Archive Note
The association begins with the Edo-period punitive system, conventionally dated from 1745, in which the Tokugawa shogunate marked convicted criminals with visible stripes, dots, and characters that varied by region: the Hiroshima domain used a three-strike completion of the character for "large," Awa used horizontal stripes, and other domains had their own marks, so an exile could be identified to where he was convicted. Members of the gambling guilds (bakuto), the peddler associations (tekiya), and the urban underclass reversed the stigma by covering their punitive marks with large decorative horimono, drawing on a vocabulary of dragons, koi, tigers, and peonies that crystallized through Utagawa Kuniyoshi's woodblock-print series of the Suikoden outlaw-heroes (1827 to about 1830). The Edo firemen, or hikeshi, were a parallel non-criminal cohort who wore similar imagery, which guards against reading every Edo tattoo as a criminal one. The Meiji government banned irezumi in November 1872 as part of presenting Japan as a modern nation, which drove the practice underground and deepened its criminal-and-outsider association until the Allied Occupation lifted the ban in 1948. The link is a historical register, not a definition: even at its peak the full-body suit was never universal among yakuza, and the association has been in documented decline.