Archive Note
Horigoro is a Tokyo tattoo lineage name, and its founder, Horigoro I, was a horishi born in the nineteenth century who associated with foreigners and is documented as having obtained a Western electric tattoo machine from a foreign soldier, then duplicating it and making his own machines, which places the line at one of the documented contact points between imported Western technology and the Japanese hand-tattooing tradition. The line continued through Horigoro II and his younger brother Horigoro III, both among the leading Tokyo tattooers recorded in the photographic archive of the detective novelist Akimitsu Takagi, taken between about 1955 and 1965 and later published in Pascal Bagot's book The Tattoo Writer in 2022. The often-repeated claim that the Horigoro family were the first in Japan to use the electric machine is disputed: in an interview with Bagot, Horiyoshi III rejects it, arguing that earlier Meiji-period tattooers, in particular Hori Chiyo, almost certainly used a machine given the fineness of their designs, so the priority claim is not asserted here.
Lineage
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