UPDATE: Hiderowさんのマイスペです。写真がいっぱいのっています。
Hiderow’s Myspace profile has a lot of great photos of his work, life, and legacy.
私は長く日本に住んでいるのに、今でも上手く日本語で伝えられない事もいっぱいあります。今日もそういう気分です。昨夜、私の大事な友達、大好きな先輩が亡くなりました。申し訳ございませんが心から言葉をうまく伝える為、私の母国語を使わして頂きます。
I was hoping I would never have to sit down and write this.
Sometimes you find yourself thinking unspeakable thoughts. The kind of things that leave even the most amoral of us with guilt pangs. You see a friend on the road to hell and your mind starts to envision where it will lead, and you briefly think to yourself, “I can’t believe I just considered how I would write that guy’s epitaph.” It’s taboo to think like that. It’s a downer. It’s a bad vibe… Self-defeating. And maybe, you fear, Self-fulfilling. And so you push down those terrible thoughts and bury them in the recesses of your heart and think too hard about not thinking of them ever again. You turn your back from reality, and all it’s ugliness – and force yourself to think positively but all the while doing nothing. And when you finally get brave and lift up your head again, you’re no longer where you were – too much time has passed – and you find yourself here, typing these words – alone and thinking these previously unthinkable things, but now it’s too late. Now it’s all too real. But most frightening of all is that this “reality” is already on it’s way to becoming a faint memory – like a slow ache that relents little by little.
On the evening of April 25th, 2009, a few days before his birthday, my friend and senpai Okano Hidenori (Hiderow) the legendary tattoo artist who ran Hiroshima’s Tommy’s Fire Tattoo Studio passed away.
Years ago, somewhere around twenty-oh-three or so, long before I even had a tattoo or considered it as a career, I was living far away from Kansai in a tiny village in Kyushu. Old friend’s and tattoo sempai’s Doug Hardy and Josh Arment had come to visit Japan from the states and I had decided to take advantage of their visit to make a week long trip around Honshuu with them. Doug was scheduled to do some guest tattooing at Chopstick Tattoo in Osaka as well as Tommy’s Fire in Hiroshima. It was there that I met Hiderow.
Hiderow’s studio was unlike anything I had yet experienced in any tattoo shop anywhere. Gundam models, cute nude figurines of questionable age, and screenfulls of animation littered the studio – it was more like an otaku’s toy box from Akihabara than a tattoo studio at first glance… up to and including the inflatable mannequin with the high school girl swimsuit. High quality prints by my favorite artist Alphons Mucha adorned the walls, flanked by rising sun flags and there were a mess of photo albums chock full of Hiderow’s art. What you could really say about Hiderow’s artistic style was that it had “asobi-gokoro” or in other words it was wild, free, crazy… imaginative and inventive. It had unique vibrant color schemes. It was FUN and most importantly the work didn’t look like anyone else.
Hiderow was easy to click with – a real affable fellow. I had a habit of keeping a sketchbook with me and so we swapped books to compare styles. I was psyched to hear what he had to say, but even more excited to see his underdrawings. They were mad. They were sick… and his girls were so damn sexy! We really enjoyed a lot of the same imagery. I felt really embarrassed showing him all my scummy dirty pencil drawings. But Hiderow was thoughtful in his critiques and showed me how he used those Mitsubishi dual red/blue pens to tighten up a drawing – a technique I shamelessly “borrowed” and still use to this day. He had his shop gal make color copies of his flash as a memorial of my trip to Hiroshima, and gave me a couple hand colored sheets (!) to take back. He even showed me a sketchbook from his elementary school days – complete with spaceships, race cars, and of course a slew of Dragon Ball characters.
Us eating. I am fat and white.
He set us up a place to stay near Peace Park. It was my first time to Hiroshima, so I was still caught up in the history of the place… If you’ve ever been there than you know it’s hard to be in Hiroshima City and not reflect on humanity a bit – but as we sat there smoking and drawing only a kilometer or so from the hypocenter of the first atomic bomb detonated on a civilian population, both of us from countries previously at war, I could feel a strange sense of peace presiding over the whole trip… you just can’t put it into words, but it was there… and mostly, I think, because of Hiderow’s generosity and good will.
Hiderow's Turbonegro girl on Doug!
Hiderow showed us around town, fed us amazing food, taught us about the rivalry of Osaka’s Okonomiyaki and Hiroshima’s HIroshimayaki, he introduced us to girls, brought us to parties, there was a bit of tattoo trading, and everyone was roaring the whole time. It was unreal how out of his way Hiderow went to show us a good time on that trip – as one hentai to another he even took notice of the oddly large amount of girls in overalls from my sketchbooks and called three or four girls to the studio decked out in their denim.
What, you think I’m making that part up!?
Tommy's Fire representin' the GiO styles! Circa 200X
I had never been so psyched.
Although I had been on the fence for awhile at that time, I was finally hooked. I knew I wanted to become a tattoo artist. It was to be a pirate’s life for me after all. And yeah I was still like 23 and dumber than a box of hammers, and I didn’t know anything, so I wanted to ask Hiderow for his advice. I barreled into the studio one morning and spilled my guts out to him, dropping an eraser as I recall out of my bag as I got out my sketchbook again.
And then he told me something I needed to hear.
He said, “If you can’t take care of your own eraser, how can you take care of other people’s things?” He didn’t look at me when he said it, he was busy fiddling with his tattoo machines. But it was like the music stopped, the CD skipped, and I that was the end of a dramatic, exciting, and life changing week… and the beginning of our friendship.
When I sit down to tattoo I often recall those words… and during those first terrible years of toilet scrubbing at Chopstick, with no vacation and no cash, I would dream about the day that I’d be able to go back to Tommy’s Fire again to visit, this time as a fully fledged tattooer to show Hiderow how my art had gotten better and then be blown away by how he had gotten better still.
And like all things in life, there’s the way you think things will be and there’s the way everyone else tells you things will be… but in the end, it always ends up being something completely different. And you realize you were naive or arrogant or both to think you’d ever had a shot at predicting how it would all turn out.
Nearly 7 years went by since that trip and yesterday I made the journey to Hiroshima to see my friend Hiderow one final time… and to say goodbye.
Godspeed You Sergeant!!
– 4.25.2009
If you met Hiderow, or just knew his art, than you experienced a rare and wonderful human being indeed. His legacy is his art, his tattoos, and his friends. If you’ve never seen his work, you owe it to yourself to check it out.
Original signed and stamped Flash by Hiderow
Hiderow loved cats!!!
Flash by Hiderow - Sexy Goils!
Religious Goils!
Underdrawing by Hiderow
Underdrawing by Hiderow
Tattoo on our friend Todd by Hiderow. Enmakun! (えん魔くん) Hiderow also loved tattooing his favorite anime characters.
