Tokyo Tattoo 1970

In 1970, as a young photographer, Martha Cooper moved from the USA to Tokyo and became fascinated with Irezumi, the art of Japanese tattooing. Searching for an artist, she found Horibun I, a respected master working in the traditional Okachimachi District of Tokyo. Forbidden in Japan for nearly 80 years, Irezumi in 1970 was an art form strictly for those in the know. For some months Horibun I allowed Cooper to follow and photograph him working. The photos, untouched for 40 years, have finally found their way into a book that tells both the story of Irezumi in 1970, and of Martha Cooper's first adventure into a subculture--Publisher's description.

This text offers a treatment of the history, symbolism, and social function of tattooing in Japan, from its earliest beginnings to the present day.

In 1891 J. Murakami travelled from Japan, via San Francisco, to Vancouver Island and began working in and around Victoria. His occupation: creating permanent images on the skin of paying clients. From this early example of tattooing as work, Jamie Jelinski takes us from coast to coast with detours to the United States, England, and Japan as he traces the evolution of commercial tattooing in Canada over more than one hundred years. Needle Work offers insight into how tattoo artists navigated regulation, the types of spaces they worked in, and the dynamic relationship between the images they tattooed on customers and other forms of visual culture and artistic enterprise. Merging biographical narratives with an examination of tattooing’s place within wider society, Jelinski reveals how these commercial image makers bridged conventional gaps between cultural production and practical, for-profit work, thereby establishing tattooing as a legitimate career. Richly illustrated and drawing on archives, print media, and objects held in institutions and private collections across Canada and beyond, Needle Work provides a timely understanding of a vocation that is now familiar but whose intricate history has rarely been considered.

Text in English, French & German. This book is a highlight for all fans of tattoo, and Japan as well! Photographer Martin Hladik attended the Japanese tattoo master Horikazu with his camera for years, and he presents now the lifework of a remarkable tattoo artist in spectacular images. With this book, comprising scant 500 pages with more than 460 pictures you are diving into the still hidden world of traditional Japanese tattooing. Interviews with the late master (2011) and his successor Horikazuwaka provide virtually intimate insights into the art of tattooing in Asakusa, and give a glance of the protagonists of a recognised dynasty of tattoo artists. Functioning and techniques of this handicraft are shown in-depth. Furthermore you will experience the fascinating aesthetics, and the complex conception of motifs in traditional Japanese tattoos displayed in gorgeous photographs, from Koi to Kabuki, from Buddha to Benzaiten. Anyone of the tattoos reproduced is one of a kind, it was exclusively created for the wearer, and made by hand. More highlights come with pictures of the personal, and familial life of the master. You may visit his studio, and watch him tattoo his clients. The present selection of not previously published designs is a true rarity! Downright sensational, and unique up-to-date is a series of full-page pictures of Horikazus clients, presenting their full body tattoos openly and with self-confidence. Total works of art of an ingenious artist, stung into the skin, lasting an eternity. HORIKAZU is an iconographical benchmark, and contains a fully comprehensive account of traditional Japanese tattooing. The illustrious Sanja festival in Asakusa is displayed in stirring images from past and presence. Finally photographs from Horikazus funeral reveal another aspect of Japanese tradition, whether closest friends pay their last respects to the master. Text input from qualified authors provides access to the secretive world of images of Japanese tattoo art. Tattooists, tattoo fans and any art lover will certainly be thrilled by this unrivalled illustrated book.

Kazuo Nakamoto's life in inner-city Tokyo is one of tea and tofu, of American TV and rock 'n' roll. Kazuo is nine. It is the mid-1960s, just after the Japan Olympics, and Kazuo dreams of being a track star. He hangs out with his buddies, goes to school, and helps with household chores. But Kazuo's world is changing. This bittersweet novel is a deft portrait of a year in a boy's life in a land and time far away, filled with universal concerns about fitting in, escaping the past (in this case World War II's lingering devastation), and growing up. J-Boys author Shogo Oketani is a writer and novelist who grew up in Tokyo in the mid-1960s.

Tokyo seems like an ultra modern--even postmodern--city, with its inventive skyscrapers and digitized surfaces. But it is also a city where past, present, and future coexist--where backstreets both inspire science fiction and host wooden temples, fox shrines, and Buddhist statues that evoke past ages. In this addition to Oxford's Cityscapes series, Stephen Mansfield explores a city rich in diversity, tracing its evolution from the founding of its massive stone citadel, when it was known as Edo, through the rise of a merchant class who transformed the town into a center for art, to the emergence of modern Tokyo. Mansfield traces a city of print masters, Kabuki theater, novelists and great architecture, which has overcome many disasters, from the 1923 earthquake through the fire-bombings of World War II to the 1995 subway gas attacks.

Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.