Insightful new profile on Kanoa Igarashi challenges notion that Japan’s golden boy is nothing more than a surfing Stepford Wife!

Dreams within dreams.

There are many understandable critiques of Japan-by-way-of-Huntington-Beach’s Kanoa Igarashi. For one, he celebrates weird, mouth open, screams flowing out neither primal nor deep, arms pumping like a father of the bride dancing to YMCA.

For two, he seems fake and not even a deep fake. Like a robot who was built to be talented and handsome and polite but built too well and therefore never considered because it is clearly artificial.

A surfing Stepford Wife.

And as surfing’s grand Olympic debut draws nearer and nearer, Igarashi has drawn more and more spotlight. I have read many of the interviews, watched too, and never considered anything other than how on message he keeps. Never a slip, never a falter, never a new bit of insight, only perfect flowing from a gleaming white tooth’d mouth… until just now.

In a new and cinematic profile for Outside Magazine, the critically-acclaimed Daniel Duane plunges beneath the plastic veneer and reveals truths that I have never stopped to consider. You must read Is Kanoa Igarashi the LeBron of Surfing? in its entirety but I would like to briefly discuss the notion of Igarashi being only a chimera of his parents dream.

You know the story, Igarashi’s mother and father pursing aerobics careers in Japan, conceive, think “How cool would it be for our child to be a professional surfer?” and fulfill that dream by moving to Huntington Beach, waking Kanoa up at 3:00 am to drive him to surf contests etc.

Igarashi, in the retelling, is only awed by his parents’ sacrifices. There is no bitterness, no frustration about being the vessel for someone else’s fantasy, and regarding this, Duane writes:

One might argue that this particular ship—Kanoa living out Tsutomu’s dream—had sailed quite a long time before. But that would also require admitting that fathers and mothers have been putting their own dreams onto children from time immemorial, that a father could imbue a kid with a dream worse than life as a pro surfer, and that nobody becomes as good of a surfer as Igarashi without an authentic hunger of his own.

Ah, “fathers and mothers putting their dreams onto children from time immemorial” is a good nut and caused me to pause deeply in order to consider my own relationship with dreaming and parenthood. Your own relationship too. The vast majority of parents dream at least something for their children beyond sitting like a blob and recreating TikTok videos and try to push them along the way. How much is too much, though? And what if the parents’ and child’s dream is truly the same?

A dream within a dream like Inception?

What if dreams are actually folded into the DNA?

The chicken/egg business of that can never be solved, but, as it relates to Igarashi, it was the first time in maybe ever that I’ve ever paused and considered really anything at all.

Duane rounds out the profile with a stray thought from Chas Smith, “editor of the heinously irresponsible surf tabloid Beach Grit,” that the Tokyo Games are likely to be the apex for Igarashi. “Because any surfer who is worth his salt and reasonable,” Smith says, “looks at all those Brazilians on tour and realizes he is not ever going to beat those guys and be world champion. I think Kanoa is rightly looking at this moment”—when he will represent Japan in the Olympics, the most-watched sporting event on earth—“and thinking, This is when I can be, honest to goodness, for a few days, the biggest athlete on earth.”

True?

I think yes.