Off the Wall with 17-Year-Old Rock Climbing Superstar Ashima Shiraishi

There’s a video on YouTube of Japanese dancer Hisatoshi “Poppo” Shiraishi performing in 1990, his face painted white, no shirt, one long silver earring dangling from his right ear, his movements soundtracked by UK post-industrial band, Nocturnal Emissions. He’s doing Butoh, an experimental style of dance originating from Japan, also known as the “dance of utter darkness.” He slinks around the stage, hands bent sharply at the wrist, each finger gesticulating independently, some curled, some pointed as if adhering to their own choreography completely. His daughter’s phalangeal dexterity, her ability to glide from rock to rock with inimitable style, now, makes even more sense—Ashima is what happens when a dancer coaches a climber.

“My dad is, obviously, my icon. He’s always been there for me,” Ashima says of her father. She’s had a handful of coaches, but her dad is her constant companion. The fact that he’s never climbed before makes him an unlikely choice, and a secret weapon. “He’s a mentor for me, but he’s also my dad,” she explains, “so it’s a weird balance. He’s also like my best friend, so we fight a lot because we’re very similar and we spend so much time together. I love him, but sometimes I get so sick of having my dad always around, you know? He’s a very traditional Japanese dad, so he can be really strict.”

Her parental feedback is laced with teenage vernacular—“like” and “you know?”—reflecting that very specific type of universal teen angst—the kind where one “wrong” move from a parent in a social situation could send you spiraling into a fit of mortal embarrassment. Ashima is impressively pragmatic for her age, and even though she’s honest about the struggles of the parent/coach paradigm, she beams when she describes how her parents fell in love, and she tells me, without a hint of self-consciousness, that she wishes she was as cool as them.