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ECCENTRIC
SUPER TATTOO-
The shop itself is located in the old part of Nagoya in the neighborhood of Naka. Here you will find various shops (not only tattoo shops) that have been around for hundreds of years. Shops here still deal with slowly dying trades like handicrafts for the local traditional market. Eccentric Super Tattoo was the first tattoo shop in this area and is still going strong at the same location Sabado started in 1990. The original shop on the street level has been transformed into a small café run by Yukino, Sabado's younger sister. She also takes care of all the chores that a busy tattoo shop deals with on a daily basis. She's a friendly, first contact with the rest of the shop and fluent in both English and Japanese, which makes the shop feel very international without the usual culture barriers. Sabado works at his newer location around the corner. Having been a good friend of Sabado for over eleven years, Genko started out his tattoo career as one of Sabado's clients and then began tattooing with him. After only nine years, he might be one of the most natural, gifted tattoo artists in the world. He is now tattooing independently at Genko Tattoo, but still maintains strong ties to the old shop. This soft-spoken man can turn out some serious stuff, that's for sure, and it's after you have made the acquaintance of Sabado that you'll see where it all comes from. The style of Eccentric Super Tattoo not only shows itself in the tattoos but also in its employee's personalities and their way of dealing with clients and everyday life. It's different from any other shop I have been to in Japan. The Japanese tattoo shop/studio mentality is, in general, pretty laid back. But after spending time with the team from Eccentric, you can easily see that there are other sides of this culture that put the meaning of the word tattoo in a different light. I don't like to compare artists and shops with one and another, since we all have different backgrounds and values, but, after an interview with Eccentric's founder and his followers, you definitely want to get more ink. Sabado opens up the shop at ten a.m. He is busy tattooing until eight, nine or, sometimes, ten p.m. The shop is closed on Tuesdays. Eccentric is brightly lit and clean. There is no unnecessary furniture, posters on the walls or other memorabilia. You get the feeling of efficiency and practicality. The rather big studio is divided into four work stations with sliding glass screens dividing them and Sabado's self-made wooden, leather-covered chairs and mobile work benches. Everything is easy to use, easy to reach and easy to sterilize. Sabado's story starts in South America where he spent six years traveling as a self-taught jewelry maker. He was a vagabond and hippie, spending time traveling the roads of South America's countryside. It was around eighteen years ago that he had his first contact with the world of tattooing.
"The guy said to me, 'Hey, Sabado, what are you doing? Tattoo me, too.' So, I said, 'Sure, what do you want?' 'A tiger on my back,' he tells me. 'Okay,' I say, 'but we need a machine for that kind of work. 'Okay,' he tells me. 'Just tell me what you need and I'll get it for you.'" The next day the guy came back with all the things Sabado told him to bring, and Sabado built the machine and got it to work. "I had absolutely no experience to do a big backpiece like he wanted," he recalls. "All I had done so far with a machine was a small rose on myself. I tried to make a tiger, but it was just too difficult. Too big. I did the line work, but the guy couldn't sit still because of the pain, so we never finished." After that, Sabado improved his technique and tattooed his hippie friends all over Peru, Chile and Argentina. There were no tattoo shops anywhere he came to, but, after coming to the huge, industrial city of Sao Paolo, Sabado came in contact with real tattoo studios and more professional tattoo artists like Russo, Polacko and Maritius Theodore. "Mauritius tattooed me lot," says Sabado. "Then I decided to sell all my jewelry and the tools to make them and buy a tattoo machine. The first one was magnetic." That was in 1989, and Sabado was twenty-seven years old. "When I did my first stuff as a professional, I worked with Russo. He was kind of a hippie, but he had his own house and car, and we used to tattoo at his house or in the back of his V.W. van near the beach. You know, smoking, drinking and maybe tattooing once a week, if we felt like it." Then, Sabado moved back to Japan and opened up his Nagoya shop. It was there that he worked with artists like Han and Washo, to name a few."
Sabado shows me a box full of small stencils and sheets of paper with small one-point designs on them, some of them roughly drawn, others extremely detailed. He shows me a small drawing of a tiger, maybe five centimeters big. He says, "This is a backpiece design I did some time ago. This box is full of that kind of design and there are many I have seen in magazines." The new Eccentric T-shirt features the artists as a big sea monster popping up between the waves, sinking a hopeless sailing boat with SABADO written in old-school, heavy-metal lettering over the whole scene. The new shop sticker features a picture of Sabado as a newborn baby with the text BORN TO BE MILD written under it. Concerning his future, Sabado likes to go to places he hasn't been before. "As for tattoo conventions, I will go anywhere," he says. "If I have the time and the money and the invitation appeals to me, I'll go. But I almost never get invited because we don't have email here. We used to have email, but it filled up our days with reading and answering. So, I decided not to have it anymore. I am a primitive guy and I like personal contact with people. I was invited to an event here in Japan just a couple of weeks ago and the organizer invited me by sending me a video clip with him talking to us and inviting us to his event. It was very funny, so I went there with everyone from the shop." Sabado feels that the tattoo scene in Nagoya is very natural. "No one hides their tattoos under long-sleeved shirts," he points out. "People in Nagoya are very relaxed about their tattoos and the tattoo scene. It's a good place to be. I'm just a simple, small-shop owner, just like the guy next door selling sneakers or the small café down the street. Lots of neighbors come over here just to hang out, and not always tattoo-related people. I'm the oldest shop around here doing tattooing, but my neighbor and his family has a very long history in this area. He's one of my best friends. We are very close." As I get ready to leave, I tell Sabado that, in Tokyo, I sometimes feel a little out of place and not so welcome if I show my tattoos. He says, "If you feel like that, people will treat you like that. People will treat you the way you act. At Eccentric, we don't hide our tattoos and people treat us well all the time. All you have to do is to smile, be good, you know?" On my way back to Tokyo I was thought of Sabado's words, and isn't it pretty obvious and clear when you look at it? Maybe it's up to us to surprise people with warm and polite behavior and prove them wrong by saying, "I have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear."
GENKO |
