Since I’m sharing videos, here’s one for GENTLEMEN only. This time its polishing a shoe! No music, just sound.
The fella in the video is Yuya Hasegawa, owner of Japan’s first shoe shine lounge : Brift H
This is the address for shoe enthusiasts : Brift H: PAN Minami-Aoyama 204, Minami-Aoyama 6-3-11, Minato-ku, tel. 03 3797 0373
Here is his story from CNN
Many successful people claim to have come up “from the streets,” but Yuya Hasegawa really means it. “I used to shine shoes in front of Shinagawa Station for four years — ¥500 a pop. Everyone’s shoes were really dirty, and that helped me improve my skills.”
Since that time, Hasegawa has polished and buffed his way up to the big time, opening the shoe shine ‘lounge’ Brift H (the ‘H’ pronounced “ashe” rather than “eightch”) on trendy Koto-doori in Aoyama. His loyal cadre of customers bring their leather shoes to the second-story shop and sit at the counter while Hasegawa and his team give the shoes a serious treatment right in front of their eyes. “When you shine shoes on the street,” says Hasegawa, “your position to the customer is low. So we wanted to raise the position of shoe shiners by having them stand while the customer sits.”
The result is the first “shoes lounge” in Japan — if not the entire world.