The Souvenir I Brought Home Under My Skin

A personal field note from Tokyo on tattoos, souvenirs, cultural memory, and identity, and why one temporary Jagua design became the most permanent souvenir I brought home from Japan.

Kirill Oleshkevich

9/4/20268 min read

I brought many things home from Japan this summer: books, Studio Ghibli souvenirs, traditional objects from museums, Japanese sweets, clothes, and, especially, for reasons I still cannot fully explain, three pairs of Onitsuka Tiger sneakers. These are the familiar rituals of travel. We visit somewhere important to us, and we want to bring something back. An object becomes evidence: I was there. This happened. I want to remember it. But this time I brought home one souvenir that could not be placed on a shelf.

A tattoo.

And perhaps what interests me most about it is that I did not travel to Japan planning to get one. It started as something temporary. On the first day of my trip, I got a Jagua temporary tattoo on my arm. This was intentional. I liked the idea of having a Japanese-inspired design during the journey, but I was not looking for another permanent tattoo. I already had one tattoo, made in my final year of school, and in general I have never considered myself a “tattoo person.” Jagua seemed perfect precisely because it would disappear.

Interestingly, despite how often Jagua is now associated with temporary body art around the world, there is nothing Japanese about the technique itself. Jagua comes from the unripe fruit of Genipa americana, a tropical plant native to Central and South America. Its juice contains genipin, a colorless compound that reacts with proteins in the skin and gradually produces a dark blue-black stain. Indigenous peoples in the Americas have used the plant for body pigmentation and other forms of coloring for generations. So even the beginning of this story was unexpectedly transnational: an Amazonian plant, a Japanese visual language, and me walking through Tokyo wearing both. But the important characteristic of Jagua was simple. It was supposed to fade.

At first, that was exactly what I wanted. By the end of the trip, it became exactly what I did not want. Japan has a complicated relationship with tattoos. There is a certain irony in deciding to commemorate Japan permanently through tattooing. Japan has one of the world's most recognizable tattoo traditions, and at the same time one of the more complicated modern social relationships with tattoos. The history is much older than the common association between tattoos and the yakuza. Scholarship on Asian tattoo traditions traces body marking in the Japanese archipelago back thousands of years and connects it, among other histories, with Indigenous traditions among the Ainu and peoples of the Ryukyu Islands. Later, tattooing was also used as a form of punishment and criminal identification. During the Edo period, elaborate decorative tattooing developed into a sophisticated visual tradition. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, during Japan's rapid Meiji-era modernization and concern with how the country would be perceived by Western powers, tattooing was outlawed. The prohibition pushed the practice underground and remained until 1948.

That history still leaves traces in contemporary Japan. The official Japan National Tourism Organization now notes that tattoos generally create no problem in ordinary daily life, but some onsen, public baths, pools and gyms still restrict tattooed visitors. Policies vary considerably, and tattoo-friendly facilities are becoming easier to find; private baths and cover patches are sometimes alternatives. The usual explanation is the long twentieth-century association between extensive tattoos and organized crime. So the tattoo in Japan occupies an unusual cultural position. It can represent extraordinary craftsmanship and centuries of artistic history. It can be fashion. It can be personal identity. And it can still close the door to an onsen. I found that contradiction fascinating. And, admittedly, slightly amusing as I was preparing to get a large visible tattoo in Tokyo.

The design I chose combines several elements that had accumulated meaning for me over many years: an enso-like brush circle, Mount Fuji, sakura, mist, and water. I do not think symbols work like dictionary entries. A mountain does not have to mean one thing. A circle does not automatically give its owner enlightenment. And putting Japanese imagery on your arm does not magically produce a relationship with Japanese culture. But symbols acquire meaning through biography. And these particular images already belonged to mine.

Fuji
Mount Fuji is perhaps the most recognizable visual symbol of Japan, but its significance extends far beyond tourism imagery. For centuries it has been a site of pilgrimage and religious practice as well as an artistic subject. UNESCO describes Fujisan simultaneously as a sacred place and source of artistic inspiration; representations of the mountain became central to Japanese visual culture and later influenced artists far beyond Japan. For me, Fuji represents something simpler and more personal: Japan becoming real. For many years during my youth, I saw this mountain in paintings, movies, books, and photographs. But many years later, I often found myself standing right in front of it in real life. That difference matters.

Sakura
Cherry blossoms carry their own enormous cultural history. They celebrate spring, beauty, and collective hanami, but they are also strongly associated with impermanence: beauty made more powerful precisely because it disappears. The National Museum of Asian Art describes sakura as representing both the impermanence of things and the joy of sharing the experience of viewing them together. Only later did I realize how perfectly this element fit my own tattoo story. The temporary Jagua image was beautiful partly because I knew it would disappear. Then it began disappearing. And suddenly I discovered that I did not like impermanence nearly as much when it was happening on my own arm.

The circle
The brush circle in the design recalls the visual language of the ensō. In Zen painting and calligraphy, the circle has been associated with ideas such as emptiness, form, and enlightenment. Historical Zen works use the circle as a powerful visual device connecting presence and absence. I would not pretend that my tattoo is some profound Zen statement. My interpretation is much more personal. For me, the circle became a way of thinking about completion. I had been interested in Japan for much of my life. Anime was an early gateway. Then came Japanese culture more broadly. Then theatre. Projects. Research. People. Professional collaborations. Travel. At some point, Japan stopped being simply a subject that interested me. It became part of my own cultural biography. Perhaps the circle represents realizing that. And then the tattoo started disappearing. This was probably the decisive moment.

