In 1872, the Meiji government of Japan banned tattooing as part of its programme of Westernisation and the suppression of practices considered barbaric by European standards, despite the rich artistic tradition of irezumi. The ban drove tattooing underground and paradoxically associated it more firmly with the yakuza criminal underworld, as legitimate practitioners were criminalised. The prohibition remained formally in effect until the Allied occupation after World War II, when it was lifted in 1948.

The Meiji prohibition produced a paradox that fascinated Japanese and Western writers alike: the suppression of irezumi transformed it into a secret art of resistance, invested with the aura of the forbidden. Japanese writers of the late Meiji and Taisho periods — including Junichiro Tanizaki, whose story 'Shisei' (The Tattooer, 1910) is a masterwork of literary body-art fiction — used irezumi as a figure for traditional Japanese aesthetic values threatened by Westernisation. Tanizaki's literary treatment of tattooing as an act of transformative artistic violence fed into a whole tradition of Japanese literary aestheticism.