Indelible Otherness

The Eight Corners of the World By Gordon Weaver. Chelsea, Vt.: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1988. 448 pages. $19.95.

Cain was the first. Slaves, convicts, Jews in concentration camps, fugitives, vagabonds, and other outcasts have followed, involuntarily or voluntarily. Although there have been brief periods of fashion for the tattooed, in the West and in Japan the tattoo has served as the mark of the outlaw.¹ In defining the West by what it is not through the contrasting image of the Orient, we have made the Orient an exotic place, what Edward Said identifies in Orientalism as one of our “deepest and most recurring images of the Other.”² Even in Japan the most visible example of cultural Otherness is the Yakusa, organized criminals, distinguished by their elaborately tattooed bodies and consisting of marginal Japanese men from the poorest classes or Koreans, who are socially unacceptable to the race-conscious nation.