An elderly woman is placed on a stretcher at the close of the Battle of Okinawa 73 years ago.

On her hand you can see a type of tattooing, called hajichi or haduchi (針突、ハジチ or ハジキ or ハドゥチ). The women of Amami also tattooed their hands. “Island women decorated their hands with elaborate tattoos, whose quality was considered a marker of social status. Women tattooed their right hands between and thirteen, when they came of age, and tattooed their left hands when they married. On the Okinawan mainland, it was done at twelve or thirteen. The first tattoo marked chastity. Without a decorated right hand, a woman was unfit for marriage. A tattoo on the left hand, by contrast, represented a woman’s obedience to her husband.”†

The hands were tattooed little by little over a period of time, until they numbered 23 in total, an auspicious number.

Ainu (アイヌ) women (below) tattooed not only their hands, but also their lips once married. Not sure what it was called in their language.

Ainu Tattooing was banned in October of 1871, but had little influence over the Ainu who believed they would gain the wrath of God and not be able to get married if they were not tattooed. In 1876, the restriction was lifted in the name of religious freedom. Similarly, in 1889, hajichi were banned in Okinawa, which had become a prefecture of the Japanese Empire ten years earlier in 1879.

Like the women of they Ryūkyū archipelago, Ainu women also tattooed their hands:

Face tattooing was common among aboriginal tribes on the island of Fermosa (modern-day Taiwan), suggesting that the Ainu, Amami, Ryūkyū people, etc. had Polynesian roots.

†Ravina, Mark. The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigō Takamori. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004, p.82.