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Tattoo designs for women are become hotter and hotter all the time. Tattoo as body art has been enjoyed by practically every civilization and culture in history down through the years. All these people had one thing in common; they appreciated the artwork of beautiful tattooing.Tattoo Designs For Women Tattoo Designs For Women
The author of “Yakuza Moon,” a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
“The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before,” she told Reuters in a recent interview.
Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organized crime.
“They’re being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away,” she said. “All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard.”
Being a gang member is not illegal in Japan, and until recently the gangs were known for openness. Their offices even posted signs with their names and membership lists inside.
Gangs cooperated with police, handing over suspects in return for police turning a blind eye to yakuza misdemeanors, but this broke down after organized crime laws were toughened in 1992.
Read more at Reuters article “Gangster daughter sheds light on Japan underworld” (Image from Reuters)
An earlier blog post mentioned how when we think about the bad in our society, one of the things we think of are tattoos. Tattoos have an almost unavoidable association with criminals. This probably stems from gang and criminal practices of using distinctive tattoos to identify themselves. In Japan, for instance, full body tattoos done the traditional Japanese way are associated with the yakuza, Japanese organized crime groups. As such, certain public bathhouses and gymnasiums even go as far as to openly ban people sporting such tattoos, in attempts to prevent the yakuza from entering.
With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman -- until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body.
The elaborate dragons, phoenixes and a medieval courtesan with one breast bared and a knife between her teeth are a symbol of Tendo's childhood as the daughter of a "yakuza" gangster and her youth as a drug-using gang member.
The author of Yakuza Moon, a best-selling memoir just out in English, the 39-year-old Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
"The more the police push, the more the yakuza are simply going underground, making their activities harder to follow than they ever were before," she said.
Police say full-fledged membership in yakuza groups fell to 41,500 last year, down from 43,000 in 2005, a decline they attribute to tighter laws against organised crime.
The number of yakuza hangers-on, including thugs and members of motorcycle gangs, who are willing to do their dirty work, though, rose marginally to 43,200.
More shocking for many in Japan, where gun-related crime is rare, were a handful of fatal shootings by yakuza earlier this year, including the killing of the mayor of Nagasaki.
Tendo said the shootings were a result of the legal crackdown on yakuza, which has made it harder for them to ply their traditional trades of prostitution, drugs and bid-rigging.
"They're being forced into a corner, their humanity taken away," she said. "All the things they used to do for a living have been made illegal, so life has become very hard."
Experts say this is especially true for gangsters in less affluent parts of Japan, a reflection of the same sort of income gaps that increasingly plague the nation as a whole.
"Yakuza need a lot of money, but depending on where they are, business isn't going so well," said Nobuo Komiya, a criminology professor at Tokyo's Rissho University. "So they turn to guns."
Descended from medieval gamblers and outlaws, yakuza were long portrayed as latter-day samurai, bound by traditions of honor and duty and living extravagant lives.
Tendo's father, the leader of a gang linked to the Yamaguchi-gumi, the largest yakuza group, led a "classic" yakuza life replete with Italian suits, imported cars and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Raised with strict ideas of honour, she was both spoiled and scolded by the tattooed men who frequented her family home.
It's usual within yakuza circuits to tattoo themselves, usually is it their clan's badge that they tattoo all over their body.
The origin to why the yakuza tattooed himself comes from Bakuto. They usually tattooed in a black ring around the arm for each crime they committed.
Finally it became an evidence of strength, when it could take over 100 hours to do a backtattoo.The tattoo was to illustrate you were unwilling to accommodate yourself to societies rules and norms.
Now it is to illustrate your clanbelonging.
Within Japanese culture mafiosi are known for their intricate full-body tattoos of mythological characters. Tattoos are also considered a sign of initiation into the mafia. The process (now done with modern tattoo guns) can take up to two years to complete. Tattoos are admired for their color and patterns.
The Yakuza, however, prefer to claim the idealist class of machi-yakko as their ancestors. With `kyoki wo kujiki yowaki wo tasukeru' (`help the weak and oppose the strong') as their clarion call, this group was at loggerheads with the rogue elements of society - the lawless gang of hatamoto-yakko in particular.
They helped the poor, safeguarded the honor of women and kept peace in the neighborhood by raising their swords against thieves, dishonest businessmen and corrupt samurais. Their success at keeping the local bullies in check elevated their position in public mind, and the machi-yakko class was revered and venerated until the samurais cut down their powers in the early 18th century, in an effort to control their popularity.
There's no room for individuality in traditional Japanese society. In a country where uniformity is valued above all else, you have to keep the rules - or keep out. An inability to conform, to fall in with the customs and mores of the times, thus, has spawned sub-societies of `outsiders' at every turn of Japanese history. While some have expressed their differences in harmless ways, the frustrations of others have come out as violent rebellion.
The Yakuza - with 300 years of violence to their credit - is the oldest and most frightening of them all. Between 1958 and 1963, the number of Yakuza members rose to 184,000, more than the Japanese army, with over 5,000 separate gangs staking their claim over large pockets of the country. The figure plummeted to half in later years, but with bloody gang wars and new areas of illegal operations, the Yakuza is as much a blight to modern society as it was in its high-expansion years.
A section of Yakuza experts trace their origins to a group of trouble-mongers known as kabuki-mono, who raised hell in the early-1600s with their brawls and bad language. Masterless samurais, who were out of jobs during these times of peace, they roamed the countryside in search of booty, hustling passersby, terrorizing and often killing them with the long samurai swords they wore on their belts.
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