Join the world’s oldest girl hair: She is 108 but the slender, white-haired Chinese woman has no plans to retire anywhere quickly.
Shitsui Hakoishi says the official recognition by the Guinness World Records this year brought her little pleasure – another than her happy customers, that is.
She was presented with an official certificate from the international franchise on Wednesday ( Mar 5 ). Guinness World Records has a distinct class for adult salons but the person who was certified at age 107 in 2018, Anthony Mancinelli of the United States, has died in the meantime, leaving Hakoishi as the only owner of the document.
Her job has spanned nine years and she says she owes it all to her clients.
” I had come this far only because of my customers”, Hakoishi told a streamed news event Wednesday at a school in her home of Nakagawa in the Tochigi province, north of Tokyo. ” I’m overcome and filled with joy”.
Born on Nov 10, 1916, to a family of farmers in Nakagawa, Hakoishi decided to become a haircut at age 14 and moved to Tokyo, where she honed her craft first as an assistant.
She got her tailor’s licence at 20 and opened a shop along with her father. They had two children before he was killed in the Japan-China conflict that broke out in 1937.
Hakoishi lost her shop in the fatal Mar 10, 1945 US war of Tokyo. Before that, she and her kids were evacuated elsewhere in the Tochigi district, according to the Guinness website.
It took her eight more times before she opened a shop again, calling it Rihatsu Hakoishi, in her home of Nakagawa. Rihatsu is Asian for hair.
She says she isn’t ready to put away her knives.
” I am turning 109 this year, so I will keep going until I reach 110″, she said and smiled safely.