During the trip, the Jagua tattoo gradually began to fade. Which, of course, was exactly what it was designed to do. But I found myself looking at it and feeling genuinely disappointed. Every day some detail was slightly lighter. Some lines became less defined. The image that had accompanied me through Tokyo, Nagoya, Fuji, and the rest of the journey was slowly disappearing. It was surprisingly painful to watch. And somewhere during those days, the idea appeared: What if I simply don't let it disappear? I had not planned this. There was no tattoo appointment waiting for me. There was certainly no carefully organized multi-month process. Instead, on my last day in Japan, I found a tattoo studio in central Tokyo and booked an appointment almost spontaneously. And suddenly something that had been designed to last only briefly became permanent.

Later I discovered that there is actually an academic literature around precisely this phenomenon. Tourism scholars have long studied souvenirs not merely as commercial objects but as forms of material culture connected to memory, place, and identity. Research shows that souvenirs can stimulate memories long after a journey has ended, while their meanings can also change over time. There is even research specifically on the tattoo as a personalized tourist souvenir.

A 2021 study examining travelers, tattoo artists, and studios described the body itself as a space for tourism experience. In these narratives, souvenir tattoos extended the process of remembering beyond the trip and became connected to personalization, emotion, social interaction, and evolving concepts of the self. When I encountered that research, it immediately made sense. A conventional souvenir represents a journey. A tattoo changes the body of the person who made the journey. That is a fundamentally different relationship. The books I brought back from Japan will eventually join other books on shelves. The museum souvenirs will become objects in my home. The Ghibli merchandise will become part of a collection. The clothes will eventually wear out. The sweets already disappeared rather quickly. And I suspect even three pairs of sneakers will not last forever. All of these things carry memory. But they remain things that belong to me. A tattoo is different. It becomes part of me.

There is also something slightly humorous about the whole decision. I have spent much of my life interested in Japan. Japanese popular culture influenced me when I was young. Later, Japan entered my professional life through cultural projects. Then through theatre. Then research. Then academic work. Then repeated travel. So perhaps, after all these years, it was simply time to make the relationship official. The tattoo became my rather unconventional way of doing that. Not because I suddenly became a tattoo enthusiast. I still haven't. And that is actually important. If I regularly collected tattoos from every country I visited, this would mean something very different. I don't. This one happened because the relationship with the place already existed long before the trip.

The journey gave that relationship a physical form. There is another contradiction I like. Professionally, I inhabit a fairly traditional world. Universities. Research. Teaching. Conferences. Publishing. Academic institutions. A large tattoo on a visible part of the arm is not necessarily the first visual detail people associate with that image. And perhaps that is partly why I like it. Identity is rarely as coherent as professional biographies make it appear. We reduce people to titles: Professor. Producer. Researcher. Author. Editor. But cultural identity is assembled from much stranger materials. Childhood television. Books. Music. Countries. People we meet. Projects that succeed. Projects that fail. Cities we return to. Images that stay with us. And sometimes a drawing that was originally supposed to disappear after a few weeks.

What does the tattoo mean now? I do not see it primarily as a memory of one vacation. That would be too small. When I look at it, I remember the journey - of course. Tokyo. Fuji. The theatres. Museums. Streets. People. The enormous amount of walking. The discoveries. The feeling of constantly recognizing things that had once existed for me only in books, on screens, and in imagination. But I also remember everything that came before that trip. My first encounters with Japanese culture. The projects connected with Japan. The people I worked with. The research questions that kept bringing me back. The fascination that survived long enough to become part of my profession. And, importantly, I also see something pointing forward. Because I do not think my relationship with Japan has reached its conclusion. Quite the opposite. There are still projects I want to create. Research I want to continue. People I want to work with. Places I want to return to. So perhaps the circle in the tattoo is not completely closed after all.

From a producer's perspective, this experience also changed the way I think about souvenirs. We often treat merchandising as the final commercial layer of an experience: the show ends, the visitor exits, the gift shop appears, the souvenir is purchased. But that interpretation is too narrow. A good souvenir extends an experience beyond its original time and place. It creates another encounter with the cultural product tomorrow, next month, or ten years later. This is one reason merchandise can matter so much in theatre, museums, theme parks, and cultural tourism. The object is not merely revenue. It is a mechanism for prolonging memory. Research into tourism and material culture similarly shows that objects can become intertwined with identity and with the ways travelers reconstruct places after returning home. My tattoo is simply an unusually literal version of that idea. I cannot put it in a drawer. I cannot lose it somewhere in my office. And I cannot decide one day that it no longer matches the furniture. The memory has become embodied.

On the first day of my journey, I chose a temporary image because I did not want anything permanent. On the final day, I sat in a tattoo studio in central Tokyo making that same idea permanent. Between those two decisions was Japan. That is probably why the story matters to me. Travel changes the meaning of objects. Sometimes it changes the meaning of places. And occasionally it changes the way we understand ourselves. I came home with suitcases full of souvenirs. But the one I value most was not inside them.

A typical souvenir says, “I brought something home from this place.” A tattoo might say something a little different: “A part of this place has come home as a part of me, but most importantly, I’ve returned from this trip a different person.” And in my case, this is probably the most meaningful souvenir Japan could have given me on this trip.