I went back home for the New Years, saw my mother for the first time in a long time, and enjoyed her home-cooked meal.
When I was a child, I loved this hair salon that my mother has been running for over 60 years. I say when I was a child, but even now, if the timing is right, I will have my hair cut and shampooed and chat about what's going on in my life.
Originally, it was a beauty salon opened by my mother's older sister, located in an area on the border between an old town and a new residential area in a regional city in the Kansai region. When I was a child, my house was next to the salon, and there was only one door connecting to it. My mother's older sister became a civil servant and left the salon to my mother, and I think it has been about 60 years since then.
Well, until I was in the early grades of elementary school, I remember coming home from kindergarten or school and showing up at my mother's workplace, where the customers loved me. Sometimes I would say I'd help with dressing, and when the salon was busy, the staff couldn't let go, so I'd stand next to my mother and pull on the obi, or go to get the undergarments and thin towels (maybe bleached?) that were used when dressing. When it was busier, I remember washing the towels and sweeping the store.
As a small child, I enjoyed being greeted by the customers, watching them become more beautiful, and above all, seeing the happy faces of the customers. I could hardly keep up with the conversations between the customers and the staff, but I could understand to some extent the topics discussed in the entertainment magazines at the salon, and I may have pretended to understand the local talk. The salon was a semi-public place, a salon for women (come to think of it, the name of the salon included the word "beauty salon"), so there wasn't much bad-mouthing, and if such talk was about to come up, I think a senior woman would scold her or skillfully change the topic.
Even now, more than 60 years later, when my mother receives a phone reservation on her LINE or cell phone, she opens the salon, and for elderly customers who cannot come to the salon, she carries her haircutting tools on her bicycle and visits their homes to provide hair care. LINE reservations for people over 80!
My mother once told me this shortly after I started my business.
"Well (in Kansai dialect), making customers happy and continuing to do so for a long time is what we call business. It's like cow's drool, for example." Drooling in beauty... (laughs).
Once again, in the new year, we have redefined the "GA" in GA Cosmetics as Goodness Aging. By adding the "Goodness" to the name, we wanted to add the idea of "kindness" to the name.
The photo shows my mother's beauty salon, which continues to this day. I'll follow her example!