Tattoos are connected to the yakuza culture, with members of various families willing to spend a lot of money to have them on their skin. Of course, not all yakuza get tattooed, just as not all people with tattoos in Japan are criminals; however, the Asian nation has had several problems with them, after the so-called "punitive tattoo" was used to brand criminals, a practice introduced directly from China.
Before that, the marks on the skin were not absolutely a problem: according to a third century Chinese legend, people used tattoos to distinguish their social class, as well as protect their bodies from evil creatures.
It's not the first time that such a “censorship” is applied to an anime: one of the strangest ones took place in Malaysia and the victim, this time, was the animated series of Attack of the Giants; the bizarre idea consisted in literally designing the underwear for the various giants present in the work, obviously generating an almost funny result (and a bit useless, given that, however, there are no private parts of the creatures on display). br>
However, it should be noted that this operation was not carried out in all of Malaysia, but that only one magazine, called Kreko, adopted it, which however closed its doors definitively in 2019.
La via del apron also exists in a printed manga version and the first volume was released not even a year ago. If you would like to recover the series, you can start from this, which you can easily find on Amazon, and which you can buy simply by clicking on this link.