Who Knew More About Everyone Than the Daimyō?

Edo had more barbers than guards. They shaved the sakayaki, tied topknots, and listened — then passed it all on. Who were the kamiyui, why was a hairstyle an identity card, and how did a razor, a comb, and gossip build the shōgunate's most effective intelligence network?

“The Barbershop of the Floating World”

"Tap the head with a chonmage — out comes the sound of backwardness and cowardice.

Tap the head with loose hair — out comes the sound of imperial restoration.

Tap the head cropped short — out comes the sound of civilization and enlightenment."

– anonymous street song,

"Shinbun Zasshi” (新聞雑誌),

issue 2, May 1871 (Meiji 4)

In Edo — the largest city on earth in the eighteenth century, home to over a million souls — there were more barbers than guards, and more than monks. Thousands of men and women who shaved, combed, oiled, tied and shaped hair from dawn to dusk — and between one client and the next, listened. A barbershop in Edo was nothing like a modern hair salon. It was an information exchange, a surveillance outpost, a matchmaking office, and the editorial room of a gossip gazette all rolled into one. The barber — registered with the city magistrate, obliged to report suspicious persons — knew every face in the quarter. He knew who had moved in, who had vanished, who was behaving differently than usual. He was friend and watchman at once, confessor and spy. And all the while doing something that in itself required courage: holding a razor millimeters from the throat of a man who trusted him.

Because a hairstyle in Edo was not a matter of taste. It was an identity document — more legible than any paper, visible at first glance. A samurai’s topknot differed from a merchant’s, and a merchant’s from a craftsman’s — and every Japanese person knew these differences the way we today know the difference between a suit and a tracksuit, an iPhone and a Xiaomi. A woman’s hairstyle said even more: whether she was unmarried, married, a courtesan, or a geisha apprentice — everything written in her hair, without a single word spoken. Historians have documented over three hundred types of women’s hairstyles from the Edo period. Three hundred. No wonder, then, that training as a barber took ten years — longer than learning swordsmanship at many a kenjutsu school. Nor that when the new government ordered traditional topknots cut in 1871, samurai rushed to photographers for one last portrait. It was not about vanity. Cutting off the topknot meant cutting off oneself — one’s name, rank, belonging — a personal identity nurtured since early childhood.

This essay is about one of the most important urban professions of the Tokugawa shōgunate. About the men who waited at dawn by the bridge with a portable razor before the city had woken. About the women who walked to Yoshiwara at daybreak with a bag of combs and left knowing more than many a spy of the shōgunate. And about the yōkai who cut people’s hair at night — and the rumors that then spread through the very same barbershops. About how a razor, a comb, and conversation built the most effective social network of feudal Japan — without paper, ink, or seals.

A Morning by Ryōgoku Bridge

Kumazō sets up his workshop before dawn, when the sky above the Sumida is still the color of ink barely diluted with water. It is summer, the air sticky with humidity and smoke from the hearths of craft workshops on the far bank. Ryōgoku Bridge — the widest in all of Edo — is still asleep at this hour, but in half an hour it will be unbearable: botefuri with their baskets, barefoot messengers, alms-gathering monks, hawkers shouting over one another.

Kumazō is a barber running a dedoko (出床) — a mobile stall of the kind found by every major bridge and crossroads in Edo. His “shop” consists of a folding wooden seat-board, a rack with hooks for tools, a bowl of water, a box of bintsuke (髋付, hair pomade), a bundle of motoyui (元結, tying cords), and a towel slung over his shoulder. The whole thing unfolds in moments and packs up even faster — because sometimes you had to flee from a watchman if you’d taken up too much space on the sidewalk.

The first client of the day appears as the sky begins to lighten. It is Shōkichi, a man in his early twenties, a worker from the nearby rice warehouse. He sits on the board and says at once: “I want to look good, but not too good.” Kumazō does not ask why. He has known for three weeks — another client mentioned in passing that Shōkichi is going to an omiai (お見合い, a formal meeting before marriage). The girl’s family runs a tōfu shop in Kanda.

— A small mage, neat but not stiff — says Kumazō, assessing the shape of the young man’s head. — You work in a warehouse, but you’re going to a merchant’s house. You need to look like someone who can count, not someone who hauls sacks.

