Horitaka (Takahiro Kitamura)

Archive Note

Takahiro Kitamura, called Taki, was born in Japan and brought to California as a small child. He describes himself as a 1.5-generation Japanese American. Discover Nikkei's 2013 feature frames him that way, a household that was Japanese and a schooling that was American, the bicultural footing that later let him work as a bridge between the Yokohama register and the United States tattoo trade. His exact birth year is not settled in the sourced record.

He started tattooing in San Jose in 1998 as an apprentice of Adrian Lee at the NewSkool Tattoo Collective. The same year, still early in that first apprenticeship, he flew to Japan to be tattooed by Horiyoshi III (Yoshihito Nakano) of Yokohama. By the Big Tattoo Planet account, Horiyoshi III tattooed a backpiece on him and, over the course of that work, asked him to become an apprentice. The Hori-name Horitaka, the carver prefix Hori plus Taka from his given name Takahiro, was conferred during the apprenticeship. The sourced record does not fix the exact year of the naming.

The training was what he calls a satellite apprenticeship. He stayed a resident of California, flew to Yokohama for stretches of about two weeks, and returned, repeating the cycle for ten years until it ended in 2008. Multiple trade and journalistic sources converge on that 1998 to 2008 arc, and Eva McCormack's curated apprentice list names Horitaka (T. Kitamura) among Horiyoshi III's former apprentices alongside Horitomo (K. Kitamura), Horikara, Horiken, and others. He is documented as a former apprentice. Horiyoshi III's currently active apprentice is his son, Horiyoshi IV.

In September 2002, while still mid-apprenticeship, Kitamura founded State of Grace Tattoo in San Jose, first on Berryessa Road. In 2009 he moved it to the second floor of the historic Shanghai Building in San Jose Japantown, with the support of the Dobashi family, one of the founding merchant families of that district, one of three remaining historic Japantowns in the continental United States. The move set the shop inside a specifically San Jose Japanese American civic ecology, the same footing behind the 2022 State of Grace 20 Years celebration with Empire Seven Studios and the Japanese American Museum of San Jose.

In 2007 he sponsored the United States visa of Horitomo (Kazuaki Kitamura), a fellow former Horiyoshi III apprentice, bringing him from Yokohama to State of Grace as a resident artist. The two share the surname Kitamura and both trained under Horiyoshi III, but the sourced record treats them as separate people with no documented family tie. The sponsorship is the mechanism behind much of what followed at the shop, Horitomo's Monmon Cats project, the 2013 conferral of the Hori-name Horishiki on Christopher Brand, and the seven-artist roster of the museum show.

His published record runs deep for an American tattooer. Through Schiffer he wrote Bushido: Legacies of the Japanese Tattoo (2000, with Katie M. Kitamura and five prints by Horiyoshi III), Tattoos of the Floating World (2003), Tattooing from Japan to the West: Horitaka Interviews Contemporary Artists (2004), We Are Tattoo (2008), and I Love Tattoos (2012), plus the 2013 Horiyoshi III monograph with Grime. He co-founded the Bay Area Convention of the Tattoo Arts in Burlingame in 2004.

In 2014 he curated the Japanese American National Museum's Perseverance: Japanese Tattoo Tradition in a Modern World, photographed by Kip Fulbeck, which ran in Los Angeles from March 8 to September 14 and then toured to Richmond, Florida, Vermont, Christchurch, and Melbourne through 2017. That same year he took a second Hori-name, Ryudaibori, and retired Horitaka as his working name. Between State of Grace and the Three Tides shop in Osaka, his is among the most documented Yokohama wabori transmission nodes outside Japan.

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