be a very independent person and that if I want to do something I am going to do it… They were fine with [my tattoo].”

Greater visibility of a tattoo also led to more conversations with strangers, particularly within the tattooed community, about the importance of cultural preservation. “I feel like I’m able to connect with more people, with tattoos… I’m able to talk to more people who have tattoos and it brings up conversations sometimes,” Claudia said.

Tattoo placement is, however, largely influenced by the pressure to conform to professional standards. In her experience, Mari shared that despite her pride for the symbolism of her tattoo, “I wanted to be able to hide it because of the standards of the professional world, which is kind of disappointing that I had to consider that.”

Even in the face of social and cultural consequences, those that I spoke to reported higher levels of confidence and greater self-respect for having followed through with getting tattooed. Although they may have ethnic roots in societies that historically stigmatize tattooing, theirs is a culture of self-expression. “It was a little cathartic… This tattoo was purely for me,” Mari proclaimed.

I’ve learned that despite residual stigma around tattoos within Asian communities, the tattoo is a powerful tool for representing a permanent part of one’s identity and can also aid in navigating unexplored social circles. This process has inspired me to someday get a tattoo of my own, featuring my Japanese family crest.

To learn more about my project, visit my website.

*Names have been changed.

 

Jaclyn Sakura Knitter is a student of politics, linguistics and Asian Pacific American Studies at the University of San Francisco. She grew up in a multi-culti Japanese American household of only women, and has lived in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and on both coasts in the U.S. before settling in San Francisco, California.