Tebori, horimono and irezumi, what are the differences?

[singlepic id=9 w=320 h=240 float=left] Tebori, horimono and irezumi, what are the differences?

By Joshua Andrews

Japanese style tattoos are easily recognizable by quite a few qualities that put them into a class into their own, such as their distinct style of imagery, their use of dynamic content, the use of vibrant colors, and the tasteful usage of the entire body’s anatomy.

The Japanese word for their ancient method of tattooing is tebori, which means “tattooing by hand”, and the word for a tattoo done by the method of tebori is horimono. Another older, but common word for tattoo in Japanese is Irezumi, which means “tattooed as a punishment”.

The term of Irezumi and its negative connotation came to be during the Edo period (1603-1868) of Japan’s history, when it was common practice by the judicial authorities to tattoo criminals with a specific symbol according to the crime that the criminal had committed as a punishment as well as for making identifying the criminal easier; that tattoo was called an Irezumi.

After the tattooed criminals were released from prison, they would hire a tattoo artist, called an Irezumi-shi, who would either tattoo over the criminal tattoo or around it, in order to conceal the past of the individual. Because Japanese society was so strict socially and the influence of Confucianism and Buddhism on Japanese culture, tattooed ex-convicts naturally gravitated to each other and eventually formed into gangs. At some point, the tattooed criminals organized into what became the Japanese mafia, or Yakuza, and that is how the relation between tattoos and the Japanese criminal underworld took foothold in Japanese folklore.

Japanese style tattoos are originally based upon the illustrations created by ukiyoe, or wood block prints in English, of characters from an18th century Japanese book called the 108 Heroes of the Suikoden, as well as upon traditional Japanese imagery and symbols. The108 Heroes of the Suikoden were similar to Robin Hood and his band of merry men, or in other words they were honorable bandits who stole from the rich and gave to the poor.

A famous if not legendary Japanese ukiyoe artist by the name of Kuniyoshi illustrated the heroes in the 18th century with vibrant colorful full body tattoos, which inspired a craze among some Japanese people and helped to make tattoos less stigmatic than they were perceived at that time in Japan.

[singlepic id=46 w=320 h=240 float=left]What makes a horimono so unique is that unlike Western style tattoos, horimono are a chromatic embellishments of the body, with great emphasis placed upon a tasteful theme taken from Japanese history or mythology, a vibrant, harmonious colour scheme and the tattoo’s design’s congruence with the body’s anatomy.

Horimono always have a sense of continuity and movement to them, their colors and designs flow over the body, often incorporating the wearers anatomy into their design in such a tasteful manner that it’s often easy to forget that you are gazing upon a persons naked body.

This is in stark contrast to a Youbori style tattoos (Western style tattoos), also known as wan-pointo (One point) tattoos that are often placed upon the body without any serious regard to harmony, symmetry, anatomy or composition, with the exceptions of tribal and Celtic style designs. Western style tattoos usually have more emphasis placed upon the design, the design’s meaning, and the value that the design has to wearer of the tattoo, than the design being an embellishment of the wearers body.

Many of the designs used for horimono tattoos are actually not dragons, kanji lettering or ying yang’s as commonly thought by many people, but rather designs based upon traditional imagery such as indigenous plants and animals like the lotus flower and the Koi fish, as well as from Japanese mythology and and as I mentioned before, from illustrations of the book, the108 Heroes of the Suikoden.

This page was contributed by Joshua Andrews http://www.howtotattoo.net