{Inter} Cultural Japan

Is Japan expensive? Not if you know where to go.

Of course, rents and the price of houses are outrageous (considering the often low quality of what you get), but for the rest it is not so bad at all.

On the contrary, I find Japan often much cheaper than my home country, the Netherlands. That is true for eating out because you have a wide choice of inexpensive but excellent restaurants in Japan; for clothing; for taxis; for food, as long as you cook a Japanse menu; and for household items (and the quality is often better then in the EU).

Even cars are much cheaper than in Europe, where prices are inflated by high VAT plus the special car taxes that most countries levy.

In fact, in Japan these last ten years or so prices of many products and services have started to show a great variation. You can buy on the high end but also stay on the economical side. You have 100 yen shops and Don Quichote, but also exclusive department stores. You can go to an izakaya or dine at Maxims. A good example is the young lady who buys a handbag at Louis Vuitton and then has lunch at McDonalds.

I was reminded of this topic by reading this post about the cost of living in Japan. Hair dressers are said to cost between 4,000 to 10,000 yen, and that is of course possible - I used to go to a fashionable hairdresser in Tokyo who asked 5,000. Happily, recently, there are much cheaper options, such as the famous 1,000 yen 10-minute haircut of QB House, which has shops all over Japan (there are also many other chains imitating them). It is much cheaper than Holland where you usually pay between 17 and 20 euros for a simple cut (almost the equivalent of 3,000 yen). The only thing I miss is the traditional shoulder massage!

[Screenshot of the QB House website]

In fact, QB House has a “cutting” business model. The chain, which now has more than 300 outlets in Japan and 30 abroad, was started by Konishi Kuniyoshi in 1996. Mr. Konishi was tired of the above-mentioned prices and the fact that it took one hour to get a simple hair cut. Wouldn’t it be possible to create a “no-frills” barbershop where the customer could get a hair cut in ten minutes at a cost of only 1,000 yen? Yes, he thought, by eliminating all the tasks that kept a barber from cutting hair and making things as simple as possible by eliminating “waste”:

• No cash register but instead a ticket vending machine that only accepts bills of 1,000 yen (= 6.6 EUR or 8.5 USD). The barber looses no time when the customer pays (in advance). He can serve 6 customers per hour, earning 6,000 yen, which is higher than a traditional barber who makes between 3,000 and 5,000 yen (beauty salons of course charge way above this, but that is a special category).
• No reservations, and so no interruptions by the phone.
• No conversations about the weather, many barbers wear a face mask.
• No shampooing. QB House barbers use the “Air Wash,” a vacuum hose, to remove loose hairs from their customers heads and shoulders.
• No shoulder massage, no shave, no frills. All you get is a hair cut.
• Using sensors in the barber chairs and lights outside the shop to signal how long customers will have to wait (green = immediate availability, orange = 5 minutes wait so come in, red = 15 minutes wait so perhaps do something else first).

This is the science of cutting hair! Whether it makes working at QB particularly rewarding for its employees is another point…

Contrary to what you would expect, the quality of the hair cut is good. My hair has been mangled by traditional Japanese barbers who asked 3,000 and took an hour, but so far never at QB or other 1,000 yen shops.

Other sites have also written positively about the business model of QB House, such as Gaijindo, J@pan Inc or web-japan.org.