Mina Shirakawa And Her Assets
You've come a long way, booby.
It was the spring of 2019. I was approximately a year and a half into my impassioned return to pro wrestling fandom and a year into the magical world of TJPW. My husband, Aaron, was not ready to join me in any of this quite yet.
I mostly watch wrestling on my laptop these days, but when Aaron was out playing hockey one night, I decided to give the living room TV a try and put on the latest TJPW show.
He came home just in time for this to happen.
He took one look at the screen and said, with tons of confusion and very little enthusiasm, “what kind of pervert shit are you watching?”
He spent the next couple of months telling anyone who would listen that his wife was watching “weird boob matches.” It would take another year to get him to reconsider and open his heart to the wonders of TJPW.
The Boob Match, as it is known in our household, has been on my mind lately, so I went through the Wrestle Universe archives to find it today.
It’s a tag from the May 12, 2019 TJPW Spring Tour '19 - Ready Set, GO! show in Osaka. Mina Shirakawa and Yuki Kamifuku vs Yuna Manase and Himawari Unagi (as she was then known).
As a match, it’s not very good. Even by 2019 TJPW undercard standards, it’s rough. Shirakawa and Unagi are quite obviously green as hell. Kamiyu has a lot of her great character work down here, but there’s barely a hint of the technical skill that will one day accompany it. Manase is solid enough wrestler at this point, but she’s yet to become the leader we know and love today, and it shows in her awkward interactions with the rookies that she doesn’t quite have the wherewithal to carry.
As a historical document, though, it’s quite valuable. All four of these women have, in their own way, forged new paths for themselves through a mix of wrestling skill, charisma, savvy, and genuine passion for the art form. And they’ve all done so in a way in a way that neither exploits nor apologizes for their sexiness in an industry where any kind of balance in that regard is rare. It’s fascinating to watch them in action at a time when they were only starting to put all of those pieces together.
I could easily use this extended intro to extoll the virtues of any of the women involved in The Boob Match, but it’s been on my mind because the woman whose boobs were big and strong enough to fend off the four big boobs that tried to suffocate her is currently charming AEW fans around the world.
So let’s focus on her.
Mina Shirakawa wasn’t the first wrestler I noticed in TJPW. That honour goes to OG Respect Army-era Maki Itoh. But I think she was the first to trigger my protective former professional pillow fighter who is fucking done seeing women underestimated just because a dude might also get a boner from watching their work streak.
From the start, there was something about her. She was gorgeous and had an undeniable stage presence, but it was more than that. She had a palpable and contagious enthusiasm, as evidenced by how she wore her Jushin Liger worship on her sleeve, but that wasn’t the extent of the early Mina appeal, either.
It wasn’t just her surprisingly intense weird side, either, although that definitely appealed to me, too.
For a taste, let’s look at this moment from the 2019 camp ground rojo match, an early iteration of what would soon become a career-long obsession with randomly turning into a flesh-nibbling monster.
As I look back on five and half years of emotional investment in Mina Shirakawa, though, I think it was her curiosity that really did it for me.
For as long as I’ve been following her, I’ve been watching her try new things and take risks. From her stints in various wrestling promotions (Best Body Japan, TJPW, Stardom, AEW) to her various cross-training adventures (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, kickboxing, bodybuilding, a brief flirtation with being a fitness YouTuber who always had immaculate form and perfectly framed boobs), she’s always been eager to learn more and find new ways to apply those lessons to her work.
Even when it didn’t click—and in the early days, it usually didn’t—it was interesting to watch her try. Take a look at this sequence from The Boob Match, for example:
It’s mostly nonsense. But to me, it’s clearly the nonsense of a BJJ white belt who has figured out that grappling can look cool, and is trying to figure out how to make it work in wrestling. These aren’t moves that the average rookie attempts.
And at some point, all of her efforts started to pay off. She solidified her wrestling fundamentals. She refined her striking and grappling techniques and got a better sense of how to incorporate them into her work. And she remained so open to new opportunities that she wound up building a rapport with an up and coming British wrestler so strong that she wound up part of her story in AEW.
She went all in on that opportunity, too. And the world fell in love with every bit of her uniquely accumulated and refined package.
I’m struggling with how to finish this post, because it risks veering into a number directions that I don’t like in wrestling writing and fandom in general. I don’t want to be a dork and lean too heavily on the whole I Loved Mini Shirakawa Before It Was Cool thing. I think it’s weird when people say they’re proud of someone when they don’t know them personally and have not actually been involved in any of their efforts to achieve whatever the source of pride is. And I’m uncomfortable with people who focus too much on potential and growth in women’s wrestling, because it often strikes me as patronizing, as if the person doesn’t see themselves as a fan (or critic) watching a professional work at their craft, but some kind of satellite mentor who knows so much more and is waiting for their cute little protege to fulfill their vision.
But when I saw her absolutely nail that roundhouse kick in heels at Mariah May’s celebration…
I thought about the days when she used to post about her striking training on social media. And I’m absolutely thrilled—for Mina and for all of us who found her somewhere along the way—to see the results of that work paying off on this stage.
Now if only she could find a way to reunite Cat’s Pye.
