Dr Fukushi Masaichi: The Tokyo Pathologist Who Collected Tattooed Human Skin

Oct 16, 2024

10 min read

Updated: Oct 16

Dr Fukushi Katsunari standing beside a large tattooed human skin preserved as a wet specimen at the Medical Pathology Museum, University of Tokyo — Dr Fukushi Katsunari with a wet specimen from the tattooed skin collection at the Medical Pathology Museum, University of Tokyo.

Somewhere inside the University of Tokyo there's a room most people will never be allowed into. Stretched in frames and propped on mannequins are the tattooed skins of men who died decades ago, their dragons, carp and warrior heroes still sharp. Others float in tanks of preserving fluid. They're there because of one pathologist, Dr Fukushi Masaichi, who spent a good chunk of the early 20th century making deals with tattooed working men: let me have your skin when you die, and I'll make sure your tattoo outlives you.

It's one of the strangest collections on earth, and a lot of what gets repeated about it online doesn't hold up. So here's what's actually documented, what's shaky and the bits most retellings miss, including the crime novel that turned him into a fictional character and the son who kept the collection going.

Quick Answers

Who was Fukushi Masaichi? A Japanese pathologist, born in 1878, who graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1907 and later collected tattooed human skin for research.
Why did he collect tattoos? It started with skin research. He noticed syphilis seemed to show up differently on tattooed skin, and his interest in tattoos snowballed from there.
How did he get the skins? He made agreements with tattooed people while they were alive, sometimes paying for their unfinished tattoos in return for the right to their skin after death.
How many survive? Popular accounts say around 105, held at the University of Tokyo's Medical Pathology Museum. The university hasn't published an official figure.
Can you visit? No. The collection isn't open to the public and access is rarely granted.

Kinhyōshi yōrin (Yang Lin), hero of the Suikoden (Water Margin).

Irezumi Before the Doctor Arrived

To understand why anyone would sign their skin away, you need to know how much these tattoos meant to the people wearing them. Japanese full body tattooing, or irezumi, took off in the first half of the 1800s, when Utagawa Kuniyoshi's woodblock prints of the tattooed outlaw heroes of Water Margin became a huge hit. Firemen, steeplejacks and express couriers in Edo started wearing the same designs, and wealthy locals sometimes paid for a fireman's tattoo as a point of civic pride

Then in 1872 the new Meiji government banned decorative tattooing outright, worried about how it looked to Western visitors. It didn't stop the practice, it just pushed it behind closed doors. The irony is that Western visitors loved it. Prince George, later King George V, and the future Tsar Nicholas II are both said to have been tattooed in Japan, and back in London tattooists like Sutherland Macdonald and later George Burchett built careers partly on that Japanese influence. The ban wasn't lifted until 1948, under the American occupation.

So for almost the whole of Fukushi's working life, the bodysuits he cared about were technically illegal to make. The people wearing them were labourers, gamblers, craftsmen and, increasingly, gangsters. That matters, because it's part of why a respectable doctor offering to preserve their work forever would have seemed like such a big deal.

Dr Fukushi Masaichi, an elderly man in a dark suit, leaning in to examine a framed, dried tattooed human skin

Who Was Fukushi Masaichi?

Fukushi was born in 1878. The University of Tokyo's own archives show he graduated from the Tokyo Imperial University College of Medicine in July 1907, and a March 1927 album lists him as a lecturer in charge of pathology and anatomy (Snopes). He also spent time studying in Germany, which was the place ambitious Japanese doctors went to train in those decades.

You'll often read that he founded the Japanese Pathological Society. That's hard to square with the dates. The Japanese Society of Pathology marked its centenary in 2011, which puts its founding in 1911 (ICCR), when Fukushi was only four years out of medical school. He may well have been an early member, but there's no good evidence he set it up, so we've left that claim out.

His early research was on moles and how pigment behaves in the skin. That's the thread that led him to tattoo ink, which is basically pigment deliberately parked under the skin by someone with a needle. The Japan he worked in during those years looked a lot like the street life in Herbert Geddes' Yokohama glass plate photographs, with labourers and rickshaw men who'd have been exactly the kind of people wearing irezumi.

The Syphilis Clue

The story usually told is that tattoo ink stopped syphilis scarring. That's an overstatement. What Fukushi seems to have noticed is that the skin signs of syphilis appeared less often, or looked different, on tattooed areas. Claims that the ink actually cured or blocked the disease don't match medical understanding then or now.