Shōkichi nods and closes his eyes. Kumazō starts with the comb — the wide teeth pass through the hair, pulling out the tangles of the night. Then he takes the razor. The blade, honed earlier on a leather strop, touches skin just above the forehead. The sound of scraping stubble is quiet, rhythmic, like a broom sweeping over tatami. Kumazō shaves the sakayaki with precise, short strokes — from the center of the forehead toward the back, then the sides, the line behind the ears, the nape. Shōkichi holds the keuke (毛受け – lit. “hair catcher”) — a small wooden board for catching cut hairs so they don’t fall to the ground. Behind them, the bridge is waking up. Someone shouts “Saba! Saba! Fresh mackerel!”

Kumazō washes the head with a damp towel, then rubs in oil — the bintsuke smells sweet, like an unripe plum mixed with wax. A fine-toothed comb draws the hair back, shaping it into a narrow stream. His hands twist the motodori (髋, the binding at the base of the topknot), wrap it with cord, and fold it into a small, discreet topknot — a chōchinmage (丁髏), but in the merchant version: low, neat, without the demonstrative thickness that craftsmen preferred.

— Listen — says Kumazō, not pausing his work. — The girl’s father is a tough one, I know because I shaved his sakayaki the day before yesterday. But it’s the mother who decides. Buy wagashi from the Funabashiya confectionery near Nihonbashi and bring them along. (more about Japanese sweets wagashi here: Wagashi – Japanese Sweets for Cold, Autumn Evenings)

Shōkichi opens his eyes.

— How do you know it’s the mother?

Kumazō shrugs.

— Because the father complained that his wife wouldn’t let him reject the previous candidate. He said it out loud, sitting right where you are now.

Shōkichi stands, reaches into his kinchaku (巾着, a drawstring pouch) and places thirty-two mon (文) on the board — the price of a men’s shave and hairstyling. Roughly six or seven Polish złoty in today’s money — less than a bowl of hot soba. Kumazō sweeps the coins into a wooden box and is already looking at the next client, perched on the edge of the bridge, waiting.

The Hairstyle as Identity Card

To understand why the barber in Edo was more than a craftsman, one must first understand what a hairstyle was. It was not a matter of taste. It was an identity document — more legible than any paper, because visible at first glance.

The chonmage (丁髏) of a samurai differed from a merchant’s, and a merchant’s from a craftsman’s — and every Japanese person knew these differences the way we today know the difference between a suit and a tracksuit, an iPhone and a Xiaomi. The samurai wore a large, pronounced topknot shaped from thick strands — his hairstyle was meant to be visible and unambiguous. The merchant was the opposite: he preferred a small, discreet mage, tidy but not projecting dominance (why antagonize samurai?). A tradesman could not look menacing — he needed a face that inspired trust. Craftsmen, in turn, favored thick, short topknots, demonstratively “hard,” as if their hair were meant to shout: I am strong, solid, masculine.

But a hairstyle communicated more than occupation. It also spoke of exclusion. People of the hinin (非人, lit. “non-humans”) class — those performing occupations considered polluted, such as grave-digging, leather tanning, or begging — were forbidden from wearing a mage (more about this class of people in Edo here: Songs from the Eta-mura – The Lives of the “Non-Humans” Erased from the Maps of Shogunate Japan). A shaved head without a mage was not mere baldness. It was a stigma. Visible from afar. Everyone lived within the boundaries of their caste.

The female side of this system was governed by even more complex rules. The shimada (島田) hairstyle signified an unmarried woman. Marumage (丸髏) — a married one. The sakko (先笄) style was worn by a maiko (舞妓, a geisha apprentice) just before her ceremony of passage to full rank. Courtesans in Yoshiwara built elaborate, multi-tiered constructions of padding, combs, and ornamental hairpins on their heads — the higher the rank, the more complex the hairstyle, the more kanzashi (簪, ornamental hairpins). Historians have documented over three hundred types of women’s hairstyles from the Edo period. Three hundred — and each had its own name and meaning. It is easy to see that the profession of women’s hairdresser in Edo demanded considerable knowledge, training, sensitivity, memory, and talent.

The barber who shaped all these varieties had to be a specialist on par with a sculptor. A proverb of the era (so very Japanese in its essence) said: “sakayaki three years, face shaving five years, finishing two years” — ten years of apprenticeship before a student could independently serve a male client. More than the training required for most crafts. More than learning the sword at many a school of kenjutsu (剣術).

