A quick glance at the interior of Antenna Dome and one might think that Tomoyuki Yoshida missed his calling in life. Call it a cosmic toy store, a psychedelic space ship with a hairdresser at the helm, or simply the funkiest salon in Tokyo, but Antennae Dome is not a place you’re likely to forget.
Strings of shining mini-discs hanging in the entryway and techno music drifting out onto the little Harajuku street where Antenna Dome is nestled draw passerbys into Tomo’s futurist wonderland. Only after a few moments do they realize that they’ve walked into a hair salon and not a collector’s store.
Though Tomo, as he likes to be called, insists that he’s not a huge fan of the movie Star Wars (he’s going to wait until Phantom Menance: Episode One comes out on video), the life-size Darth Vader and Storm Trooper adorning his store might give someone the wrong impression. Four TVs playing Star Wars in the waiting area and three C-3PO heads watching you in the bathroom do nothing to dispel the rumor.
But it’s not all Star Wars paraphernalia covering the walls. Star Trek’s Mr. Woorf also lurks over the toilet bowl, along with a knight in not-so-shining armor, a few oversized watches, a globe or two, yellow wooden hands, wheels from toy trucks, and a slew of water faucets (not just the ones you wash your hands under). Darth and his Storm Trooper pal are not enshrined and fawned over like the collector items they are but are instead chained to the wall and forced to wear headphones and goggles. Over each workstation a foot high Alien doll looms, flanked by rows of tiny red-coated British soldiers. The walls are covered
with patterns made from CDs and chips of broken mirrors.
Antenna Dome is not a place easily explained. Part sideshow funhouse, part surrealist collage, it’s a place to linger in. Yet not so long ago it was just another average hair salon; no gas-masks in the waiting area, no guns hanging from the ceiling. Tomoyuki Yoshida decided that he wanted the shop to have a more cosmic feeling, so he and his employees started collecting the hundreds of CDs, records, dolls, and other objects that decorate the place. A few years and a lot of cash later and Tomo’s cosmic vision is reality.
Although the funky interior at Antenna Dome might convince you that he should have been a trendy night club designer, Tomo and his crew are serious about hair. After graduating from the Kanto Beauty school in Tokyo, Tomo headed to London where he studied both English and hair design. Starting out at the Vidal Sasson Academy and then two years later moving to the Toni & Guy Academy, Tomo spent a total of seven years studying and working in London. Then in 1993, following in his father’s footsteps, he opened his salon in Harajuku.
Given the look of his salon one might assume that the hip Harajuku crowd is the main clientele at this shop. Of course the shop does have its share of young people wanting their hair dyed all colors of the rainbow, but the bulk of their clients are average office workers who just want a good hair cut. Tomo says that the design change two years ago from simple hair salon to funky futurama startled a number of his regular clientele but plenty of them were pleasantly intrigued. He wants his customers to know that the look of the shop doesn’t mean they are limited in what they offer their customers. They offer a wide range of services ranging from most basic cuts to the wildest colored extensions.
Just to prove the point that looks can be deceiving both the shop and Tomo himself give off first impressions that are not exactly accurate. A young man with yellow-framed glasses, bleached kinky hair, and a hip plaid shirt, Tomo might be mistaken for someone who hits the clubs every weeked and annoys train passengers with loud techno music blaring from his headphones. But put aside his appearance and Tomo is in every other way a pretty typical workaholic. He says he takes off about one day a month and doesn’t have enough time to go out to clubs. Which is fine with him because although techno music pounds from the speakers at the shop, Tomo insists that he’d rather listen to Enka at home and visit temples in his free time.
But lately Tomo hasn’t had a lot of free time. His current passion, hair extensions, has recently become popular in Japan. He studied extensions in London and received an instructor’s license from Antenna, a Kensington salon known for extensions. After becoming licensed, Tomo changed the name of his salon to Antenna Dome and began doing extensions in his Harajuku shop. Tomo now teaches courses in extensions to hairstylists all over Japan. He recently traveled to salons in Tochigi and Kyoto to train their staff and he hopes that eventually extensions will be available at shops all around Japan.
The thing that Tomo likes about extensions is diversity, the ability to change from one look to a drastically different one in hours. Someone can go from short hair to long dreadlocks or simple hair to wildly colored streaks. Tomo’s model book is filled with hair-extension styles that are as funky as the interior of his shop: spiral curls in all the colors of the spectrum, braids, dreadlocks, and puffy colored twists. But he says that unusual extensions make up about 10-20% of his extension clients and the rest are people who want natural looking extensions which he is happy to do.
In addition to training hairstylists to do extensions, Antenna Dome offers a course to teach customers how to do their own extensions. Given that going from short to long hair with extensions can cost between ¥80,000 and ¥100,000, the course priced at ¥30,000 is a pretty good deal. It’s usually taught one-on-one and takes two evenings to complete. After completing the course, a customer should be able to do their own extensions, giving themselves a new look whenever they choose.
As far as new looks go Tomo is happy with the way his shop turned out and now he has his eyes on the future. And what does Tomo want for the future? He thinks for a minute and then says, “Now, I want a big Episode One doll!”
3-24-9 Jingumae, Shibuya-ku
Tokyo 150-0001
Tel: 3402-7505
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