Archive Note
Horiuno I, born Kamei Unosuke, was a Tokyo tebori master of the late Edo, Meiji, and Taisho periods, conventionally dated 1843 to 1927. Born in the Kanda district of Edo, he began tattooing around the age of twenty, worked in cities including Osaka, Kyoto, and Shizuoka, and settled into full-time practice in Tokyo from around forty, continuing into his seventies. He is remembered chiefly as the founder of the Horiuno line and as the tattooer whose Kanda clientele, drawn largely from the construction and manufacturing trades, formed the friendship and pilgrimage society that became the Edo Choyukai, one of the oldest documented associations of tattooed people in Japan. His work passed to Horiuno II and Horiuno III, and the society he indirectly founded still makes an annual pilgrimage to the Oyama Afuri shrine in Kanagawa. His tattoos are recorded in the Akimitsu Takagi photographic archive of the Tokyo scene of the 1950s and 1960s and in the documentary Horimono: Japan's Tattoo Pilgrimage.
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