Why did samurai wear topknots and tufts of hair? In the beginning, it was a bloody and painful practice to pluck out each hair one by one.

At the end of the Edo period, foreigners who came to Japan were said to have been surprised when they saw Japanese men in topknots, saying, "Wow, what's up with those guys! They've got pistols on their heads!" They had carefully shaved only the top of their heads, and on top of that there was a stick of black hair - a pistol - which must certainly look strange even to us today. But how did such a bizarre hairstyle come about? The most primitive …