A 108-year-old Japanese woman has been named the world’s oldest female barber, nine decades after she first started cutting hair professionally.

Shitsui Hakoishi, who received official recognition from Guinness World Records this week, said she had no plans to stop working at her salon in the town of Nakagawa, Tochigi prefecture.

Dressed in her work clothes, Hakoishi told reporters: “I’m truly overwhelmed by happiness. I’m grateful to everyone in the community.”

After thanking her parents for her formidable genes, she added: “I will never forget this.”

Hakoishi was born on 10 November 1916, as the fourth of five children in a farming family in Nakagawa, then a village known as Ouchi.

Aged just 14, she moved to Tokyo alone and found work as an apprentice barber, secretly practising her techniques late into the night while her colleagues went out socialising.

“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 told the Asahi Shimbun newspaper earlier this year.

She obtained her barber’s licence in 1936, shortly before her 20th birthday, and opened her own business with her husband, Jiro, three years later.

Surrounded by friends and neighbours who had come to celebrate her record-breaking feat, Hakoishi recalled the misery inflicted on her family during 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 Army, did not return home from the war.

She did not receive official notification of his death until 1953. That year Hakoishi decided to open a one-seat barber shop in Nakagawa, while raising her two children.

She attributed her extraordinary longevity down to dozens of exercises she has performed every morning since she was 70 – a regime that must have helped when she was selected as a torchbearer at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.

Hakoishi, though, is far from alone in keeping active well into her twilight years. In 2023, Tomoko Horino was recognised by Guinness as the world’s oldest female beauty adviser at the age of 100, while local media recently reported on the athletic feats of Kaneo Tsukioka, an 87-year-old trail runner who two years ago completed a 160 km race.

Older people in Tokyo are involved in everything from breakdancing to competitive football.

Japan, a super-ageing society, is home to more than 36m people aged 66 or older – accounting for almost 30% of the country’s population – according to the internal affairs ministry. Hakoishi is is one of 95,000 centenarians.

Hakoishi concedes that a niggling knee pain means she can’t cut hair as often as she would like, limiting herself to a handful of regular customers a month.

“Life has been full of hardship since I was young, but I’m truly happy,” she said. “Some people travel from far away to see me, so I want to keep going for as long as I can.”