All illustrations by Kazuo Oguri.

I was born in l933 and grew up in Gifu, a large industrial city in central Japan. Times were tough after World War II. All over Japan people were unemployed and even those who had jobs did not make enough money to live comfortably.

When I was a teenager I was proud of being a tough guy, and by the time I was l9 I was the leader of a street gang. We had fights with other gangs, and in one of these fights I stabbed a guy with a knife. He fell to the ground and we thought he was dead. The members of my gang ran back to my house, but we knew we couldn't stay there because the police would be looking for us. So my gang took up a collection and gave me enough money to get out of town and go to Tokyo.

I stayed in a hotel and went to movies and pretty soon the money was all gone. At the employment center there were long lines of people waiting to find work. They told me there was nothing for me. For three days I slept in a park and didn't have anything to eat.

I was walking the streets, feeling frightened and desperate, when I noticed a sign tacked to the door of a residence. It read "apprentice wanted," but it didn't say what kind of work it was. I knocked, and a kindly-looking middle aged woman opened the door.

"It's about the sign," I said. "I want to be an apprentice. What kind of work is it?"

"My husband will explain that to you," she said. "But I can tell you this. It's very difficult. You have to have a lot of courage and determination to stick with it.."

"I'm tough. I need the work and I can do anything."

"You can come in and talk to my husband. He's upstairs working, and he'll be finished in about an hour if you want to wait."

While I waited she brought me some green tea and little rice cakes. At that time it was the custom to give a guest a snack, but it was considered good manners to eat only a little bit. I was so hungry that I forgot all about good manners and ate all the rice cakes.

"I think you haven't eaten for a while," the woman said. "Come into the kitchen and let me give you a good meal." I liked her and I saw that she had a good heart, and so I decided to stay there and become an apprentice no matter what kind of work it was.

When the man who was destined to be my teacher finally came downstairs I was very surprised to see that he had tattoos on his arms, because like most people at that time I thought that anyone who had a tattoo must be a yakuza (gangster). He told me that he was not a yakuza, but a tattoo artist, and he had advertised for an apprentice to learn tattooing. When I heard this I hesitated, because when I was in school I had never been good at drawing. But when I looked into his eyes, I had the feeling that he was a good man, and I thought, " I've got to have work so I'll give it a try," and so I told him I liked to draw and I wanted to learn tattooing.