Rising Son

Japanese Surfer Kanoa Igarashi Is Having A Breakout Year And Is Set To Keep The Japanese Flag Flying High.

- Craig Jarvis

It’s a miserable day during an otherwise warm winter in South Africa. Kanoa and I sit on the balcony of his small but cosy apartment, meters away from the contest site in JBay. His filmer arrives and surreptitiously starts shooting our interview. “He’s cool,” says Kanoa of his filmer. “He’s just going to get a few shots of us.” We riff a little about the Championship Tour, about the year so far, about the back half of the year. Easy-going and intelligent, Kanoa speaks freely and has a measured thoughtfulness behind much of what he says. He delivers a rare style of old-school wisdom, a refreshing element to come across when interviewing a professional surfer, and especially one as young as Kanoa.

Born in 1997 in Southern California to Japanese parents, Kanoa and the Igarashi family made their home in Huntington Beach. Having left Japan for a brighter future, they struggled at first, with Kanoa’s dad, Tsutomu Igarashi doing whatever he could to make ends meet, including driving a limo and working as a tour guide for wealthy tourist visitors from Japan. “I was desperately trying to get by every day,” Tsutomu recalled of those dark days in a recent interview for The Asahi Newspaper in Japan.

Growing up as a Japanese kid in the United States wasn’t all fun, and had some disadvantages. As he started showing more talent and surfing skills, his dad entered him in all of the amateur events, and he was winning many of them by age eleven. In those early years, however, spectators often booed when a young Kanoa won a contest, and let out huge cheers when he lost.