Women Are Getting Their Hair Chopped Off Their Heads in Public and Stolen in Japan

Hair is a hot commodity these days. A graduate student in Japan was reportedly arrested this week “on suspicion of causing bodily harm by cutting off around 35 centimeters (about 14 inches) of a woman’s long black hair from behind” on a packed train, according to Asia and Japan news site the Asahi Shimbun.

The hair was for an “online auction,” said local police who spoke to the assailant.

Apparently, hair is commonly sold on Japan’s version of eBay, Yahoo Auctions, and is a big business, according to the Asahi Shimbun.

“The items for sale usually feature pictures of gleaming locks of hair tied at one end or the back of a long-haired woman who is the source of the item, accompanied by titles and descriptions,” according to the site.

If you’re in the market for some hair, you might read a description like, “High school student hair; very silky to the touch,” and “Teen hair; straight permed.”

One item had a starting price of 34,000 yen, which is about $300, and came with “a DVD filled with photos of the actual haircut.”

While hair is sometimes used for wigs in Japan, wigmakers usually get their hair from dealers based in China and other countries, not the back of a bus, according to the Asahi Shimbun. One of the descriptions specifies that the purchase is good for those with a “strong hair fetish.”

An official from another auction website that also sells hair told the Asahi Shimbun, “We live in a time where various desires can come to life on the Internet. People who love hair must be purchasing them through auction websites.”

Police had been looking for the perpetrator of around 30 hair-cutting incidents on trains in the area since May 2013, according to the website. “Investigators said the suspect has confessed to similar attacks.”

Unfortunately for Americans, this crime isn’t unique to Japan. In 2015, a man was arrested in Oregon for chopping off a woman’s hair without permission in a discount store. According to the New York Daily News, this man had a history of “fondness for women’s hair.” Authorities had become familiar with the man after several arrests involving his “affection for women’s hair.” In 2009 he became known as the “TriMet Barber” after he was caught “cutting and gluing women’s hair on Portland’s TriMet bus service.” He was once arrested — disclaimer, this is gross — for masturbating on a woman’s hair on a bus.

In Europe, there was a murderer with a hair fetish who would cut off women’s hair and place it in the hands of his victims after the murder.

While these stories are creepy, hair fetishists — or trichophiles — aren’t always evil. According to Mark D. Griffiths, PhD, these extreme cases are “not representative of those who enjoy this paraphilia.” According to Griffiths’s article in Psychology Today, “trichophilia is a sexual paraphilia (sometimes called trichopathophilia, hirsutophilia, and/or hair fetishism) in which individuals derive sexual pleasure and arousal from human hair (most commonly head hair). The source of sexual arousal may be derived from viewing, touching, or (in extreme cases) eating hair.”

While we can understand fetishes, with haircutters on the loose, we’ll be keeping our luscious locks on lockdown when we’re out in public.

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