A new beauty center in Tokyo is offering Muslim women special amenities, giving them privacy, prayer mats, and alcohol-free shampoo, The Asahi Shimbun reported Wednesday.
“The service is very nice, as it offers a sense of relief,” Dhyah, 24, a student from Indonesia who has lived in Japan for six years and uses the hair salon, said. “I’d like to recommend it to friends.”
At the salon, Muslim women can safely remove their hijab to have their hair cut or dyed without worrying about being seen by men.
It was started after Naoki Okamoto, 43, head of the company’s sales promotion department, became aware that Muslim women were struggling to find salons that they could visit without anxiety and proposed the new service after studying Islamic practices.
“The skills of Japanese hairdressers have won high praise from East Asian women, whose hair has characteristics similar to those of Japanese women,” said Okamoto, who is also a hairdresser.
“I would like Muslimah customers to experience the exceptional techniques of our stylists.”
Islam sees hijab as an obligatory code of dress, not a religious symbol displaying one’s affiliations.
Though this initiative of ‘Muslim women salon’ seems to be unique in Tokyo, it is not the first in the US.
In 2017, a Muslim women-only beauty salon opened in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, offering hijabi women a place where they can safely let their hair down without fear of any privacy intrusion.
Another salon for Muslim women opened last February in Massachusetts, becoming the state’s first salon and spa established specifically for Muslim women.
Islam began in Japan in the 1920s through the immigration of a few hundreds of Turkish Muslims from Russia following the Russian revolution.
In 1930, the number of Muslims in Japan reached about 1000 of different origins.
Another wave of migrants who boosted the Muslim population reached its peak in the 1980s, along with migrant workers from Iran, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
The Pew Research Center estimated in 2010 that there were 185,000 Muslims in Japan.