Welcome to Saturday University, a monthly lecture series featuring experts from around the world. Gain new insights on Asia throughout time as our visiting scholars, authors, artists, and thought leaders delve into new themes each season. Tickets include gallery access.
Why Get a Japanese Dragon Tattoo? An Enduring Image of Cross-Cultural Exchange
Sherry Fowler
Where does the mysterious hybrid creature of a Japanese dragon come from and what has led so many to have its form permanently marked on their skin? This talk will consider dragon imagery alongside the history of tattooing in Japan with its synergistic relationship to Edo period (1615-1868) print culture and its long-standing associations with outsider identities. When it became illegal for Japanese people to get a tattoo in the late-nineteenth century, tattoo artists were allowed to continue their artistry on foreigners visiting Japan, many of whom chose dragon tattoos as souvenirs. After World War II, US soldiers stationed in Asia enthusiastically embraced this tradition to return home with dragon tattoos. Now, as the visibility and acceptance of custom tattooing has reached new heights around the world, thanks to the pioneering efforts of artists like Horiyoshi II and Ed Hardy, the dragon image maintains an exalted position within the plethora of new possibilities available for tattoo designs.
Sherry Fowler is Professor of Japanese Art History at the University of Kansas. She has a PhD in Japanese art history from UCLA. Her newest book is Buddhist Bells and Dragons: Under and Over Water, In and Out of Japan (University of Hawai?i Press, 2025) and others are Accounts and Images of Six Kannon in Japan (2016) and Muroji: Rearranging Art and History at a Japanese Buddhist Temple (2005). Other publications include “Japanese Buddhist Sculpture” with Yui Suzuki for Oxford Bibliographies in Art History (2022) and “Drawing Embodied: Ed Hardy’s East Asian Art Connections” with Dale Slusser, in Ed Hardy: Deeper than Skin: Art of the New Tattoo (2019). She has research interests in pre-modern Japanese sculpture, East Asian bells, pilgrimage prints, foreign interactions with Japanese art, issues of collecting, and ritual. She is currently working on Buddhist/Christian exchanges in sixteenth-century Japan.