In addition to the photographs taken in the tattoo artist’s studio, the black-and-white series compiles portraits of clients, photos of gang members in intimate settings, with their families, and images captured during Sanja matsuri, a Shinto festival held in Tokyo. Over the course of the visits that followed, the photographer, born in 1978, met Horikazu Shodai’s clients, the majority of whom were yakuza members. He showed great discretion during the sessions he observed and got on extremely well with Horikazu Shodai, gaining his trust, and the latter granted him permission to start working and take out his camera. Ronin de Goede returned to Japan in 2016 to complete his series. Ronin de Goede thus served as a guide for the group in Europe. A few months later, the tattooist (who had taken on his father’s name in the interim) travelled to Frankfurt to attend a tattoo convention with some friends. He discovered that he was seriously ill and met his son, also a tattoo artist.

The artist began his project in 2011 when he went to visit the renowned tattoo master Horikazu Shodai. The moments they spent together are documented in the series Asakusa (2020). In 2017, Dutch photographer Ronin de Goede followed the work of the famous tattoo artist Horikazu Shodai, who is close to the yakuza and specialises in full-body tattoos. No tattoo artists had a medical licence, which made the practice illegal.

Until that point, the practice-which had a somewhat scandalous image due to its historic association with the yakuza-was considered a medical procedure, due to the use of needles. In late 2020, the Japanese supreme court ruled that tattooing could become… legal.

Yakuza tattoo