The Moral Shortcut of Crying Imperialism

”Those are actual bullets. They’re firing at us. This is real.”

That was the point in my grandfather’s World War II story where I would sit up a little straighter, lock in, and stop complaining that I was missing The Cosby Show.

It was when I realized that he was just a dude. A regular guy pushed into an insane global meat grinder situation that he absolutely did not ask for. He, and so many others.

Nobody woke up in ‘44 stoked to take back Guam. Nobody wanted to fight the Japanese occupying forces, and nobody wanted to battle malaria mosquitoes and oppressive tropical heat while building airstrips all day. And I’m almost certain nobody wanted to scoop maggots out of their potted meat, though I’m sure they could’ve used the protein.

That military food is just one Spam thing after another.

Sometimes, after 18 hour days of avoiding death and disease, they would get to relax. They’d have a few drinks and watch movies from home projected on a makeshift screen hung between palm trees. For a lot of them, my grandfather included, it was the first time seeing their newborn kid. For some of them, it would be the only time.

Another common leisure activity? Getting tattooed. 

These weren’t pristine, sterile luxury studios with lo-fi hip hop playlists, drought tolerant plants in the lobby, and damaged climbers who couldn’t act their way out of dinner plans making content. The machines were crude and they ran off of leaky truck batteries. The ink was not vegan. But those tattoos were badges of honor they wore as proudly as their stripes. 

I thought those old, blue, Traditional anchors on my grandfather’s Navy buddies were so ugly when I was a kid. Little did I know what the future held for me.

Those anchors, that art, they were all influenced by a multitude of things. Many of them geographical and entirely exclusive to that specific region in the 1940s. This was the raw and chaotic genesis of modern tattooing. It didn’t spread through academic theory or a PDF syllabus or biased YouTube videos on style discourse. It spread through sweaty, terrifying human contact. 

Tattooing has never existed in cultural isolation. It has always evolved through that kind of contact. Travel, trade, migration, war, curiosity, and mutual fascination. What we now call “modern Western tattooing” didn’t appear out of thin air. Nor was it stolen wholesale from another culture. 

Like all great human achievements. It was built through exchange.

Modern Western tattooing owes a tremendous debt to East Asian traditions, particularly Japanese tattooing. Not through theft, but through study, gruelling apprenticeships, reverence and adaptation. Sailors, collectors, and early artists didn’t “loot” visual language like cartoon pirates. They carried it home on their skin because they were deeply influenced by it. Often crediting its mastery and philosophy.

Tattooers like Norman Collins, a man not exactly known for being a sensitive snowflake, openly acknowledged how much Japanese tattooing shaped his entire understanding of composition, flow, longevity, and respect for the body as a living canvas. Likewise, masters such as Horiyoshi III didn’t just influence Japanese tattooing, they reshaped global tattoo aesthetics in ways that keep current shops open today.

I say this not as an outsider defending history, but as someone who lives at the intersection of these bloodlines. 

I’m a mixed race tattooer with Japanese heritage and Pacific Islander roots. I’m also a descendant of Irish refugees who escaped the potato famine just to become “disposable labor” that built the American railroads. My family history is tied directly to the Pacific, culturally and historically, as well as the very real sacrifices made during the birth of this nation, and in the Pacific Theater during World War II. 

That history isn’t an abstract thought experiment I use to sound smart at dinner parties. It’s very real. It lives in my family stories. Ones of absence, survival, sacrifice, the complicated aftermath of war, occupation, and cultural exchange.

So, when some performative activist on TikTok reduces tattoo history to a simplistic narrative of “the West stealing from the East,” it erases the lived reality of people like me. It ignores the people who were shaped by both sides of that contact. It ignores the fact that tattooing moved across oceans through human bodies, human relationships, and often profound respect. Not through conquest of art, but through admiration for it. 

It’s called inspiration. And without it, art is just a fax machine in a dark room spinning out.

Accusing modern Western tattooing of thievery ignores a few glaring realities. 

Tattoo knowledge was shared person-to-person, not extracted by institutions.

Techniques were adapted, not duplicated.

Credit was given, often obsessively, by the people doing the learning.

Framing tattooing as an act of cultural appropriation strips dignity from the craft itself.

It suggests tattooers are opportunistic culture vultures rather than stewards of a legacy, and it reduces centuries-long artistic dialogue to a modern moral shortcut.

Culture grows through conversation, not quarantine. To insist that influence is inherently exploitive is to deny how art actually survives. If you reduce tattooing to extraction and propaganda, you’re not preserving the past. You’re just rewriting it with worse information and broadcasting it with a distorted audio file.

Tattooing isn’t a museum artifact to be guarded by a purity test or a bloodline. It’s a living practice shaped by devotion, discipline, and transmission. Treating it like stolen property isn’t justice.

It’s historical erasure disguised as righteousness.

Calling inspiration thievery assumes bad faith by default and strips tattooers of agency, discipline, and humility. And worse than that, it implies that Eastern tattoo traditions are so fragile they couldn’t possibly influence the global stage without being destroyed by it.

And that paternalistic idea is way more disrespectful than acknowledging their massive impact. 

Maybe some would rather see tattooing frozen in a sterile museum case getting smudged by third graders with hot Cheetos fingers, but I think this craft deserves better than that. It deserves better conversations. Ones rooted in nuance, humility, and lived experience.

Art doesn’t exist in a solipsistic vacuum, whether you were dumb enough to pay for a blue checkmart or not.