The Gossip Salon

Barbershops in Edo came in two types. Dedoko (出床), like Kumazō’s stall in the previous scene, were mobile stations by bridges, riverbanks, and street corners — open to the street, exposed to rain and wind, but cheap and quick. Uchidoko (内床) were permanent shops within the neighborhood fabric — often at the gate of a nagaya (長屋, a tenement row house), in a small wooden room that smelled of bintsuke oil and smoke from the hibachi (火鉢, a portable brazier). Here the client sat facing the street — and the street saw him sitting there. Nothing was hidden.

The system was organized like a military craft. The barbers of Edo operated in forty-eight guilds called kumi (組). Terakado Seiken (a Confucian scholar from Mito, a rebel and a provocateur — I note to myself to plan a separate article about him, for he was a colorful figure) in his work “Edo Hanjōki” (江戸繁昌記, lit. “Records of the Flourishing of Edo”) noted that there were 964 registered shops — and over two thousand more operating independently, outside the guilds. Together, this meant several thousand barbers in a single city. More than guards. More than monks.

But the most important function of the kamiyuidoko (髪結床) was not shaving. It was conversation. Clients waited their turn — and the wait was long, because a full treatment, from shaving the sakayaki through washing, oiling, combing, and shaping the topknot, lasted nearly an hour. What did you do during that time? You talked. With the others waiting, with the apprentice sweeping the floor, with the master who chipped in from behind the client’s back. People discussed rice prices, yesterday’s fire, the latest kabuki performance, scandals in Yoshiwara. Shikitei Sanba, author of satirical novels from the early nineteenth century, captured this phenomenon in his “Ukiyodoko” (浮世床, lit. “Barbershop of the Floating World,” 1813).

The barbershop was not spared a more serious role, either. In many neighborhoods the uchidoko served as a watchpost — bansho (番所 – lit. “guard station”). The barber, registered with the city magistrate, was obliged to report suspicious persons to the neighborhood authorities. He knew every face in the quarter. He knew who had moved in, who had vanished, who was behaving differently than usual. He was friend and watchman at once — and no one, absolutely no one in all of Edo, had a better overview of neighborhood affairs.

Waiting in the Uchidoko

Autumn, afternoon. The sun is already low, but inside the uchidoko on a side street not far from Nihonbashi it is warm — the hibachi in the corner glows with a fading light, and from the kettle atop it rises a thread of steam. The room is small: about three tatami, a wooden wall with hooks for tools, a mirror of polished metal, a rack of combs and razors arranged in a row like swords in an armory. It smells of bintsuke — the scent has soaked so deep into the walls that it will probably linger long after the building is turned into something else.

The master — oyakata (親方 – lit. “the parental side” – in the guild system he was a surrogate father to his apprentices) — is working on the head of a middle-aged merchant. Behind him kneels the apprentice, a suridashi, a sixteen-year-old boy in his fifth year of training. He has just finished the preliminary combing and shaving — now the master takes over the head for the “clean shave” and shaping of the topknot. The razor is narrow and long — a kamisori (剃刀), different from the European kind, with a single blade curved like a willow leaf. The master touches skin behind the ear, draws the blade along the nape. The merchant is silent, because silence at this moment is a matter of safety.

On a wooden bench sit two men waiting. The older one is Jinbei — a retired shopkeeper, an inkyō (隠居, lit. “withdrawn”), who handed the shop to his son and now comes to the barbershop every three days — not for a haircut, as he has less and less hair, but for conversation. The younger one is Chūbei, a carpenter from the next street, who has just finished a commission and has a free afternoon.

— Did you hear about Danjūrō yesterday? — says Jinbei, as though the information he is about to share were a public matter.

— I heard he performed badly — Chūbei replies, not lifting his gaze from the pattern on his sleeve.

— Not so much badly as without fire. And without fire, it’s not Danjūrō. Apparently he quarreled with his… — Jinbei doesn’t finish the sentence, but a gesture of his hand says everything.

— How do you know?

— The oyakata told me yesterday. And he was told by the onna kamiyui (a female hairdresser) — who had been combing that woman’s hair that morning.

The master behind the merchant’s back smiles but says nothing. He applies bintsuke to the comb, draws it through the client’s hair — the oil softens the strands, gives them a moist sheen. His hands shape the motodori — the point where all hair converges into a single binding. The motoyui cord wraps them tight, firm — the merchant doesn’t flinch, though the cord pulls. Then the master folds the topknot, presses it, smooths it with the sides of his palms. He checks the result not in the mirror, but by touch — a thumb running along the line of the topknot, a quick feel of the sides of the head. The mirror is a formality. The hands know better.

