There¡¯s mischief brewing one fall night. Someone pours some sake and another neatly stacks mochi on a dish with maple leaves as shamisen music softly plays from a smartphone speaker.

¡°What a nice evening for moon viewing,¡± a friend says.

¡°Yep, that sure is a nice moon,¡± says the other, gesturing not to the sky but to my smooth cranium. ¡°Big and round.¡±

¡°Hey, cut it out!¡± I snap in good fun as I stuff my head into a beanie, feigning rage.

Since I started buzzing my head about a year ago, I have had the rare privilege of being one of Japan¡¯s few voluntary bald. By friends and students alike, I¡¯ve been called ¡°²ú¨­³ú³Ü¡± (monk), ¡°baseball boy,¡± ¡°kiwi fruit,¡± and, yes, sometimes ¡°moon.¡± Instead of bridling at these snipes, I embrace them. Bald and shaved heads are one of the most common punchlines in Japanese banter, which is perhaps the reason I¡¯ve leaned into my new role as the comedy baldie so readily. In the middle schools I taught at in Kyushu, kids loved to learn the English word ¡°bald¡± to use on their buzzcut friends on the baseball team. On , balding adults stick suction cups on their heads or mock older gentlemen with comb overs as b¨¡c¨­do hage (barcode baldies).

Among Asian countries, Japan has the at around 26%, as well as 7.8% of women experiencing . The greatest determinant for hair loss is of course genetics, and you can speculate that countries like Japan or Spain (the leading hair loss country in the world at 50%) simply have larger clusters of these particular hair loss genes. Some also blame lifestyle factors, such as stress, poor eating habits and overuse of hair products that damage the hair shaft and ultimately the hair-generating follicle.

On a cultural level, especially among older generations, thinning hair is often taken lightly: another physical trait to tease and poke. Younger generations, however, are seeing a shift where more and more people are expressing sensitivity about their thinning hairlines ¡ª especially cases where hair loss begins young. Think tanks like the Japan Public Relations Institute Inc. have begun discouraging TV programs from continuing to perpetuate kami hara (hair harassment) along with other forms of appearance-based discrimination.

Cosmetically speaking, there are only a handful of stopgaps when you notice the signs of alopecia beginning. High-level medical interventions, like hair implants and light treatments, tend to be prohibitively expensive, with follicular implants averaging (in addition to several hundred thousand yen in baseline costs) and high-quality can cost up to ?135,000.

There are more affordable treatments...