Reasons To Get A Tattoo

I don’t have a tattoo. I know other people who have tattoos - my sister has a couple. Although I don’t think she has a special reason for either of them. I’ve often thought it would be fun to get one, but I’d want to do it for a reason.

What I really need is a nutcase Japanese geezer as my boss. This guy for instance. (Source: Mainichi Daily News.)

A former health food company president, Hiroaki Mizuno, forced one of his employees to get a tattoo when the employee told his boss that he wanted to quit. With these magical words -

“Get a tattoo. If you don’t, I’ll hand your son over to gangsters.”

- Mizuno actually caused his employee to go and get inked. Even more hilarious, he also paid for the tattoo.(Pic is not of the actual tattoo.)

You have to wonder about the thought processes of the employee. Did he come to his decision like this -

“Well, I’m worried about my son being handed over to gangsters by a guy I don’t want to work for any more, and he’s just told me to get a tattoo, so instead of going to the police which is what more normal, sane people might do under these circumstances, I’m going to do exactly as this psycopathic old bastard said, and get myself Etch-a-Sketched up. I mean, he is paying for it & I probably deserve to make him feel better, since I obviously stressed him out so much” - ?

Sadly, the Mainichi does quote the employee, and he doesn’t sound as freaked out as he should be about the whole incident -

“I had a good record and it seems that he didn’t want me to leave the company,” he said. “There are other workers who he also made get tattoos.”

This may have something to do with the ways in which the company president garnered the loyalty of his staff, as detailed in his “How I will increase productivity” entry in his filofax:

I will increase productivity amongst the workers by -

* controlling a person’s time and environment
* creating a sense of powerlessness
* manipulating rewards and punishments to elicit the desired behaviour
* creating a closed system of logic which makes dissenters feel as if something was wrong with them

Oh hang on, I just made up that bit about that being in the boss’ filofax…

…those are part of Margaret Singer’s conditions for mind control…

Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 Bizarre, Japan, Japanese Culture, Japanese News Trackback URL for this entry