Steve Levenstein has an interesting blog entry about the tattooed men and women of the Yakuza.  I knew male gang members are often covered with tattoos to signify their affiliation with the organized Japanese crime group; what I didn't know was that wives, girlfriends, and mistresses are also often tattooed to show their affiliation with the gang lifestyle or their loyalty & obedience to a particular Yakuza member they are romantically involved with.

 

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i think the tattoos are beautiful...i am just sad it has to represent something so bad. i used to have yakuza fantasies, until i saw showdown in little tokyo. seriously, i did...but you know it is because of the glamorization of crime.

when i spent a few days in county jail for a DUI, i saw an Asian dude in the showers who was covered in Asian-esque tattoos, but he didn't look Japanese. he looked southeast Asian.

i'd be willing to bet that the Yakuza idea of tattooing bodies spilled into other Asian gangs cuz it is kinda cool with the loyalty and money factor involved. and now throw in these cute little tatted-up, hood-rat hos, it just makes it all the more cooler.

imagine being in the midst of a brawl and then ripping your shirt off to reveal one of those crazy tatts above. if i were on the opposing end, i guarantee you the sight of that would intimidate me. lol.

i have noticed that the south east gang like guys have black ink and not color and usually is not as elaborate as the yakuza tattoos.

i'm sure most of the Asian gangs in SoCal are unorganized groups of guys who either nickel and dime small quantities of drugs or run petty crime rings. it pales in comparison to the organization of bigger groups like Yakuza and its derivatives, so the meaning behind their initiation process is more meaningful. but i do know that hawaii is a big traffic stop for many East Asian drug lords into the West Coast Market so there may be some affiliation.

small town thugs try to emulate the big ones, this creates the illusion of power. not to say either is any less dangerous on a one-on-one level, but one has real backing of literally an army of agents, while the others are limited to their little cliques.

There were a lot of guys from SE Asia in my high school who were covered in black tatoos. Didn't mean they were criminals though, they had them for years and many were really faded -- it was more cultural for them I suppose, like in some Polynesian cultures. In Hawaii recently, I saw a children's poetry wall from a local elementary school titled "my first tattoo."

This sucks. I always found heavily tattooed Asian women quite hot. Now, I feel somewhat restrained in getting to know them.

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