The merchant rises, glances at himself in the polished metal, nods. He doesn’t say “beautiful” or “great.” He says: “Yō gasu” (ようがす) — “all right.” In Edo, one does not show delight at one’s own appearance. That would be yabo (野暮) — improper, boorish, lacking finesse. True elegance, iki (粋), lies in looking good and pretending it’s an accident.

When the merchant leaves, the master turns to Jinbei and asks quietly: “Did you see that new one in the nagaya? The one who moved in on Tuesday. Has he talked to anyone?” Jinbei shakes his head. The master nods his own. He will have to report this to the nanushi (名主, the neighborhood headman) — in Edo, you cannot simply live somewhere if nobody knows you.

The Woman with the Comb

Men had their kamiyuidoko. Women had something different — a woman who came to their home.

The onna kamiyui (女髪結, female hairdresser) appeared in Edo around the An’ei era (the 1770s), when women’s hairstyles became too complex to manage alone. Until that point, a simple rule applied: a woman who cannot style her own hair is like a woman who cannot write (immature). But when the tōrōbin (灯籠髋) came into fashion — a hairstyle in which the side strands fanned out like the wings of a lantern, translucent, thin as paper — no amateur could manage it.

The onna kamiyui had no shop of her own. She went from house to house with her tools wrapped in a furoshiki (風呂敷, a wrapping cloth): combs — sujimekushi (筋目櫛, a lining comb) and sukigushi (梳き櫛, a wide-tooth comb) — oils, motoyui cords, and scissors. Her best clients lived in Yoshiwara — courtesans who needed elaborate hairstyles every morning before another day of work began.

The price of a single session was about two hundred mon — roughly forty Polish złoty in today’s money. Six times more than a men’s shave. And visits were frequent: every regular client needed refreshing every three or four days. On top of that, courtesans and wealthy merchants’ wives gave seasonal gifts — occasional kokorozuke (心付, “tips”) and material presents. The hairdresser earned well. Better than most men in the neighborhood.

Hence the saying that has survived for centuries: “kamiyui no teishu” (髪結の亭主, the hairdresser’s husband). It meant a man living off his wife’s earnings — something between today’s “kept man” and “househusband.” It was not a compliment, but neither was it a tragedy: if the only profession in which a woman in feudal Japan could support a family — aside from midwifery — was hairdressing, then someone had to be that husband.

The shōgunate tried to ban the profession. Repeatedly. It was deemed that having one’s hair styled by a specialist was a luxury — a violation of ken’yaku (倹約, frugality – more about sumptuary laws in Edo here: Sumptuary Laws in the Time of the Shogunate, or How Prohibitions Stirred the Defiant Creative Genius of the Japanese) norms that the Kansei and Tenpō reforms tried to impose on society. But the bans never worked. Within three years of every edict, the hairdressers returned — because women wanted to look fashionable, and hairdressers wanted to earn a living. By the mid-nineteenth century, over fourteen hundred onna kamiyui were working in Edo alone. The shōgunate lost to the comb.

A Morning Visit to Yoshiwara

Otake arrives at Yoshiwara while the district still sleeps. It is spring, the hour of the hare (early morning) — the willows along the main avenue are pale green with buds, but the streets are empty. The night lanterns have already been extinguished and the morning ones not yet lit. The air holds the scent of sake, incense, and something sweet — perhaps perfume that someone spilled nearby the night before. The doorkeeper at the gate of the ageya (揚屋, a house of entertainment) lets Otake in without a word. She has been coming here every three days for four years.

Otake is an onna kamiyui — and she looks exactly as every source from the era describes: a woman past thirty, in a worn kimono with a discreet check pattern, an apron-like maedare tied in place of an obi, combs tucked into her own hair, and a furoshiki full of tools slung over her shoulder. Her blackened teeth — ohaguro (お歯黒) — and shaved eyebrows reveal that she is married and has children. Her husband works as an assistant in a building materials depot. He earns less than she does.

Upstairs, in a room with walls lined with gilded paper, Komurasaki waits — a courtesan of chūsan (中散) rank, exhausted after the night, her loose hair falling over her shoulders like a black curtain. She slept on a takamakura (高枕, a wooden neck pillow) to preserve the hairstyle — but after two days the style has loosened and needs to be taken apart completely.

