**World’s Oldest Female Barber: 108-Year-Old Japanese Woman Shitsui Hakoishi Recognized by Guinness World Records**
Shitsui Hakoishi, a 108-year-old woman from Japan, has been officially recognized as the world’s oldest female barber by Guinness World Records, nearly ninety years after she began her professional hair-cutting career. Hakoishi, who operates her salon in Nakagawa, Tochigi prefecture, expressed her joy at the recognition, stating, “I’m truly overwhelmed by happiness. I’m grateful to everyone in the community.” She also thanked her parents for her strong genes, adding, “I will never forget this.”
Born on November 10, 1916, as the fourth of five children in a farming family in Nakagawa, which was then a village called Ouchi, Hakoishi moved to Tokyo at the age of 14 to pursue her dream of becoming a barber. She worked as an apprentice, dedicating her nights to practice while her peers socialized. “I wanted to catch up with, and surpass, my senior apprentices as quickly as possible, so I worked very hard and did my best,” she shared with the Asahi Shimbun earlier this year.
Hakoishi obtained her barber’s license in 1936, just before her 20th birthday, and opened her own shop with her husband, Jiro, three years later. Surrounded by friends and neighbors celebrating her achievement, she reflected on the hardships her family faced during wartime, including the destruction of her salon in an air raid and the loss of her husband, who was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army and did not return home. She received official notification of his death only in 1953, the same year she opened a one-seat barber shop in Nakagawa while raising her two children.
Hakoishi attributes her remarkable longevity to a series of exercises she has performed every morning since she turned 70, a routine that likely contributed to her selection as a torchbearer for the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. She is among the 95,000 centenarians in Japan. However, she admits that persistent knee pain limits her ability to cut hair as frequently as she would like, serving only a handful of regular customers each month. “Life has been full of hardship since I was young, but I’m truly happy,” she remarked. “Some people travel from far away to see me, so I want to keep going for as long as I can.”
