| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Subject | Yushi (Scratch Addiction) |
| Type | Person |
| Era | Contemporary |
| Location | Harajuku, Tokyo, Japan |
| Date | 2009 CE |
| Style / Technique | cross-cultural street-shop work combining traditional Japanese imagery with bold Western outlines, in a walk-in flash format |
| Connected to | Japanese Irezumi, The Sailor Tattoo Tradition, Yakuza and Irezumi |
Archive Note
Japanese tattooing was for most of its history a private trade. A master worked full-body irezumi for introduced clients in a home or a discreet studio, by appointment, with little advertising and nothing in the window. Scratch Addiction in Harajuku, Tokyo broke that pattern. The shop runs on the American street-shop system, where a customer walks in off the street and orders a tattoo, with flash on the walls and a counter at the front. The 2014 Tokyo Fashion feature "Top 10 Tokyo Tattoo Shops" describes it as the first street shop of its kind in Japan.
The shop sits on or just off Takeshita Street, the dense pedestrian lane that anchors the neighborhood's youth culture. Directory and business listings place it at Jingumae 3-27-14, 1F, in Shibuya City, Tokyo. It is small, resembles an overseas walk-in studio, keeps its booths toward the back, and tattoos across many styles. Its founding year and founder are not established by any reviewed source and are not asserted here. The "first street shop in Japan" claim is reported as it appears in the Tokyo Fashion feature. The precise opening date is unconfirmed.
Yushi is documented as one of the resident tattooers at Scratch Addiction. The same 2014 Tokyo Fashion survey lists the studio's artists at that time as Yushi, Kou, Yuya, and Kobayashi. That roster is from a single source and may have changed since. It is recorded as of 2014.
The fuller name comes from one place. In a historical profile published in Afterlife Press's Disintegration issue 3, the writer Michael McCabe records him as Yushi Ichinohe and traces his career from about the late 1990s, when he built his reputation at Scratch Addiction in Harajuku. The bookseller Good Guy Tattoo Supply lists Disintegration 03 and independently confirms that the McCabe study of Yushi and Scratch Addiction exists within that issue. The surname Ichinohe, though, appears only in connection with the McCabe profile and has not been found in an independent second source. It is recorded here as documented by McCabe rather than as fully verified.
McCabe describes the work as cross-cultural. By that account Yushi combines traditional Japanese imagery with bold Western outlines and a modern graphic sensibility, the visual language of a walk-in shop rather than a closed master's studio. That description sits well with where he works. A street shop on Takeshita Street draws a different clientele than the introduced clients of a traditional horishi, and the imagery follows the customers.
The name Yushi causes confusion, and the note that informs this entry is careful about it. There is a separate, well-documented Yushi who tattoos at Guru Tattoo and founded Oyabun Tattoo in San Diego, described in his own shop biography as Korean-born, having moved to Japan in 1999. A third tattooer, Yushi "Horikichi" Takei, was born in Tokyo in 1976, apprenticed in Seattle from 2000, and is based in Amsterdam. Without a source that ties the Scratch Addiction Yushi Ichinohe to either of those men, no move to the United States and no work at Guru Tattoo is claimed for him. What is supported is narrower and steadier. A resident tattooer named Yushi, working since about the late 1990s at a Harajuku walk-in studio that helped bring the street-shop format to Tokyo.