Otake sits behind her, unfastens the ornamental kanzashi hairpins one by one, laying them on a tray covered with soft cloth. Then she unbraids the mage, unwinds the cords, gently unravels the twisted strands — hair kept in oil for two or three days has a different texture from freshly washed. It is heavier, smoother, more obedient. Otake combs it slowly, starting from the ends, working upward, section by section. The rustle of hair against the comb is the only sound in the room for a long while.

She shapes a new hairstyle: a tall shimada with a delicate tōrōbin — side strands fanned out like wings, translucent in the light. It requires precision and patience — oil on the comb, stretching the hair bit by bit, holding the shape with wax before the motoyui cord fixes everything in place. Komurasaki asks for news from the city. Otake tells her about a fire in Kanda — three houses, including a well-known teahouse, but no one died. And about a new hairstyle catalogue just off the press.

— There’s a style in there that might suit you — says Otake, inserting the last pin. — But not that one. Your hair is too thin at the back. I’ll do something better for you.

Komurasaki doesn’t protest. Nobody argues with the hairdresser about hair. The hairdresser knows best.

Otake gathers her tools, wraps them in the furoshiki. Two hundred mon are recorded on the house’s account — the hairdresser does not take money from courtesans directly, since they rarely have cash at hand. On her way out, on the stairs, Otake passes a man in a fine kimono who has just arrived with a morning gift for Komurasaki. They do not look at each other. Otake knows everything about him — his name, his trade, the amount he spends at this house. He knows nothing about her. She is a hairdresser. She is invisible. And that is precisely why she sees everything.

The Creature That Cut Hair in the Night

If a hairstyle in Edo was identity, then losing it was a catastrophe. And that is precisely why few yōkai (妖怪) inspired as much dread as the kamikiri (髪切り, lit. “hair cutter”).

Periodically, waves of panic swept through Edo: people — men and women alike — would wake in the morning to discover that someone or something had cut their hair during the night. The severed motodori lay on the path, still bound with cord. The victim had felt nothing. Accounts of such incidents, recorded among others in the collection “Shokoku Rijidan” (諸国里人談, “Folk Tales from Various Provinces,” c. 1743) and in the notes of the scholar Ōta Nanpo, tell of events in the Shitaya and Kohinata districts, where maidservants in merchant households fell victim one after another.

Who was the kamikiri? Nobody knew. Some spoke of an insect — kamikiri-mushi (髪切り虫), a creature with “toothed jaws and scissor hands” that lurked beneath the eaves. Others spoke of a demon. Still others of a jealous lover taking her revenge in the night. Stalls sold paper amulets bearing a protective verse (known from the late-Edo encyclopedia Kiyū Shōran – 嬉遊笑覧):

千早振神の氏子の髪なれば切とも切れじ玉のかづらを

Chihayaburu / kami no ujiko no / kami nareba / kiritomo kireji / tama no kazura wo

“Since this is the hair of a devotee of mighty gods — cut as you may, it shall not be cut — and if it should: it is but a wig.”

— an ambiguous joke-incantation, typical of Edo humor. And of course, rumors of the nocturnal hair-cutters spread fastest in the very place you would expect — the barbershops. The barber who repaired what the demon had destroyed was also the one who told the story of the demon. The circle closed.

The Day Japan Cut Off Its Past

On August 9, 1871 — the third year of the Meiji era — the new imperial government issued the danpatsurei (断髪令): an edict encouraging the cutting of the chonmage and the adoption of Western hairstyles. Formally it was not a mandate — but in practice everyone understood that the traditional topknot had become a symbol of the old order, and the new style — short-cropped hair known as zangiri (散切り) — a symbol of “civilization and enlightenment.”

For several weeks after the edict, photography studios across Edo were besieged. Samurai — those who still wore topknots — came with their entire families to be immortalized in a photograph with their chonmage one last time. Then they went to the barber and had it cut off. For many, this was a moment painful in a way that Western observers could not fathom. It was not about vanity. It was about identity. The chonmage was not a style. It was a name, an address, a rank, and a soul — carried on the head for many generations.

A popular song from the early Meiji era mocked both sides:

半髪頭を叩いてみれば因循姑息の音がする

Hanpatsu atama wo tataite mireba injun kosoku no oto ga suru

Tap the head with a chonmage — out comes the sound of backwardness and cowardice.

総髪頭を叩いてみれば王政復古の音がする

Sōhatsu atama wo tataite mireba ōsei fukko no oto ga suru

Tap the head with loose hair — out comes the sound of imperial restoration.

