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Young people today do not understand the road I have traveled. I studied tattooing under the old Japanese style of apprenticeship, in which the relationship of the student to the teacher was like that of a disciple to a master. For five years I lived in my teacher's house and did all the chores like cleaning , washing dishes, and chopping wood for the stove. If I made a mistake, my teacher scolded me and sometimes he even hit me. It was very difficult because I wasn't used to this kind of life I missed my friends in Gifu and sometimes when I went to bed at night I would cry myself to sleep. But I tried to show the samurai spirit and in the morning I never looked sad. I just did my work.

Every day I watched my teacher while he tattooed. He usually had three or four customers a day and he worked on each customer for about two hours. I helped him by preparing his colors and getting all the things he needed ready for him. But I didn't ask questions, and he didn't explain anything. That was the traditional style of Japanese teaching in all the arts and crafts. Words go in one ear and out the other, but after many hours of observing and thinking about what you have seen, you learn without words. This is the best way.

One time a customer asked my teacher to tattoo a carp on his back. The following Sunday my teacher took me to a carp pond and we sat there all day looking at the carp. After we came home my teacher said, "Do you know why I was watching carp all day?"

"No," I answered."It is because I want to study the living carp. I don't like cartoons; I'm a professional artist and I want to tattoo the true spirit of the carp. "

At that time I hadn't seen the work of other tattoo artists. In May my teacher took me to the festival at Sanja Temple where I saw many tattooed men wearing loin cloths. Then I understood what he had said about the living spirit of the carp as opposed to tattoo designs which are cartoons. I remember two carp tattoos: one by Hori Bun, which looked like a cartoon, and one by Hori Uno, which had some of the true form of the carp but was still partly a cartoon. It was supposed to be a carp climbing up a waterfall but it looked dead, and a dead carp can't climb a waterfall. The face of the carp climbing a waterfall must be strong, like the face of a samurai, but the face of the carp by Hori Uno was not strong. The expression on the face is very important in a tattoo. For example, in the traditional tattoo of the samurai fighting the giant snake, the samurai doesn't know whether or not he can kill the snake. His face must express this feeling.

My teacher asked me which tattoo I thought was best. I saw a man with a dragon tattooed on his back which was very powerful and moved as if it were alive when the man walked. The name of the tattoo artist was Hori Sada. I told my teacher that was my favorite, and he said, " You have a true tattoo artist's eye. Most people look only for beauty in a tattoo, but a truly great tattoo must be more than a pretty picture. It must have a life of its own."

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