Reina Asami: Balancing the Scales of Tradition and Innovation Through Tattoos

By aimee kim

In a private tattoo studio in Los Angeles, Reina Asami is bringing to life her admiration and appreciation of her Japanese heritage by modifying calligraphy and other artistic traditions into wearable, livable art.

The home base for this second-generation Japanese-American is Bear w/Me, located in Atwater Village, where she works alongside a wide variety of talented artists.

In her quest to become a self-supporting artist, Reina experienced – and met head-on – myriad challenges and doubts, not only about her artistic skills but also her own identity.

Although Reina was born and raised in New York City, she moved to Tokyo for high school when her mother’s work relocated them there. The experience gave her an upbringing that felt less Japanese-American than “purely Japanese, just straight from the motherland.” Aside from one other student, she was the sole Japanese-American in her elementary school in NYC. As a result, Reina didn’t even realize that “a mixed identity could exist or how to exist in it.”

“I would go every summer to visit my grandparents, and so I was really exposed to the culture and all of that, but I didn’t really bring it home with me to America because I wanted to fit in with everybody,” she recalls. “I wasn’t trying to announce it—it wasn’t anything that I advertised too much or thought about too much until I moved to Japan.”

But those years in Japan came with their own set of challenges. Although Reina was perceived as Japanese while living in the United States, when she began high school in Japan, it was a whole different matter

“During my years in America, I was considered Japanese, and in my years in Japan I was considered American or nikkeijin.”

“I went to an international school,” she says, “but a majority of the kids were still Japanese. The social culture of the school was Japanese, and it was really shocking to me.” Summers spent with her grandparents had not prepared her for the social demands of integrating with her peers.

“Here I am: I’m supposed to be like one of them, but I’m not. It was very difficult trying to understand where I fit and feeling ashamed that I couldn’t speak the language like everybody else. I didn’t know certain social cues like everybody else, my bento was not the same as everybody else, so there were a lot of things that made me face the fact that I wasn’t Japanese enough.”

Looking back now, Reina reflects, “I’m so grateful that I had that experience living and partially growing up in Japan because I wouldn’t feel this close proximity to my heritage. But at the time you’re 14 so you think your world is falling apart.”

She began to see the difference between living in Japan instead of just visiting when she first moved in with her grandparents. “While they do speak English, it’s not their base language, so at home everything is in Japanese. Taking the train: everything is in Japanese. Going by myself to school: Japanese. All the kids speaking to each other between class: Japanese.”

The initial culture shock led to a lot of doubt and hesitation. But not knowing where to fit in, especially as someone “a little bit alternative,” gave Reina the unique opportunity to expand her understanding of herself.

“I was forced to get over myself. I was always so scared to speak because I look Japanese, and people assume I’m fluent. I had to get over that insecurity, and I was able to improve my Japanese. I think that language was how I felt more settled in my Japanese-ness.” And now, as an adult, Reina feels far more secure in knowing who she is. “I think we’re always going to be hyphenated. We’re going to be on one side one day and another side another day. We’re always going to be kind of transient.”

Her heightened sense of self extends beyond a personal identity and infuses her professional work as an accomplished tattoo artist – a journey which presented its own challenges and doubts along the way.

Mina, Reina’s mother, is an artist herself. Following her graduation from high school in Japan, she emigrated to the United States to attend art school in Los Angeles, eventually becoming a graphic designer and creative director for advertising companies.

“I always grew up around her designing—book covers, whiskey bottle campaigns, websites. In order to make money providing for two kids as a single mom, graphic design was the way.”

“I think there was an unspoken resistance,” Reina recalls of her decision to become a full time tattoo artist. “I think her knowing first hand the uncertainties of making a living from your art brought on some hesitation.”

Although she knows that her mother would never deny her her passion or outright oppose her pursuit of tattooing, Reina remembers how they danced around confronting the inevitable. “When you want to present something to your parents as something that you want to do in your life, you have to make sure it’s all packaged and ready to go. I didn’t tell her until I actually had my station set up.”

Now, Mina is one of Reina’s biggest supporters, having even been tattooed by her multiple times. “My mother has a phrase she likes to say, 『メリハリは大事』 (meri hari wa daiji) which loosely translates to ‘a contrast/a balance is important,’” Reina shares. “ This phrase kind of sums up my philosophy as an artist.”

It’s this desire to strike a balance that drives the carefully, deliberately crafted artwork that Reina puts into the world and onto bodies.

Reina’s work is centered around the adaptation of Japanese artistic traditions and symbolism into pieces that seamlessly integrate onto the bodies of her clients. “For everything that I’ve tied to Japanese culture or my heritage, I still want to make it mine, but I also want to respect the tradition. If it’s too traditional, there’s none of me in it, but if I bastardize it too much and make it too much of me, I’m not really respecting the essence,” she explains. “I’m always trying to find that middle ground.”

