Drawing - European Barber

"Drawing — European Barber" presents the Western barber — with his straight razor, apron, and Western-style barber's chair — as a figure of cultural transformation, the man whose tools and techniques reshaped Japanese men's heads during the Meiji period. Western-style barbershops, which offered the short haircuts and clean shaves demanded by Meiji modernity, replaced traditional Japanese hairdressers as the instruments of cultural modernization made visible on every face. Kawakami's drawing style gives the European barber an appropriately direct, illustrative quality.