In post-occupation Japan, the yakuza — organised crime syndicates — adopted and refined the full-body irezumi tattoo as a mark of group identity, endurance, and commitment, undergoing hundreds of hours of painful tattooing as a rite of passage and loyalty test. The spectacular full-body suits — covering the torso, arms, and legs but leaving a panel of untattooed skin visible above the collar — became one of the most recognised images of Japanese subcultural identity in the post-war world. The association between yakuza and tattooing led to widespread discrimination against tattooed individuals in Japan, including bans from public baths and gyms that persist to the present.

Yakuza irezumi became a major subject in post-war Japanese literature and film, appearing in the work of writers including Mishima Yukio, whose novels engaged with the tattooed body as a figure for Japanese masculine identity, physical endurance, and the sublimation of pain into beauty. The yakuza tattoo recurs in contemporary Japanese poetry as an image of beauty inseparable from violence — a tension that mirrors haiku's traditional juxtaposition of aesthetic refinement and transience. Western poets engaging with Japan, including Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen, were aware of the irezumi tradition as a form of embodied aesthetic practice with literary parallels.