The moment has arrived. After cutting your hair and massaging your shoulders, the white-smocked barber holds up a gleaming razor between finger and thumb - and runs it smoothly across your lathered forehead.
Welcome to barbering, Japanese-style.For anyone in need of a quick, cheap haircut, Japan is the wrong country. Nearly all barbershops here are places where customers are babied for an hour or more - and nothing above the neck is left untouched.
A phalanx of trendy-looking "barbers," many of them women, bow in greeting to the unkempt customer and guide him to a chair for the full treatment - and a lesson in Japanese precision, pampering and thoroughness.
First come the instructions. Some barbers offer a menu consisting of 20 or so passport-size photos of different hairstyles, usually starting at around 3,600 yen ($28). Just pick a number and it's smooth sailing.
But off-the-cuff instructions can get complicated. Japan's harried workers are under the gun to perform flawlessly; maitre d's at crowded restaurants are so afraid of being wrong they sometimes refuse to estimate the wait for a table.
So vague directives like "short" won't cut it with barbers whose greatest fear is upsetting a customer by trimming too much. After several trips fruitlessly urging my barber to hack away with abandon, I finally wised up - and requested a "4-centimeter cut."
Next comes an uneventful shampoo, with some vigorous scrubbing of the scalp, a rinse and dry.
After that, an unexpected twist for a Westerner: a full back and shoulder massage. Close your eyes and relax as your barber - or "barberess" - rubs your shoulders and runs her thumbs up and down your spine.
Reaching for that wallet? Slow down. It's time for a shave - on parts of your face you'd never expect.
The Japanese have not risen to the top of global industry by fudging the details, and they apply the same thoroughness of designing Toyota engines to barbershop shaves: not a pore is left untouched.
The whole face - cheekbones and forehead included - is gently lathered, and the barber skillfully glides a hefty razor across your face, taking care to root out any stray hairs between your eyebrows. You sit stock-still when your barber wipes the blade - and then shaves the rims of your ears.
Such service is not only for men. Older Japanese women make special trips to the barber to get that special, just-shaved freshness, which Japanese say gives the skin a lighter sheen.
"They come here because beauty salons won't shave them," explained one barber. "It makes their faces nice and soft."
The experience winds down neatly, with the barber laying a white cloth over your mouth as he trims your nose hairs, and then cleans your ears with a feathery cotton swab.
The final flourish, though, can make the first-time customer squirm - an ear massage. The barber inserts a finger into your ear and then gently taps her knuckle with her other hand.
Close attention to hair is nothing new in Japan, where hairdressing began hundreds of years ago to keep samurai topknots well-coiffed.
Today's government, however, is trying to roll back some of the excesses, arguing that ear and nose hair is needed to filter air and keep out foreign objects. Barber schools no longer teach such techniques, but barbers still practice them.