Remember this was the era before penicillin, when syphilis was a slow, disfiguring death sentence for huge numbers of people and every scrap of knowledge about how it moved through the body was worth chasing. Fukushi had a pathologist's reasons to look closely at tattooed skin. What happened next went a long way past what the research strictly needed.

A preserved full body tattooed human skin displayed upright on a mannequin, covered in black, red and gold Japanese irezumi designs

Mitsui Memorial Hospital and the Deal

In 1920 Fukushi joined Mitsui Memorial Hospital in Tokyo, a charity hospital that treated poor patients. Plenty of those patients were tattooed working men, and it's here his collecting really got going. He was especially drawn to the full bodysuits, the designs that run from the neck to the thighs and can take years to finish.

His offer was simple. If you agreed to let him remove and preserve your skin after you died, he'd help pay for your tattoo to be completed. Tattoo artist Don Ed Hardy, who later toured the collection, described it as paying people to finish their work “on the condition he could harvest the tattoo when they died”

A full bodysuit was expensive, and an unfinished one was a bit of an embarrassment, so the offer clearly appealed. A 1950 LIFE magazine piece reported that he'd advanced small sums of money to members of the Tattoo League of Japan in return for the rights to their skin. It also noted that at least one family refused to honour the deal once their relative had died (Snopes). Some modern accounts say Fukushi founded the Tattoo League himself and that it met in public bathhouses. That's possible, but LIFE describes him as dealing with its members rather than running it, so treat the founder claim with caution.

It's worth saying that he wasn't tattooed himself. He was a collector and admirer, not part of the scene, though by all accounts the tattooed community treated him with a fair bit of respect.

A dried, darkened tattooed human skin stretched into a human outline and displayed against a Japanese shoji screen

How Do You Preserve a Tattoo?

Once the person had died, the skin was cut away from the body and the fat and tissue scraped off the underside. From there Fukushi used one of two methods. The dry method stretched the skin out, much like an animal hide, and let it dry so it could be framed behind glass. The wet method kept the skin submerged in a preserving solution in tanks.

Hardy's visits give the best picture of what that looks like today. The dried skins are framed like hides on the walls, some stand upright on foam mannequins and the wet specimens sit in chemical tanks in a lab room. Most of them are missing the hands, feet, head and genitals, which is partly practical and partly because those areas weren't usually covered by the bodysuit anyway.

A framed, dried section of tattooed human skin, dark and ragged at the edges, mounted on a pale wooden background

2,000 Skins and 3,000 Photographs?

The headline numbers are where things get slippery. You'll see it stated everywhere that Fukushi built up around 2,000 skins between the 1910s and the 1940s. Nobody seems able to point to a primary record for that figure. When LIFE visited in 1950 it counted 38 tattooed skins covering several walls of the museum, which isn't the same as saying that's all there was, but it's a long way short of 2,000.

The photographs are better attested. Fukushi is credited with more than 3,000 photographs of tattoos, and a 2005 academic book on tattoos and violence repeats that figure. Like Danzig Baldaev with Soviet prison tattoos or Herbert Hoffmann in Hamburg, he was building an archive of a world that most people preferred not to look at.

Fire Raids and a Suitcase in Chicago

Two separate disasters ate into the collection. The best known is the American bombing of Tokyo in 1945, which destroyed a lot of his material, including many of the photographs. Some skin samples had been stored elsewhere, and those are the ones that eventually passed to his son.

Dr Fukushi Masaichi, elderly and in a suit, seated in front of a large framed tattooed human skin

The other loss is stranger. The story goes that Fukushi toured the United States giving lectures in 1927 and 1928, took some skins with him and had them stolen in Chicago. Whoever took that suitcase presumably got the shock of their life. It's a great tale, but it rests on thin sourcing and we haven't found a contemporary newspaper report confirming it, so it's best treated as likely but unproven.

There's also a wrinkle in the photo story. Some accounts say the photographs were wiped out in the bombing, yet Hardy later described the surviving collection as including more than 3,000 photographs along with the elder doctor's notes. Either more survived than people think, or the numbers have been muddled somewhere along the way.

Dr Fukushi Masaichi, an elderly man wearing glasses, seated in a chair with a preserved tattooed skin displayed on the wall behind him

LIFE Magazine Comes Calling

By 1950 Fukushi was a curiosity for the Western press. LIFE's article of 3 April 1950 described a 72 year old doctor and his collection of “parchmentlike human skins” at the university, and said he'd personally removed the skins after their owners died. Oddly, the magazine gave his name as Sei-ichi rather than Masaichi, which has sent more than one researcher down a rabbit hole.