散切り頭を叩いてみれば文明開化の音がする

Zangiri atama wo tataite mireba bunmei kaika no oto ga suru

Tap the head cropped short — out comes the sound of civilization and enlightenment.

– anonymous street song,

first recorded in “Shinbun Zasshi” (新聞雑誌),

issue 2, May 1871 (Meiji 4)

But behind the humor lay real change. Thousands of barbers across Edo lost their livelihoods. Shaving the sakayaki and tying topknots — a craft that took a decade to learn — became unnecessary overnight. Those who could adapt became riyōshi (理容師) — modern barbers with chairs, mirrors, and Western scissors. Those who could not, vanished.

But the tokoya (床屋 – “the shop on a platform”) survived. The name survived. The function survived. In small Japanese towns — the kind where time flows more slowly than in Tokyo — there is still a barbershop run by the same family for generations. The same clients still come (or their great-grandchildren). Still waiting their turn, they talk about nothing — and about everything.

The Throat and the Secrets

In every society there are bridge professions: people who connect everyone with everyone else, without fully belonging to any group. In medieval Europe this role was filled by innkeepers. In ancient Rome — by owners of public baths. In Edo Japan — by barbers.

The barber touched the head. And the head in Japanese culture is not simply a part of the body — it is its summit, literally and symbolically. Touching someone’s head is a privilege reserved for the few: a mother, a lover, a barber. Whoever touches the head, touches thoughts. Whoever touches thoughts, sees the person without a mask — their honne. Kamiyui was therefore not an ordinary craft — it was a form of intimacy embedded in the social order. A razor at the throat. Fingers in the hair. And a whisper: “Did you hear what happened yesterday?”

The shōgunate fell. The chonmage vanished. Yoshiwara was shut down. But somewhere in an alley in Tokyo’s Kanda district, or on a side street in Asakusa, there stands a narrow building with a revolving pole striped in white, red, and blue. Inside, it is quiet. It smells of aftershave cream and old wood. A middle-aged man sits down in the chair and closes his eyes. In a moment he will tell the barber something he would tell no one else — not because he decided to confide, but because he is in that chair, with his eyes closed, with a blade against his skin. And because the barber listens. He always has.

SOURCES

Shikitei Sanba (式亭三馬), Ukiyodoko (浮世床, “Barbershop of the Floating World”), 1813–1814. In: Shikitei Sanba shū, ed. Tanahashi Masahiro, Kokusho Kankōkai, 1992.

Terakado Seiken (寺門静軒), Edo Hanjōki (江戸繁昌記, “Records of the Flourishing of Edo”), 1832–1836. Ed. Asakura Haruhiko, Andō Kikuji. Tōyō Bunko, Heibonsha, 1974–1976.

大田南畝 (Ōta Nanpo), 半日閑話 (Hannichi Kanwa, “Idle Talk of Half a Day”). Late Edo period manuscript. Referenced in: Nihon zuihitsu taisei, Yoshikawa Kōbunkan.

Pola Cultural Research Institute (ポーラ文化研究所), “Onna kamiyui” and “Otoko-tachi no kodawari: Kamiyui” – articles on Edo-period hairdressing.

Shauna J. Goodwin, The Shape of Chic: Fashion and Hairstyles in the Floating World. Exhibition catalogue, Yale University Art Gallery, 1986.

Debra Daley, “Of hair and hairdressers in historic Japan,” The History Girls, 2016.

>> SEE ALSO SIMILAR ARTICLES:

Machiya: What Were the Townhouses of Edo Like? – The Lives of Ordinary People During the Shogunate

The Hour of the Rat, the Koku of the Tiger – How Was Time Measured in Shogunate-Era Japan?

Born in hell, buried in Jōkanji – what have we done to the thousands of Yoshiwara women?

The work of Japan’s tattoo masters, the horishi – where the gaze of the shogunate did not reach

An Hour of Complete Focus – What Can We Learn from Traditional Japanese Craftsmen, the Shokunin?

Who Knew More About Everyone Than the Daimyō? – Kamiyui, the Barbers of Edo

“The Barbershop of the Floating World”

A Morning by Ryōgoku Bridge

The Hairstyle as Identity Card

The Gossip Salon

Waiting in the Uchidoko

The Woman with the Comb

A Morning Visit to Yoshiwara

The Creature That Cut Hair in the Night

The Day Japan Cut Off Its Past

The Throat and the Secrets

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Mike Soray

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