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My life as an apprentice in those days was not easy. Every day after work my teacher would ask me to bring him his sake, and after he drank a few cups he would become abusive and go on a rampage and hit me and his wife and kick things until I begged him to stop. That's why I never drink alcohol. It changes a man's heart.

Sometimes my teacher hit me in the presence of customers, and the customers would laugh. I was proud and I hated it when they laughed at me, so told my teacher that I wasn't used to that kind of treatment, and hitting me in private was okay, but not in front of customers. But I wanted to prove to my teacher that I had courage and confidence, so I stuck with it and endured the beatings.

One time I got so discouraged that I packed my suitcase and walked to the train station and sat there all night waiting for the train back to Gifu. But my teacher's wife came and found me in the station.

"Why did you leave?" she asked.

"It's too tough," I said. "I don't like the beatings."

" I told you it would be difficult and you said you had the courage to do it, but now you want to give up. When my husband was an apprentice he had it much tougher than you do, but he stuck with it, and now he's a great tattoo artist. You are fortunate to be his apprentice. You are like a son to him. He thinks you have what it takes to be a good tattoo artist. I want you to come back home with me and show him that he was right." So I went back with her.

Every day after my teacher finished work he would give me a drawing assignment. For my first assignment he gave me a picture of a lion he had drawn and told me to copy it. After I copied it he took away his drawing and told me to draw the same lion from memory. I tried, but I couldn't get it right.

"What were you thinking of?" he said. "When you draw you must do it with total concentration. It is the same when you tattoo. You must concentrate on what you are doing and let no other thought enter your mind." Now I can memorize a picture after looking at it for only a few minutes, because my teacher taught me the technique of concentration and drawing from memory.

Japanese tattoo designs are based on drawings which illustrate traditional stories and legends, and these designs have been handed down from generation to generation. When my teacher was an apprentice he got a book of tattoo designs from his teacher, and my teacher gave me this book. My teacher's designs were all based on the work of the nineteenth century Japanese artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi, but my teacher didn't have any of Kunyoshi's prints; he had only copied the designs that his teacher had drawn for him, and he had about 100 designs. Kunyoshi's work is the source of most of our traditional tattoo designs. I read about Kuniyoshi but when I was an apprentice it was very hard to find Kuniyoshi's prints because most of them had been lost in the war. A few of them had survived in small towns which were not bombed, and after the war some dealers bought them and brought them back to Tokyo. But many of them were bought by foreigners who took them out of the country, so that now the great collections of Kuniyoshi's prints are in France, England, and the United States. There are a few collectors of Kuniyoshi prints in Japan, but they will not allow their prints to be shown or photographed. I have collected many reproductions and photographs of Kunyoshi's prints, and I have drawn about 350 designs based on them.

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