Japan's Outlaw Magazine

Scans from BURST Magazine / September 1999 & February 2000

“Archive Dive” is a periodic series by Welcome Magazine that sources scans from important physical cultural archives, alongside context on the people and traditions behind them. This installment documents BURST, Japan’s outlaw magazine.

In Japan, visible tattoos can cost you entry to a restaurant or the gym, an apartment, or even your job. The cultural stigma around ink, stemming from its deep association with the Yakuza, results in a quiet exclusion from normal life that predates and outlives BURST Magazine.

BURST (1995-2005) was Japan’s premier tattoo magazine. And because a tattoo is the mark of an outlaw in Japan, through documenting tattoos, BURST ended up documenting a range of fringe subcultures, from bikers, to punks, to gangsters.

Where the rest of Japan covered up, BURST embraced the bodies of society’s outcasts, depicting the taboo from the inside. It began as a biker magazine, before branching into covering body modification, tattooing, crime, and drug culture. It’s art direction and visual identity came from a design team called “PISS&JUNK”.

We scanned from two issues: September 1999 and February 2000.

WARNING: Some of the following images are graphic. Reader discretion advised. All scans from the Welcome Magazine archive.

To see the other half of the scans, and access the rest of our Archive Dive series, become a paid subscriber to Welcome Magazine