Japanese Government Workers Being Forced to Admit Having Tattoos

I read about this a while ago and learned that people with visible tattoos aren’t welcome in public bath houses.  It makes me kind of sad since I have a full back tattoo and I’ve always wanted to visit Japan.  Guess I’ll have to skip the bath house experience and keep my tattoos covered if I don’t want to be thought of as a criminal.  :( 

“or they’re assuming that some tattooed employees are members of the yakuza”

That’s actually probably it.

Tattoo culture in Japan is quite different than here. Here they’re more considered as part of the passage into adulthood (and the mistakes you make along the way).
In Japan, very few people have tattoos. If those ABC numbers are accurate, we’re talking about 0.3% of city employees.
They are not looked highly upon and were outlawed completely for half a century, making them more popular among criminals. People generally still associate tattoos with criminal activity.

So before you ramp your snark machine up, when they say that they may be a distraction, they don’t mean the kids are going to be fascinated by the image on their skin. They mean the kids are going to be more focused on wondering how many crimes their teacher may have committed than their studies.

I’m not saying it’s a good policy, but it’s not like this stuff comes from out of nowhere.

Well tattoos *have* traditionally been associated with yakuza. There’s a much more negative stigma attached in Japan (like the bathhouse thing). I met a Japanese girl when I was over there whose arms were covered in tattoos, and complimented her on them, but she clearly had mixed feelings about them. The thing about Japan is that while it may adopt surface qualities of other cultures and societies, under that thin surface it’s very definitely Japan, and things are done the way people there want to do things. It makes for a complicated cross-cultural experience. You really can’t expect people to conform to the rules and mores of other cultures, but it’s hard to remember that sometimes when so many of the readily-observable characteristics of a society seem so familiar.

…or they’re assuming that some tattooed employees are members of the yakuza.

That would be it. Many in Japan (particular older people and those of a conservative bent) equate tattoos with Yakuza tribal markers (which they were used as for a long time). They see anyone with tattoos as either Yakuza, ex-Yakuza, or wannabe-Yakuza. As we see here, the mayor also believes that everyone else will interpret tattoos the same way he does, and so all those schoolchildren must therefore be distracted by the fact that their teacher has a connection to the Yakuza. And the teacher must be so worried about this assumption that they can’t focus on teaching over the chorus of “I hope they don’t think I’m Yakuza” coursing through their mind.

Though of course, this is a big case of the Affirming the Consequent fallacy. Just because all Yakuza have tattoos doesn’t mean that everyone with a tattoo is Yakuza. It hasn’t meant that for a long time, if it ever has.

But that’s real logic. Here’s the logic being used:

Yakuza = bad
Yakuza = tattoo
tattoo = bad
person with tattoo = bad

The moral notion of purity is tainted by the indirect connection with the Yakuza, and moral decisions tend to override the logic centers of the brain.

While I’m hesitant to defend this kind of mindless, dehumanizing bureaucracy, which is a serious problem in Japan, I also think that the author is being a bit insensitive to culturally specific implications of certain symbols and practices.

I can’t tell if the comment about the yakuza is intended to be a joke, but it’s really no laughing matter in Japan. Organized crime is a big problem there, and tattoos have a long history of being explicitly associated with violence, drugs, prostitution, and racketeering. I wouldn’t go so far as to compare a tattoo in Japan with a swastika tattoo in Europe, but the fact is that a tattoo isn’t always just some culturally neutral body adornment which is always appropriate for display by public servants in every field. Here, it’s the content of a tattoo that can be problematic; in Japan, any tattoo is problematic. I think the author needs to be a little less cocksure about his or her own cultural assumptions being applicable to the Japanese context.

Yeah, gotta side with the “It’s a Japanese thing” camp.  Tattoos are far less socially accepted in Japan. They’re still very much associated to the Yakuza (as are, unless I miss my guess, dark sunglasses) and at the very least, as seen as Something Nice People Don’t Do.

Here in the US, tattoos are so accepted, they don’t shock the average parents any more. So The Kids Today have to resort to more extreme body art like multiple piercings and the truly-incomprehensible-to-me Gauging, getting progressively larger things inserted into one’s earlobes and such.

There’s any number of jobs here that have no tattoo policies, and require they at least be covered up. most of them are in service indistries, and are aimed more to keep from “spooking the straights”, as i like to call it.

There’s plenty of acknowledgement below, so I won’t be too repetitious here, but it is plain and simple a cultural thing. It’s also considered vulgar to blow your nose in public. Last year, my wife and I were selected as the American entrants for a Japanese-run goodwill project and though we didn’t win, we were invited along with all of the other preselects to a very posh onsen. However, the “winners” were unable to attend since one of them had assorted tattoos spread around his body. 

As you can see, I’m not shy about my own tattoos, but I struggle to be upset about this. If it were in another country, particularly the US, I would be, but the Japanese have a reason to be wary about tattoos. Over time, the stigma against them may change, but it will take a while. 

Think of tattoos in Japan as tattoos in America in the 50s. Time and popular culture will likely wear away at the assumption that all tattooed people have ties to the Yakuza, but it will take a few more decades, in all likelihood. 

I totally understand the cultural stigma and yakuza association surrounding tattoos in Japan, but the totalitarian way of dealing with them still rubs me the wrong way. Like the author says, employers can enforce a rule that requires tattoos to be out of sight, but requiring the disclosure of whether employees HAVE tattoos or not and requiring their removal feels like a gross violation of privacy.

People who get tattoos have to deal with the social ramifications of what they’re doing, whether they’re seen as punks or criminals, whether they scare people or are stigmatized. They must realize that people will treat them differently, and you can’t force society to be accepting. But to insist that people can’t even make these decisions for themselves? That seems like overstepping some boundaries.

Do not cut your bodies for the dead, and do not mark your skin with tattoos. I am the LORD.  Leviticus 19:28, The Holy Bible.  
Tattoos are on the people who didn’t get the word of the Lord.

 Wow. O.o I knew about the Yakuza tattoo thing in Japan, but I didn’t realize that it would actually freak a Japanese person out to find out a foreigner had a tattoo. Looks like if I ever end up on a trip to the Land of the Rising Sun, I’ll have to hide my dragon tatt.

 Same here, but mine’s a full-color dragon across my left shoulder blade, not a whole back tatt. No bathing suits for this one apparently, which is a shame, because I have always thought Tokyo would be a neat place to visit someday.

Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be a terrible idea…it’s strange to me that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a westerner or not. I’m clearly not Japanese and wouldn’t be welcomed into any Japanese crime families, but a tattoo on my arm would be looked at with the same mistrust.