Hoodies and turtlenecks are not allowed" The unknown hardships of the hairdressing industry,

The third installment of Aiki Hashimoto's series "Working People" focuses on hairdressers. Nowadays, more and more people, both men and women, are getting their hair done at beauty salons. What kind of hardships do those who work there face?

This may be sudden, but let's ask a quiz.

(1) Dental clinics across the country
(2) Beauty salons across the country
(3) All educational institutions (schools) in Japan
(4) Traffic lights across the country
(5) McDonald's around the world
(6) Convenience stores across the country
?*Data is unified to the year 2022
?*Educational institutions include national, public and private institutions from kindergarten to graduate school.
?Please rank these in order of frequency.

?We often hear that there are more dental clinics than convenience stores. In fact, there are 67,755 dental clinics and 55,838 convenience stores, which means there are more than 10,000 more dental clinics.

?However, there is one store that easily surpasses that number: beauty salons.

?According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare's "Reiwa 4 (2022) Health Administration Report," the number of beauty salons in the same year was 269,889. This is actually four times the number of dental clinics.

?It may not seem like much to you, like the use of "the size of a Tokyo Dome" as a measure of size, but there are 207,057 traffic lights in Japan. That means there are more hair salons than traffic lights.

(Note: A traffic light is a machine that controls traffic lights. There are 1,265,493 red, yellow, and green traffic lights in Japan.)

?Because beauty salons are essential facilities for daily hygiene, there were originally many of them, with 186,506 salons in 1990. However, even as Japan's population declines, the number continues to increase year by year, up to the current number.

?What is the reason for this?

?There are multiple factors, but one of the biggest is the "diversification of beauty." Until now, beauty salons were the target of "women's beauty" such as cuts, coloring, and perms, but as times have changed, beauty awareness has increased among people of all ages and genders. Another factor behind this is the increase in the variety of services, from hair quality improvement to scalp care, treatments, and hair thinning prevention.

?In this way, about 10,000 new hair salons are opening each year, but at the same time, there are also many salons that close within a year.

"The barrier to entry for opening a beauty salon is low. All you need is a small space. But a small salon can only serve a limited number of customers per day, which makes business unstable and often leads to closure."