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Tattooing in Japan and the East
Japan
The history of tattooing in Japan is long and complex. More than 1,500 years ago, Chinese travelers noted that Japanese men and women were heavily tattooed. In the Middle Ages, tattoos were used in Japan to mark criminals. In the late eighteenth century, in an attempt to purge the general public of certain cultural excesses, the government effectively banned certain types of painting, theater, and dress. Many Japanese responded by replacing their outlawed kimonos with elaborate, colorful tattooed "body suits."
The earliest evidence of tattooing in Japan is found in the form of clay figurines which have faces painted or engraved to represent tattoo marks. The oldest figurines of this kind have been recovered from tombs dated 5,000 BC or older, and many other such figurines have been found in tombs dating from the second and third millennia BC. These figurines served as stand-ins for living individuals who symbolically accompanied the dead on their journey into the unknown, and it is believed that the tattoo marks had religious or magical significance.
The first written record of Japanese tattooing is found in a Chinese dynastic history compiled in 297 AD. According to this text, Japanese "men young and old, all tattoo their faces and decorate their bodies with designs." Japanese tattooing is also mentioned in other Chinese histories, but always in a negative context. The Chinese considered tattooing a sign of barbarism and used it only as a punishment.
By the seventh century the rulers of Japan had adopted much of the culture and attitudes of the Chinese, and a result tattooing fell into official disfavor. The first record of tattooing as punishment in Japan is found in a Japanese history compiled in 720 AD. It reads: "The Emperor summoned before him Hamako, Muraji of Azumi, and commanded him saying: ΠYou plotted rebellion, and your offense is deserving of death. I will, however, exercise great bounty, and remitting the penalty of death, sentence you to be tattooed."
After the sixth century tattooing was widely used to identify criminals and outcasts. Outcasts were tattooed on the arms: a cross might be tattooed on the inner forearm, or a straight line on the outside of the forearm or on the upper arm. Criminals were marked with a variety of symbols which designated the places where the crimes were committed. In one region, the pictograph for "dog" was tattooed on the criminal_s forehead. Other marks included such patterns as bars, crosses, double lines, and circles on the face and arms. Tattooing was reserved for those who had committed serious crimes, and individuals bearing tattoo marks were ostracized by their families and denied all participation in the life of the community. For the Japanese, who valued family membership and social position above all things, tattooing was particularly severe and terrible form of punishment.
The Tattoo in Polynesia
Taking a last glance at their native southeast Asia thousands of years ago, the seafaring Polynesians began migrating eastward. By 1000 B.C. they had settled in Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. In their outrigger canoes they continued to explore and settle the South Pacific's myriad islands. By 1000 A.D. they had ventured as far north as Hawaii, as far south as New Zealand, and as far east as Easter Island — an area of more than 12 million square miles. Far-flung as these island societies were, however, nearly all of them had one thing in common: the art of tattooing.
In the Gilbert Islands, tattoos were thought to ensure passage to the next life. In Fiji, girls were tattooed as a rite of passage when they reached adolescence. In the Society Islands, tattoos served as status symbols to distinguish the upper classes. In the Marquesas, tattoos allowed an individual to take part in particular ceremonies. Among the Maori of New Zealand, who raised tattooing to artistic heights, the practice served to demarcate the social classes.
Giolo
In September of 1691 a tattooed Polynesian slave was brought to London to be exhibited as a curiosity. His owners went to great pains to promote his public appearances: they arranged to have two full-length portraits engraved and published as illustrations for an elegantly printed pamphlet which introduced him as "Giolo, the Famous Painted Prince."
Prince Giolo did not want to visit London. His owners, however, had told him that he would be handsomely paid for his public appearances and would afterward be allowed to return to his home in the Philippines. But the journey to England was arduous and Giolo, who was in poor health when he arrived, soon died of smallpox. This was a great disappointment for his ambitious English owners, who had hoped he would live long enough to make them rich.
Prince Giolo had been brought to London by an adventurer and buccaneer named William Dampier. It was the dawn of the golden age of piracy: Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan and Blackbeard Teach were operating out of headquarters in Southern Mexico and enjoying profitable careers. Dampier, however, was not one of the world_s great pirates. For over 12 years he had traveled up and down to coast of South America, changing allegiance from one gang of pirates to another as he thought to better his position. But the pirates with whom he traveled did not capture Spanish Galleons laden with gold, diamonds and pretty ladies. Instead, their routine work consisted of the safer, if less profitable, business of robbing defenseless villages and small coastal vessels. It turned out to be much work for little money, and after ten years of this strenuous life Dampier signed on with a ship headed for the Philippines.
It was while he was in the Philippines that Dampier first saw Giolo, whom he acquired from a ship_s officer named William Moody. Dampier described his adventures in the Pacific and his meeting with Giolo in a popular travel book, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), from which the following passages are taken.
Samoa
The Samoan Islands were first seen by Europeans in 1722 when three Dutch ships commanded by Jacob Roggewein visited the eastern island known as Manua. A member of Roggewein's expedition described the natives in these words:
"They are friendly in their speech and courteous in their behavior, with no apparent trace of wildness or savagery. They do not paint themselves, as do the natives of some other islands, but on the lower part of the body they wear artfully woven silk tights or knee breeches. They are altogether the most charming and polite natives we have seen in all of the South Seas."
The Dutch ships lay at anchor off the islands for several days, but members of the crew did not venture ashore and apparently did not even get close enough to the natives to realize that they were not wearing silk breeches, but tattooing on their legs.
The second European expedition which visited Samoa was led by the French navigator Louis Antoine de Bouganville, who stopped briefly in 1768. Like Roggewein, he was careful not to get too close to the natives. He admired the skill with which the Samoans navigated their canoes but reported that they were ill-mannered compared to the Tahitians, and thought it curious "that their thighs to below the knees were painted a deep blue."
The first Europeans who set foot on Samoan soil were members of the 1787 French expedition commanded by Jan Francoise de la Perouse. La Perouse got a closer look at the natives and reported that "the men have their thighs painted or tattooed in such a way that one would think them clothed, although they are almost naked."
After an initially friendly exchange of trading goods and food, the French caught a Samoan whom they suspected of theft and hoisted him to the top of a mast by his thumbs. This provoked a skirmish in which twelve French sailors and several Samoans were killed. La Perouse later wrote: "I willingly abandoned to others the task of writing the uninteresting history of these barbarous people; a stay of twenty-four hours and the relation of our misfortunes has sufficed to show their atrocious manners."
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