Japan's military officials are considering lifting the ban on tattoos as they try to increase public response to a dwindling recruitment drive.
Tattoos have long been taboo in the country, as they have been associated with mafia crime gangs known as yakuza.
But officials now say young Japanese are getting tattoos for fashion reasons, not to identify with the yakuza.
And they also claim that this ban hinders enlistment.
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The Japan Self-Defense Forces (JSDF), the country's army, has ten percent less than the required capacity, and the recruitment target set last April has not been reached, officials say.
"Rejecting candidates just because they have tattoos is a problem in terms of increasing the manpower base," Masahisa Sato, a lawmaker from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, said recently.
Kazuhito Machida, head of the defense ministry's personnel bureau, said the ban must be reconsidered given Japan's declining birthrate.
The country of 125 million people had fewer than 800.000 births in 2022, down from more than two million in the 1970s.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said it was "now or never" for Japan to address its shrinking and aging population.
This has also increased pressure on Japan to fill vacancies in the military in response to China's growing power and North Korea's nuclear arsenal.
There are increasing calls for Japan to revise its post-war pacifist constitution to better respond to rising tensions in the Asia-Pacific region and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
It is unclear when a final decision will be made, but scientists say there was a time when tattoos were common in Japanese culture.
But encounters with Europeans in the 1800s changed that, says Yoshimi Yamamoto, a cultural anthropologist at Tsuru University who has studied tattoo culture in Japan and Taiwan.
"Civilized Europe" saw full-body tattoos on the Japanese as "backward," prompting them to cover them up except during religious festivals, Yamamoto said in a 2019 online lecture.
The taboo intensified in postwar Japan when yakuza movies became popular in the 1970s and 1980s.
Then they became synonymous with criminal activities.
"Tattooed people are almost automatically feared," says Yamamoto.
The image of the yakuza has recently become popular again, thanks to a Hollywood movie Wolverines from 2013, in which Hugh Jackman spoke about the origins of the most popular movie personality on the streets of Japan, she added.
Fear and suspicion are spreading again, so people with tattoos are banned from entering some beaches and some public bathrooms.
But this ban is being questioned, Yamamoto said, as more and more young people opt for tattoos purely as a personal choice.
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