I thought I knew Ikebukuro station, I really did. But it never ceases to amaze me how there's always something in that gargantuan building that I haven't seen.

When taking a new line, I came across this most curious haircut shop. It advertised ten minute haircuts. I'd never seen one before, so maybe they aren't too popular. But there was nevertheless, a long line of businessmen waiting to have a trim. You can just see from the photo that each stall has a type of flobee, vacuum style hose attached to it. I still saw employees sweeping hair up off the floor, however.

What was even more novel--that this store had directions on how to get your hair cut there in both English and Japanese. It probably goes without saying that people who really care about their hair would avoid this place like the plague. But for those men who simply wait their hair to look like it did before--short, I don't think the process could get much easier.

And I love how the instructions state that the cut will take only ten minutes. The clock only starts from when you're actually seated with a barber, ie. the entire process will likely take much longer.

Like some restaurants in Japan, this place uses a ticket system. The employees don't handle money, the machine does. You simply hand them a ticket that the vending machine gives you, and you're good.

Japanese WiFi has been a bit of an issue for me. In addition to being unable to find free WiFi anywhere other than a small room in Narita airport's Terminal 2, I found the home wifi setups to be somewhat of a puzzle.

In America, the WiFi names tend to be things that people thought up on their own. Cute names like PinkRoom or Jenna'sNET. Or, the default names like Linksys and Netgear. But wherever I went in Japan, the WiFi names were all technobabel. Garbage names that were little more than random strings of characters--these were everywhere!

As a computer guy, most of what I did was reset and setup routers for people. I wondered how literally every home in Japan had such professionally done names. When I finally found the answer at a friend's house, it surprised me.

I guess the popular wireless routers here come preconfigured with both a specific SSID names and login passwords. Or at least that's the conclusion I came to when I found the stick on the bottom of a friend's wifi router. In Japan, they don't do any setup! It's probably the best way to do things. Or at least the most efficient.