Over the years, this has taken many forms and evolved into her signature brushstroke work.

“As much as you want to do what you want as a tattoo artist, you also have to do what other people want,” Reina said. “I can’t just do whatever I want and hope that people want to get it. I have to do things that meet some sort of demand.”

She found her answer in flowers, the evergreen in-demand tattoo imagery.

“I was visiting my grandparents, and my grandmother cut a little plum blossom bud from a tree. She put it in a tiny vase next to the kitchen TV, and I think it just clicked,” Reina said. “I would look at it everyday—how she chose that specific branch with that many buds and put it in that specific vase, and I thought, ‘Maybe I can do something with this.’”

Her ikebana concept, though loosely based on the traditional art, found its footing through her unique abstraction and visualization of her particular arrangements. Clients could designate one type of flower with up to three blossoms, for which Reina would create custom stems to follow the flow of each individual’s body lines.

The popularity of her arrangements with her clients speaks for itself. Although her ikebana concept is currently out of the rotation of bookable tattoos, Reina said that many of her followers have asked for it to make a return.

Her kimono concept is currently experiencing a rebrand. “Not all art can translate into a good tattoo,” she explains, “so I think the translation process is where I take a lot of time. I had to figure out this balance of how to do it where it wasn’t super Japanese to the point that I felt uncomfortable giving this piece to a non-Japanese person but still retaining the essence.”

The elements and ornamental patterns adapted for arm sleeves, leg sleeves, and full-body pieces are derived from Reina’s own appreciation of art, having been inspired by a kimono exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and her further exploration of secondhand kimono shops in Japan where she took pictures of patterns and compositions that caught her eye. “I would choose a main element, like cranes, and then choose one ornamental pattern and manipulate it so it’s not exactly like the traditional one. Then, throw in some brushstrokes and make it a little more abstract. That was my way of trying to start doing large pieces.”

For now, though, she is choosing to focus her time on her two biggest concepts: brushstrokes and heritage tattoos. “I reached this point where I had too many concepts, and I felt like all of my energy was being split and everything that I was doing was mediocre.” By focusing her energy on a reduced scope, Reina is honing her skills and giving herself more room to develop so that she may be able to bring back retired concepts like ikebana.

But for Reina there isn’t really any downtime while she refines her work. “I’m only at this point because I was yearning for it for all of my twenties. I always dreamed of the life I’m living now and the things I’m making now. It has to do with my Japanese upbringing: I wasn’t careless. I was very cautious. I camped out and waited.”

It wasn’t a passive wait, though. Reina searches for the right word, and what she comes up with is “磨く(migaku), which means to polish. I was trying to build something slowly and make sure it was polished until I could find the right timing to take a risk.”

She tirelessly continues to refine her work by honing in on her main concept: brushstrokes, designed and fitted just for each individual body. She explains that it’s meant to compliment the natural shape, lines, and movement of the wearer. “I think because I was able to develop my technical skills, what I envisioned in my head and my skills have now met, whereas before I was still trying to learn how to tattoo better or learn different skills.”

Each brushstroke is drawn onto the body, rather than stenciled like her flowers or kimono motifs might be, all coming from the imparted wisdom of her grandfather, Yoshio: “how much ink is on your brush, the angle of your arm, the weight and speed of the stroke.”

Although not formally trained in calligraphy, Reina does have some firsthand experience with putting brush to paper. “My grandfather taught me when I was in elementary school. I think he was just trying to show me things that elementary students in Japan do, like we made kites out of chopsticks and glue and rice paper. I remember last year I went to the Noguchi Museum gift shop, and they had a small little display of kites. It made me think, ‘Oh my god, I made these as a kid!’ When I look back now, he was trying to share Japanese culture with his American grandchild.”

She points out a shikishi board propped on a shelf with a laugh. “He did it as a hobby. He wrote that for me when I turned 20, for my coming-of-age year. He wrote it on the back side of the board. That kind of shows the character of our family: everybody’s just a little bit off.”

It’s that combination of technical execution and unique artistry that makes Reina’s needle-driven brushwork so alluring to her clients. Her longest running concept, heritage, is not one that she is particularly active about advertising but that never sees a decline in demand.

“The heritage tattoo project was inspired first by my own desire to honor my grandmother’s maiden name, Asami. Then my brother wanted one, and it sparked the idea to expand it,” she shares.

Reina’s heritage project is a love letter to the diasporic Asian-American community, who may be at various points of struggle in their own journeys for belonging. There are only a few spots available per round of booking, but entrants are welcome to share their personal stories, to their comfort level, for a chance to have a name tattooed in Reina’s signature calligraphic style. One factor in its origin “came from reclaiming characters from misuse” by non-Asian artists—especially kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese, inked by non-Japanese or Chinese artists. “I wanted to be able to provide more care to our language.”

