Subscriber Login
Not A Subscriber?
For more info on how you can join and get un- limited access click here
Know Your History?
Know your history better than we do?
Then let us know and e-mail us any additions you might have. If you know about an important event or a person influencing tattoo history that we missed out on... we wanna know about it too!
First Timers
This is your first visit and you're wondering how to use this site?
All about, what you can expect and find on this site and how to take full advantage of it, here.
Tattoo History - Ainu
Ainu
The earliest records of the colonization Japans are ceramic findings from the Jomon culture from about 4.500 before Christ. They obviously derive from the Ainu who are considered the natives of Japan. The Ainu exclusively decorated their bodies, preferably the faces of the women by performing something called "Nuye" or "Sinuye", the Ainu synonym for tatauing. The body jewelry was less an expression of religious feelings but more a status symbol of grown-up and married women. According to a legend a deity descended from heaven and explained to all the women that every women without a tatau who married a man is committing a big sin and she won't find salvation after death. On the contrary, as a punishment she would be tataued in hell in just one treatment.
From there on earthly tataus were indispensable for Ainu women. The procedure was conducted by specialists over years and was done by rubbing in charcoal dust in the with sharp little knives carved skin giving young girls a black-blue looking, sideways pointed line, similar to a mustache, tataued around their mouth called "Anci-Pini". The picture was supplemented with sinuous lines in faces around the eyebrows and extensive ornaments on arms and forearms. The women also received a tomb stone as a magic mark in their armpit which helped averting the crisis she will face in the age of 19, 33 and 37.
From around 300 B.C. until about 300 after Christ, immigrants from Mongolia and Malaysia came, followed by the Chinese culture and scripture through Korea. In the 6th century the Buddhism and Confucianism reached the country from China. Together with their tradition, the people of the Ainu, were finally displaced by the colonization of the northern island Hokkaido, the Ainu's main settlement area.
In the official japanese historiography this time is marked as the "peaceful cultivation of unowned land". Ainu relics can be gazed at the Ainu museum on Hokkaido. The last survivors of the Ainu still live as kind of an under race in northern Japan. Their language still doesn't have anything to do with japanese.
