Why This Japanese Stylist Went on a “Worldwide Haircut Tour”
Group OTAKU Breaks Cultural Barriers around the World
by Keiichi Tanaka
This May, hairstylist Yoshihiro Mitsumori published a photo collection called Touch. As proprietor of an Osaka-area salon, Mitsumori-san has spent the last five years traveling to different countries around the world, giving haircuts to people he meets along the way. Touch, however, is the first time his travels have been collected in one volume. Flipping through the book’s pages will reveal pictures of the crowds that often gather to watch him cut hair, alongside shots of their reactions to the hairstyles he creates, followed by rows of fresh smiles that marvel at his finished designs.
But how did his traveling hairdresser project get strated?
TOUCH Web site: www.otaku-project.com
“I want to make people reevaluate what they think about hairstylists”
Founded exactly ten years ago, Mitsumori-san’s salon is located in Takatsuki, Osaka Prefecture, an idyllic residential community surrounded by deep green mountains. His worldwide hairstyling tour, he says, began in 2010, and was inspired by a deep held desire “to change the way people think about hairstylists.”
“In Japan, when people think of hairstylists, they tend to imagine flashy people who are obsessed with showmanship and fashion contests. We may have a gaudy image at a glance, but in reality it’s just as important for us to spend a lot of time getting to know our clients so we can learn how to provide good service for them. I wanted to show people the total picture of what we do, including the human element that goes into our daily work and guarantees the ‘high quality’ that fashion magazines like to talk about.”
This thought, Mitsumori-san says, kept coming back to him until finally he decided he couldn’t ignore it anymore. In a profession infamous for not allowing much vacation time, he suddenly started taking one- and two-week vacations from his shop to visit different places, all with an eye towards bringing his vision into form. He made it his mission to give haircuts in every place he visited — a mission, it turns out, that he’s continued pursuing to this very day.
“One of the major motivations behind all my travel was the thought that I wanted to gain enough publicity to make my clients proud.” In the beginning, he traveled alone, visiting places like Paris, New York, and Hawaii. Everywhere he went, friends and acquaintances would make arrangements for him to give haircuts to the locals.
For the first three years, Mitsumori-san says he took around one or two trips a year, but the response in his neighborhood was far bigger than he’d expected, and he decided to extend the project.
“Suddenly, customers would come in asking me ‘where are you going next?’ People started coming to the shop just to hear stories about my travel. It was such an intense environment I could literally see the anticipation in their eyes,” he says.
In 2013, Mitsumori-san decided he had to bring some structure to what had suddenly become a major publicity undertaking, so he assembled a group of like-minded photographers, designers, and other hairstylists into a production unit he named “OTAKU.” The group’s slogan was “We Challenge the World!,” and in the two years between February 2013 and February 2015 they’ve made trips to Paris, Iceland, Bhutan, and Nishinari Ward in Osaka. The Touch photo anthology is the official record of their journeys.
“When we began the project, we didn’t have many expectations about what we were getting into, but suddenly people started asking what we were going to do next, so we decided to expand the scale of what we were doing a little. We’re still figuring out what types of things we’re going to do next. The photo collection is sort of our midterm report.”
For every trip the group takes, members of the traveling party are chosen depending on the destination. Sometimes OTAKU’s clients and locations are arranged by acquaintances in the area; other times, the group just proceeds in guerilla fashion, striking off in search of a good spot as soon as they arrive in town. The national (and regional) character of the different clienteles is visible in their reactions to the group.
Hairstyling as Communication
In Iceland, a country famous as the home of musicians, writers, and other artists, a number of different people answered Mitsumori-san’s call for creative collaborators. His haircuts became multimedia events, with musicians performing alongside him and widespread coverage appearing in the local media. In such a highly collaborative, spontaneous environment, Mitsumori-san says he felt he had discovered the true spirit of creativity.
In Bhutan, a country sometimes called “The Kingdom of Happiness” because of its government’s policy of prioritizing quality of life over GDP growth, the group lived a self-sufficient life among locals who seemed like the personification of pastoral living. Mitsumori-san says Bhutan is one of the countries he remembers most strongly. “There were almost no hair salons in the town, and since many of the people had never experienced anything like this before they tended to squirm around when they first got in the chair. But then I took this one rambunctious kid and turned his hair blonde, and all at once their anxiety unraveled. I’ll never forget that boy’s expression right after I dyed his hair blonde: it was a mixture of so many different emotions, like he couldn’t even believe what was happening.”
A stylist’s career, Mitsumori-san says, lives and dies by playing hunches about “how much I should take off,” especially with people who aren’t used to having their hair cut. Mitsumori-san considers cutting hair a means of communication, and he takes pride in the fact that, everywhere he went, the scene quickly turned into a kind of neighborhood community center, where strangers had a chance to relax and get to know one another. “If I can use my skills as a stylist to make people happy around the world, and can make some kind of impression on large numbers of people, I am satisfied,” he says.
His motivation for visiting these places, however, wasn’t just to give himself a chance to cut hair, but to give his collaborators a chance to take original photos. Offering people in wildly diverse locations something they’ve never experienced is, he says, how OTAKU lives up to its “Challenge the World!” motto.
Paris. Photo considered for the cover of Touch. A while after we put these yellow extensions in her hair, this girl became more outgoing with her friends. Photo credit: Sayaka Bono http://www.sayakabono.com
The first blond dye job of our trip to Bhutan. Photo credit: Yusuke Okada http://yusukeokada.com
Members of vok, a promising young Icelandic music group, get a haircut right before going on stage. Photo credit: Sayaka Bono http://www.sayakabono.com
Our first customer in Nishinari, Osaka. Photo Credit: Yusuke Okada http://yusukeokada.com
Rediscovering His Mission of “Making People Happy”
But why does he keep doing this?
What drives Mitsumori-san to keep closing his shop, over and over, and strike out in search of new places, is the same creative spirit that drives great photographers to keep going out in search of new shots. If the shop is his “job,” his travels are his “art.”
“I go to these places, and even though I’m doing something that doesn’t really make much sense, the people there enjoy it, and all the members of my group have a good time too. If I make a fool of myself but everyone around me is having a good time, I consider our ‘mission’ a success. This is such an obvious thing that it’s very easy to forget about it, but it lets me feel what got me doing this in the first place.”
He wants to inspire not just his own customers but all kinds of people, and he says the experience of leaving his shop and meeting so many different people has changed him as well.
As the internet has connected people all over the world, Mitsumori-san has developed newfound faith in the importance of “analog” contact — of actually meeting, and touching, people in the flesh. For Mitsumori-san, media like e-mail and social networking sites are essential tools for his professional life, but it is the analog act of going to real-world communities, even when they’re in other countries, and cutting people’s hair personally, that has taught him the real meaning of communication. He says OTAKU has been an opportunity for him to learn the importance of this “other” form of communication, so easy to lose sight of in the onslaught of digital conveniences.
“Using the internet, you can buy books, music, and other media very conveniently, but are these really the only things we need? This should go without saying, but when you meet people in person, your interaction with them deepens and you experience dimensions of communication that are totally inaccessible online. Without some kind of balanced concept of human interaction, the world will become very lopsided. Going on these hairstyling journeys, I rediscovered all kinds of little phenomena that only emerge when people meet each other in person.”
The beautiful smiles in his photobook definitely could not have been created via digital communication alone. However far OTAKU may have to travel, and however inconvenient the trip may be, their creative journey teaches us things we can only learn by going outside and meeting each other — face to face, and haircut to haircut.
(photo: Takuya Shiraishi translation: Michael Craig)
Originally published at ignition.co.
