#okinawa

A silver spell cast over the ocean Okinawa [沖縄], Japan [日本]

These sacred tattoos were banned in Okinawa. A new generation is bringing them back.

Once worn by nearly every Ryukyuan woman, these intricate hand tattoos were outlawed for over a century.

By Haley Harrison

Inside a small tatami room just outside the center of Naha, the capital of Okinawa Prefecture, a quiet rebirth of a once-banned tattoo practice is taking place. Moeko Heshiki, one of the few remaining hajichaas, lays out her stick-and-poke tools with practiced care. My eyes are drawn to the long, dark arrows that trace the length of her fingers—a sacred art now nearly lost.

I tell her that the last woman in my lineage to have hajichi tattoos was my great-great-grandmother, the weight of both pride and loss settling over me.

“People sometimes tell me, ‘Oh, you opened a box,” she says, alluding to the cultural practices Okinawans were forced to lock away. Soon, the tattoos that once marked the hands of generations of Okinawan women will mark my own.

The colonization of Ryukyu

Long before U.S. military bases lined its shores, the islands known today as Okinawa were once the independent Ryukyu Kingdom. In 1879, Japan’s Meiji government annexed the islands, abolishing the kingdom and absorbing the newly named Okinawa Prefecture into its empire.

Ryukyuan sovereignty was dismantled on all fronts: communal lands were seized and redistributed, the indigenous languages were prohibited, and the political and social systems in which women held positions of leadership were overthrown. 

Adriane Tengan-Stoia and Lex McClellan‑Ufugusuku, doctoral students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, explain that women were the spiritual leaders in Ryukyuan society and were believed to possess a divine connection to the spiritual realm. 

“Before Western intervention and Japanese colonization, the chifijing ganashi me, or high priestess, served as the king's counterpart,” says Tengan-Stoia. McClellan‑Ufugusuku adds that the new Meiji government “wanted to put heteropatriarchy firmly in the Ryukyus as it was in Japan” and began persecuting women in positions of power and targeting their cultural traditions.

As a result, hajichi—hand-poked markings that adorned the hands, wrists, and fingers of Ryukyuan women for centuries—was banned.

In the days of Ryukyu, girls as young as six would begin their hajichi journey by receiving two small circles, called tontonmi, between their knuckles. As they grew and reached new milestones, such as getting married, mastering complicated weaving techniques, or turning 60, so did their tattoos.