‘I’m actually glad’: 108-year-old takes document for world’s oldest feminine barber | Japan

A 108-year-old Japanese lady has been named the world’s oldest feminine barber, 9 many years after she first began slicing hair professionally.

Shitsui Hakoishi, who obtained official recognition from Guinness World Data this week, stated she had no plans to cease working at her salon within the city of Nakagawa, Tochigi prefecture.

Wearing her work garments, Hakoishi advised reporters: “I’m actually overwhelmed by happiness. I’m grateful to everybody in the neighborhood.”

After thanking her mother and father for her formidable genes, she added: “I’ll always remember this.”

Hakoishi was born on 10 November 1916, because the fourth of 5 kids in a farming household in Nakagawa, then a village generally known as Ouchi.

Aged simply 14, she moved to Tokyo alone and located work as an apprentice barber, secretly practising her strategies late into the evening whereas her colleagues went out socialising.

“I wished to meet up with, and surpass, my senior apprentices as rapidly as potential, so I labored very exhausting and did my greatest,” she advised the Asahi Shimbun newspaper earlier this yr.

She obtained her barber’s licence in 1936, shortly earlier than her twentieth birthday, and opened her personal enterprise together with her husband, Jiro, three years later.

Surrounded by buddies and neighbours who had come to rejoice her record-breaking feat, Hakoishi recalled the distress inflicted on her household throughout wartime.

Her salon was destroyed in an air raid, forcing her to return to Nakagawa, and her husband, who had been drafted into the Imperial Japanese Military, didn’t return house from the struggle.

She didn’t obtain official notification of his demise till 1953. That yr Hakoishi determined to open a one-seat barber store in Nakagawa, whereas elevating her two kids.

She attributed her extraordinary longevity right down to dozens of workouts she has carried out each morning since she was 70 – a regime that should have helped when she was chosen as a torchbearer on the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. She is certainly one of 95,000 centenarians in Japan.

Hakoishi concedes, although, {that a} niggling knee ache means she will’t minimize hair as typically as she would really like, limiting herself to a handful of standard prospects a month.

“Life has been stuffed with hardship since I used to be younger, however I’m actually glad,” she stated. “Some folks journey from far-off to see me, so I need to maintain going for so long as I can.”