At 108, Japanese woman becomes world’s oldest female barber | Trending News
The Guinness World Records has honoured Shitsui Hakoishi, 108, as the world’s oldest female barber. Hakoishi is determined to continue working at her salon in the town of Nakagawa, Tochigi prefecture, The Guardian reported.
Hakoishi was born on November 10, 1916, as the fourth of five children in a farming family in Nakagawa, then a village named Ouchi. At just 14, she moved to Tokyo alone and began working as an apprentice barber, secretly practicing her skills late at night while her coworkers went out to socialise. She earned her barber’s license in 1936, just before turning 20, and three years later, she opened her own salon with her husband, Jiro, the report said.
Surrounded by friends and neighbours celebrating her incredible achievement, Hakoishi recalled the suffering of her family during the war. Her salon was destroyed in an air raid, forcing her to return to Nakagawa, and her husband, deployed into the Imperial Japanese Army, never returned from the war. She did not receive official notice of his death until 1953.
That year, Hakoishi opened a one-chair barber shop in Nakagawa while raising her two children. She credited her remarkable longevity to a daily exercise routine she started at 70, which likely helped when she was selected as a torchbearer for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
Hakoishi admits that persistent knee pain prevents her from cutting hair as frequently as she would like to, so she limits herself to a small number of regular clients each month. “Life has been full of hardship since I was young, but I’m truly happy. Some people travel from far away to see me, so I want to keep going for as long as I can,” The Guardian quoted Hakoishi as having said.
In 2023, Tomoko Horino was honoured by Guinness as the world’s oldest female beauty advisor at the age of 100.
