The master’s hands don’t waver; they have done this thousands of times. Each movement lands without hesitation: the clippers press firmly at the back of the neck, then ease away as he resolves the gradient cleanly. His execution contradicts the assumption that age brings an inevitable decline of the senses. There is no tremor in the hand, no visual impairment, no loss of coordination.

It is early on a Saturday afternoon and I am in the barber’s chair at Hair Shop Aoyagi. The master’s son and another young barber are hard at work trimming hair and shaving beards across the busy shop floor. I suspect that any of the shop’s three barbers would leave me with a competently finished cut, but I am especially pleased to have found the owner himself available, a man who has been in the trade for over fifty years.

Aoyagi is a tokoya (床屋), or riyōshitsu (理容室), in the Nishi-Ogikubo neighbourhood. The shop stays open until 8pm most evenings—unremarkable in a city where salons and barbershops routinely serve late-working customers—and it was during one such evening that it first caught my attention. A rotating barber pole, its pattern more intricate than usual, glowed from a side street just off the Fushimi-dōri shopping arcade. Warm orange light spilled from the shop’s broad windows onto the pavement, drawing me in to photograph the façade for my barbershop collection.

Traditional barbershops and hair salons have become a welcome sight during long walks through the city. Even across extended stretches of deeply suburban neighbourhoods, they are often the one type of outlet to appear reliably—a solitary colourful presence amid a grey and beige field of prefabricated homes. Over time, I’ve come to appreciate their aesthetic. The barber’s pole unifies a street-facing, service-first aesthetic marked by block colours, stripes, and display fonts, chosen once and then left untouched for years.

Shopfronts typically favour discretion, relying on drawn lace curtains, frosted glass, tinted brown windows, and half-drawn sun blinds to create a sense of privacy. Ornaments, potted gardens, and parked bicycles spill onto the street and, at times, that privacy emerges simply through the sheer accumulation of bric-a-brac. After seeing it often enough, though, the neighbourhood barbershop’s reserve became the very thing that finally drew me inside for a cut.