For American readers in 1950, still processing the war and the occupation, the image of an elderly Japanese professor surrounded by framed human hides must have landed somewhere between horror story and anthropology lesson. That LIFE piece is a big reason the collection is known outside Japan at all.

Dr Tattoo in Fiction: Takagi Akimitsu's Murder Mystery

Here's the part most retellings skip. In 1948, the same year the tattoo ban was lifted, crime writer Takagi Akimitsu published Shisei Satsujin Jiken, known in English as The Tattoo Murder Case. It's a locked room mystery set in postwar Tokyo. A heavily tattooed woman is found dismembered in a bathroom with her tattooed torso missing, and one of the central characters is Professor Heishiro Hayakawa, a tattoo obsessive nicknamed Dr Tattoo who judges tattoo competitions and is always hoping to add to his collection. The novel even mentions a specimen room of dried skins at Tokyo University.

A 2005 study of tattoos in literature says the character was most likely based on Fukushi. So when you see Fukushi called Doctor Tattoo online, it's worth knowing that the nickname belongs, at least in print, to his fictional double.

Takagi was a tattoo enthusiast himself. In 2016 French journalist Pascal Bagot came across a stash of photographs in the family albums of Takagi's daughter Akiko, showing Tokyo tattoo artists, clandestine studios and tattooed clients from the 1950s and 60s. The 134 black and white images, many showing tattooed women, were published as a book in 2022. It's the same world Fukushi had been collecting from, seen through a novelist's lens instead of a pathologist's. If you like your postwar Tokyo dark, the city's other notorious true story, the case of Sada Abe, comes from barely a decade earlier.

Dr Fukushi Masaichi, in a suit and tie, standing beside a group of men whose bodies are covered in traditional Japanese irezumi tattoos — Dr Fukushi Masaichi with tattooed men, possibly future donors to his collection.

Fukushi Katsunari and the Collection Today

After the elder Fukushi died, his son Katsunari, also a doctor, became the collection's custodian. He's much less documented than his father, which is a shame, because he's the reason any of it can still be seen. He turns up alongside his father in Christine Quigley's 1998 book Modern Mummies, and in 1983 he invited Don Ed Hardy to visit, which led to some of the only detailed eyewitness descriptions in English.

Australian collector Geoff Ostling also got in while filming a short documentary called Skin. Beyond that, the collection is closed. It isn't open to the public, it's very rarely opened to researchers and the university has never put up any official catalogue online. The usually quoted figure of 105 surviving pieces comes from secondhand accounts, not from the museum.

That secrecy makes sense in Japan today. Tattoos are still widely associated with the yakuza, plenty of gyms, pools and hot springs still turn tattooed visitors away and a 2014 survey of 1,000 adults found only 16 had tattoos. A university showing off a room full of gangsters' skins isn't going to be anyone's idea of good publicity.

Not the Only Tattooed Skins in a Museum

Fukushi's collection is the best known, but it isn't the biggest. London's Science Museum holds more than 300 tattooed skin fragments in the Wellcome collection, all bought from a seller calling himself Dr La Valette, a name that's probably fake. Paris has around 56 pieces from the 19th century, Kraków's Jagiellonian University has 60 and the medical legal institute in Lisbon has about 70. Lisbon is also where the university keeps the head said to belong to Diogo Alves in a jar, so it's clearly a city that doesn't throw much away.

The big difference is consent. Victorian and Edwardian specimens usually came from prisoners, soldiers and the unclaimed dead, and the history of collecting tattooed body parts gets very dark very fast, from Horatio Gordon Robley's Māori heads to the claims around Ilse Koch at Buchenwald and the odd world of books bound in human skin. Fukushi's donors, whatever you make of the money involved, agreed in advance.

And the idea hasn't gone away. Save My Ink Forever, set up in Ohio in 2017 by father and son Michael and Kyle Sherwood, preserves tattoos for grieving families through funeral homes. A single tattoo costs around $1,699 and a full bodysuit can run to $100,000. Fukushi would have recognised the business model instantly.

A faded preserved tattooed human skin featuring a large Japanese dragon design in muted blues and reds

Art, Science or Something Else?

It's easy to call Fukushi a ghoul, and there's no getting round how unsettling the collection is. But the tattooed men who took his deal weren't victims. They'd spent years and serious money on work that was illegal to create, and he offered them something nobody else would: proof it had been worth it, kept long after they were gone.

Whether the research justified the scale of the collecting is another question, and with the museum closed and the records patchy, it's not one anyone can answer properly. What's left is a room in Tokyo full of Edo heroes and dragons that have now outlasted the people who wore them by the best part of a century, which is exactly what both sides of the deal wanted.