In 1972 Don Ed Hardy, already a tattoo artist of note, made his first trip to Japan. He had long admired the ukiyo-e culture, particularly the prints that had inspired Edo-style tattooing, and now he was invited to come and work with Horihide (Kazuo Oguri). Hardy thus became the first Westerner to tattoo in a traditional Japanese environment.His customers were "carpenters, traditional tradespeople and a lot of yakuza," and Oguri was full of traditional tattoo lore that he willingly imparted. At the same time, however, "he was also in love with the flashy life of the gangsters."
The American had come with the mistaken impression that every Japanese tattooer was a dedicated Zen-like master. Now he found that "our social set was made up of thugs more interested in the design of the new Ford Mustang or the possibility of me smuggling in handguns for them than in the nuances of woodblock prints and stories from the old kabuki drama."Realizing that "I didn't have to go around the world to hang out with two-bit hoods," he returned to California. But he carried with him all he had learned, and his work became more and more informed by Japanese aesthetics and techniques that he pioneered in the U.S.
Ten years later, in 1983, he returned to Japan. This time he came with an introduction to Horiyoshi II (Tamotsu Kuronuma), generally considered the finest of the old-style Japanese tattooists.