Sumo Revisited

Sunday’s post on sumo has me thinking about bodies, size, and the twin obsessions with thinness and excess weight we have in the United States. The emcee managed to avoid using the word fat, and I stood there thinking she was smart to craft her patter for neophytes.

As I listened to her, my love of sumo made me think that surely at least a few people were there to learn about an ancient culture’s time-honored athletic contest. That conversation would go like this:

Bob: “Hey, sumo, I wonder what that’s like?”

Mary: “Yeah, I mean wow, what is the history is behind that?”

Bob: “Hm. That might be interesting.”

Mary: “Okay, let’s go check it out. And then we can head over to the ikebana hall.”

But I knew that the majority of the audience must have been there for the shock value, gross-out factor, what-have-you, of seeing fat guys wrestle. And that conversation would go like this:

Bob: “Oh wow, sumo! Fat guys wrestling!”

Mary: “Yeah, in diapers! Let’s go see that.”

I will admit that the biggest guy there (I think the emcee said he was 300-ish pounds) was not necessarily pleasant to look at. His legs reminded me of a baby’s, with the excess flesh drooping down and rubbing against itself. The emcee stressed several times that these guys have regular checkups, and tend to be in better shape than you would think.

Beyond the visual impact, there’s the stubbornly solid smack of massive bodies making contact at high speed. It’s a bit like the sound of a belly flop, but more substantive, with a wider range; it was also loud enough to shock me, and I was at least 30 yards away from the stage.

I wish I’d talked with a few audience members to find out why they were there, and whether their perceptions of sumo changed after learning about it and watching it. The conditions for that kind of change were good. The emcee stressed the cultural significance of the sport, the high place of honor reserved for champions, and the gorgeous women they subsequently date and marry. The rikishi were gracious with the kids they brought onstage, and gracefully powerful in their bouts. The bouts were interesting, with a variety of moves, holds and unexpected outcomes.

So if you were there, tell me: What did you think?

Japanese Festival: Sumo Edition

One of the things I most wanted to see at the Japanese festival was the sumo. A while back I blogged about the basics of sumo and why it's so awesome, so I won't repeat myself here. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who wanted to see big men wrestling -- the place was packed.

The three rikishi (wrestlers) that were there had wrestled professionally in Japan but were from Hawaii, and they were introduced by a woman who wrote a book about sumo. I don't recall her name, but I do recall the crowd getting visibly and audibly impatient as she sucked up valuable wrestling time with fun facts about sumo, like, sumo wrestlers are big because they eat a lot! Really? We had no idea.

Okay, done being snide now. She did say some interesting things, and I realize she was gearing her talk to people who have no exposure to sumo, but in all honesty, she needs an editor. (Interestingly, though, she never once used the word "fat.")

Eventually she introduced the rikishi, ending with the biggest one, who elicited gasps and comments from several people around me. They went through their stretching exercises as the woman continued talking about how much weight they'd lost and what there did no (one of them is a surfing instructor). Then, finally, hallelujah, the two smaller ones settled in for a bout:

They brought a bunch of kids up to go through the stretching and strengthening exercises:

They asked for a kid volunteer to wrestle with one guy:

Then came an older kid, whom they put in a mawashi, which was funny both because they had to spin him around three or four times, and because I knew everyone there was thinking, "Hey, look at the kid in the diaper."

He got the initial squat just right.

He was very serious about the bout.

But he did not win.

Watching all of this only strengthened my jones to attend a real sumo basho (tournament). And while there are annual "sumo opens" in California (this year's happens to be next Saturday), I have a feeling that wouldn't quite do it, either. Because with sumo, as with ice cream, NASCAR and high-end hair products, there just ain't nothing like the real thing.

Sumo!

In Tuesday's post I talked about my sumo alarm clock and promised to talk about sumo today, so here we go.

When I lived in Tokyo with my older brother, he got into sumo, and then I did, too, once I got over the big-men-in-diapers ick factor (it helped to learn the proper name for the diaper: mawashi). We'd watch "Sumo Digest" whenever there was a basho (tournament) going on (they go for 14 days, six times a year). We took turns waiting in line for days to get tickets to one day of the basho advertised in the poster above. There were a lot of minor yakuza waiting with us, and we learned from our linemates and students that many corporations snap up blocks of the best tickets.

Sumo is an ancient sport that's connected to the Shinto religion as well as Japanese military and imperial history, and it's a test of strength and skill as well as a ritual and an exercise in psyching out your opponent. Check out these guys, preparing to fight:

There's a good five minutes of ritualized stomping and salt-throwing, and rikshi (wrestlers) crouch down at the face-off point many times before they actually go at it. They both have to have their knuckles on the ground before the match can begin, so crouching but keeping your hands off the ground is one way to stall the beginning of a match.

Things are pretty tense by the time a match begins, and it can go very fast from there, because the rules are very simple: Force your opponent outside the ring, or make him touch the ground with more than the bottoms of his feet, and you win. Approved fighting techniques include grabbing the other guy's mawashi and using it for leverage, shoving, slapping, hooking the other guy's leg with your leg, and so on.

This clip is an excellent example of a classic bout:


These nobori outside the kokugikan (tournament hall) announce the honbasho (Grand Sumo Tournament):

Finally, it's definitely a family affair; this is one of many kids we saw the day we went:

Sumo Alarm Clock

During my final year of college, my older brother and I hatched a plan to teach English in Japan. It was all the rage in those days, and so we ran off, abeit circuitously, to Tokyo. (More about the circuitous part in a later post.)

After a year and a half in Tokyo, I really needed to get away from all the crowds but wanted to stay in Japan, and so I found a job teaching English at a very small school in Kushiro, on the northern island of Hokkaido. And that's where the sumo alarm clock comes into play: he was a departing gift from a student of that small school.

He is modeled on a real sumo rikshi (RICK-shee), Wakanohana, who along with his brother Takanohana, was very popular at the time. He has woken me every morning for more than 10 years, and last night when I dropped him on his topknot, I knew it wasn't good for him. The topknot isn't just cute, it's the activation device for the alarm, and it was stuck in the "off" (down) position. I wiggled it, pushed down gently on it, and then on a whim and starting to panic, I gave it a sharp whack.

Imagine my relief when it popped up into the "on" position and the alarm statred to sound, healthy and strong as ever.

About the sound of the alarm. It's in the pattern and rhythm of the play-by-play chant of the referee during a wrestling bout, but instead of saying whatever they say for that, it says, roughly, this:

Here's the charge, wake up, wake up-wake up, wake up, wake up-wake up, looks like it's over, it's over.

Naturally, it says all of this in Japanese. Here's a video of a bunch of bouts where you can hear the ref fairly clearly.

I know what most of you are thinking: "Ooh, gross, big fat men in diapers!" That's why Thursday's post will be all about how cool sumo is.