I love chatting with the locals in small neighborhood bars. In the comfortable anonymity of these places, I sometimes reveal that I am tattooed. Often people want to see. If the situation is right, I oblige them and take off my shirt.
And then the most surprising thing happens. Sensing a rare opportunity, other customers and bar employees join in by pulling back their clothing to reveal tattoos—usually over half the men and women present. Most Japanese think that their countrymen do not have tattoos. The reality is that they don't show their tattoos.
Only one of these people admitted to a Yakuza connection. He was a civilian, but his father was a Yakuza gangster who wore a dragon tattoo. He had an amusing story from his boyhood.
When he was a child, his father threatened, “If you're bad, this dragon will bite you!” (お前が悪いことをしたら、この龍が噛みつくぞ！) That scared the hell out of the young boy.
Like many Yakuza, the father was missing portions of his fingers. Instead of admitting he had chopped off his own fingers in atonement for gangland transgressions, the father claimed to have been mutilated by a fan. The boy spent summers in mortal fear of electric fans.
His father left when he was young and had been largely incommunicado thereafter.
Nonetheless, on his chest the son bore the same dragon tattoo as his father.
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