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Yoji Harada

Custom; reality-television-era

Miami Ink / Love Hate Tattoo, Miami Beach, Florida

Yoji Harada (1972 to 2019) was a Tokyo-born tattooer and punk musician who became the on-screen apprentice on TLC's Miami Ink under Ami James. He later worked internationally, including in Amsterdam, and died in 2019 at age 46.

Archive Note

Born in Tokyo in 1972, Harada came to the United States in the 1990s, first pursuing music as a punk-rock guitarist and singer in a New York band called Big Deal before moving to Miami around 2004 to apprentice under Ami James at the South Beach studio, associated with the Love Hate Tattoo brand, that became the production base for Miami Ink. The series ran from 2005 to 2008, and Harada was presented as the shop apprentice; his on-camera arc from apprentice to working tattooer was a recurring storyline that made him widely recognized, particularly in Japan. After the show he co-founded a tattoo-themed children's apparel company with fellow cast members and continued to tattoo and play music, with reporting placing him at a studio in the Netherlands from around 2016. He died in March 2019 at the age of 46; his death was widely reported and mourned by peers, but the cause is not reliably established in the sources and is treated as unknown.

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