Well, my barber back in Reading did a particularly hard shearing on me before Christmas, but sooner or later I was always going to have to get my hair cut. I got around to it last week. It’s a little terrifying going for a hair cut when your grasp of the language is limited. You never know what you’re going to get. So, before my hair started getting in my eyes I decided it was time for a shearing again.

As you can see in my photos of Ikuta there are a number of barbers and male/unisex hairdressers in Ikuta. Actually, there are an awful lot of them. Having now experienced a Japanese haircut, I know why there are so many(more on that below).

So, having decided I would get a cut, I considered the barbers in Ikuta. One of them looked very trendy. Not my scene at all, man :-)! Another looked bit down at heel. I decided to avoid this place. That left two. One looked like a men’s hairdressers whereas the others looked like a barbers, so I went for the barber. You can see the results (front, back, side) in the gallery.
When I arrived there was only one young-ish chap working (there are three chairs). After some language difficulties he got across that there would be a wait of about 90 minutes. I checked and coming back an hour or so later was deemed likely to result in a shorter wait, so I went and did some shopping and went back. When I got back there were three chairs working and five people in the shop. There was only one other customer in the waiting room, too. It was an older fellow who beckoned me through. None of the staff had much in the way of English. I’d figured out how to express in basic Japanese what I wanted (make the sides and back short, the front very short but the top not so short). Having heard my desires, the barber got a quite thick “style book” featuring line drawings of various styles of haircut. There is a standard Japanese haircut with the sides and back closely trimmed and the top left quite a bit longer. Not quite the “short back and sides” I get at home, but close enough. He checked that I was OK with the trimmer on the back and sides and went to work. Now, I’d left it a bit long so there was a lot to chop off. I think the fact I’d left it so long was part of the difficulty. I don’t think they’re used to people who let their hair grow quite a bit then get it chopped right back, so as far as they were concerned I was going in to a barber where I didn’t speak the language much and asking for a style change.

So, with a lot of back and forth, during which I learned how to say “a little more (shorter)” (mou skuoshi) he eventually got me down to more or less what I wanted. He was very very precise about it, doing a lot of fiddly scissor cuts to get things exactly lined up. This was even more extreme than my barber in Reading (I’m going to have to find a new one when I get home – my usual barber retired in March while I’m away) who was way more fussy about it than my quick but good barber in St Andrews who could do my simple cut in ten minutes – the one in Reading took over twenty. There were three more elements to this that were different for me.

First, he wanted to know if I then wanted my hair washed. In the UK, you normally have the hair washed then cut then dried/styled. In Japan, first they cut then they wash – makes sense, I suppose, in that it gets rid of the chopped hair.

Having declined this, he offered a neck and head massage. I declined. I didn’t feel like it. I may avail myself of this next time just to see what it’s like, but I was already way too tense because of the worry of getting a reasonable haircut to start with. Some might say that when you’re tense is exactly when you need a massage, but I’d rather trust them on a haircut before trusting them on a massage.

Finally, he did some fiddling around with a hair dryer. Not that my hair was wet – he’d dampened it slightly to start with but by this time (over forty minutes later) it had dried out completely. Since we’d discussed the fact that the hair at my crown tends to stand up (tachimasu) he used the hair dryer and a comb to persuade it to lie down. Interestingly enough, this has worked and it’s staying lying down even after washing. When I get home, I’ll have to try this myself after a haircut.

The price is more expensive than I’m used to paying, but for the time they take is around the same hourly rate (it was between three and four thousand yen – 15 to 20 pounds).

Final note: Why are there so many barbers in Japan? It’s because they take at least 45 minutes for each customer, even when they don’t want a shampoo and massage. Even with more barbers per salon, this means they need more salons per person. Plus they work different hours. They seem to open about 15:00 but until 17:00 or so there’s only one chap working. They work until about 21:00, which is a relatively short day, I suppose. However, it IS much more convenient than my Reading barber who shut at 16:00 and would close his door to new entry by 14:30 if he head enough customers waiting to take him through to closing time.