The evolution of the heritage project, however, was beyond the scope of what Reina could have ever imagined at its inception. “Now, the heritage tattoos have become sort of an anecdotal history project because of all the stories behind each name. These stories that spread across the Asian diaspora are about familial relationships, immigrant struggles, assimilation, losing language, reclaiming identity, and so much more. Reading each story teaches me something new about our collective history and experience as Asians, particularly Asians in the West. They also remind me that my own experiences as an Asian American were and are real. As different as each name and voice behind it might be, they’re all speaking to each other.”

A common thread that she notices among her clients and the stories that they submit is just how raw and vulnerable each one is. “I feel like I’m reading this long lost piece of history from a book that was buried somewhere—it’s current history. It’s the stories of people in our generation. I don’t think that we as a community talk amongst each other about these things that are deeply, deeply personal, so when I do post the stories that I’m allowed to publish, I just hope that there’s somebody out there who has a similar story and can realize, ‘It’s not just me, and it’s not all in my head.’

“I also get so much out of it just learning about different backgrounds. I didn’t really grow up around Japanese-Americans at all, so now being in Southern California, there is so much diversity within the community that I’m learning so much about what I rejected in my youth.”

And for that New York-Tokyo-based kid who didn’t always have a place to fit in, it really is a project with so much opportunity for healing and self-recognition for Reina herself.

“My grandmother’s maiden name is Asami. It’s a pretty rare last name; you can sometimes hear people with the first name Asami but not the last name. It just rolls off the tongue, and it’s very pretty,” she says, explaining the name and the woman who inspired the birth of a community. “I adopted that name for my artist name, and my brother also uses Asami in his artist name. My mom loves the name, too, so it’s like this well-loved name within the three of us, and it represents my grandmother’s strength as a woman. I didn’t want to let it die.”

Her grandmother, Takako, was raised in a well-established family among mostly other sisters. One of her elder sisters, Reiko, is the first half of Reina’s namesake—the ‘na’ coming from her mother’s name, ‘Mina.’

And Reina is still, humbly and gratefully, learning more about herself and her family the older she gets. “My great aunt, Reiko, is a painter, which I found out a year or two ago, so I just feel like all of these things, as you discover more things about your family or your background or your heritage, things start to make sense about who I am and how I am. Asami is a really important name to me.”

It’s the care that Reina puts into her work, her respect and care for each name and each story, that continue to bring her clients to her booking form every two months. “In the beginning, I wondered if I should only offer heritage pieces to Japanese people because I’m Japanese, and it’s appropriate. Maybe a Chinese person isn’t comfortable with me doing their tattoo or even a Korean person because of the history, so I did think for a while before hard launching this. But I decided to let the client decide what they’re comfortable with. I don’t like the idea of being too limiting or excluding.”

Thankfully, all of her heritage clients have been nothing short of pleasant. They’ve even given her the opportunity to take on the role of a mentor, helping to track down the appropriate kanji for their names and facilitating other options when she can’t. And while her grandfather’s teachings about the calligraphy basics are always at the forefront of her practice, she’s come a long way from her first hand- poked names. “I’ve evolved over time and gotten more comfortable with abstracting. I’m trying to put a little bit more flair into things, always improving.”

This project is close to Reina’s heart and to her practice, as a way to honestly confront family history and the places that younger generations will continue to take their names in the future. “It’s truly an honor to be servicing my community in this way. I’m so grateful to every person who has entrusted me with their heritage tattoo.”

The variation and diversity of Reina’s work, exemplified by her mantra “meri hari wa daiji” is a quest that is never done. As she continues to evolve as a creative and technical artist and the balance continues to sway, she constantly recenters herself to keep her ambitions in line with her practice. And tattooing may very well be one of the best teachers of this mindset.

“That’s the difference between other art and tattooing: you’re sharing it with somebody else. It feels like an exchange of energy: someone is giving me a piece of them—their body—and I am giving them a piece of me—my art.”

The intention behind Reina’s work is evident in the way that her work has evolved all the way to brushstrokes, and it’s the careful, deliberate investment in her craft that makes her a trustworthy artist with clients ready to share in her artistic vision. “I’m always evolving and changing and growing,” she says, “your movement could be lateral—it doesn’t have to be climbing a new mountain or anything—but it’s really boring if you’re never going to evolve.”

It has been a long journey for Reina to get to where she is: able to support herself with her artwork in a studio that empowers her vision for the present and the future. And she’s not nearly at the end yet. As her skill and artistic awareness continue to grow, so too does her community of fellow Japanese- and Asian-Americans who have found belonging and self-acceptance in the artwork that adorns their bodies and heals their spirits.

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