Sumo Wrestling in Nagoya, and my Japanese Television Debut

This weekend a large group of us went to see a day of sumo wrestling in Nagoya, which is a couple of hours from Tokyo by train. It turns out that sumo is cool beyond words, and I learned so much about the sport in just a day. First of all, sumo is actually very much like the “king of the hill” game, except the participants are on a flat mound of dirt and are wearing much less clothing. The goal is to eitheryou’re your opponent to fall onto the ground within the ring, or to get him to exit the ring. There are only a few sumo tournaments a year, and this tournament in Nagoya is the only tournament that will happen while I’m in Japan. Each tournament lasts about 2 weeks, and each wrestler competes no more than once per day during the tournament (and usually not every day.) So imagine being a professional sumo wrestler… you spend months “preparing” (which, as I understand, means eating a special soup twice daily, sleeping a lot, and I’m sure getting some workouts in there). After months of preparation, you have a torment, and you show up on the day you have a match, you walk into the ring, and literally within 30 seconds you are done. It’s often very fast, and only a few matches last more than a few seconds.
The tournament is almost all day long, but most people don’t show up except for the last two hours or so of wrestling (it ends by 6pm), because that’s when the really well-known, professional guys start wrestling. We showed up at around 11am, so we got to sit very close to the ring in someone else’s very expensive seats and watch the “junior leagues.” The junior leagues are often made up of smaller wrestlers, and the matches are generally much less aggressive, but they were very fun to watch. Junior league wrestlers are also afforded much less of the pageantry and ritual that the more professional wrestlers get. For instance, only the senior wrestlers can wear the flashy, colorful sumo outfits. Senior wrestlers are also all brought out and paraded around for the audience, with their names and hometowns announced; they also go back and forth from the middle of the ring to the side of the ring before the match starts to get salt and throw it on the ground. The salt is supposed to purify the ring, as I understand, and drive out evil spirits, or maybe protect from injury. The senior wrestlers sometimes do this a lot in what our sumo handbook called “mental warfare,” with the idea being that they are trying to psych each other out before the match begins. (In the photos below, the bottom left photo, white guy on the right is fairly famous throughout Japan. We saw lots of pictures of him on souvenirs.)
Each match also has what I would call a referee, but he really reminds me of a clown in a rodeo bullpen. He basically signals that the match can begin, but it is up to the wrestlers when to start (they both have to touch their hands to the ground before they can begin.) As soon as the match begins, the clown referee starts jumping around, trying not to be crushed underneath these huge guys, and yells weird things in Japanese (none of us could figure out what they were saying.) The referee also signals when there is a winner, assuming that there was no question about who won. If ever there is uncertainty about who touched first, there are five judges sitting around the ring that convene and decide. After a winner is declared, another interestingly dressed man comes into the wring and quickly sings something about east and west (each wrestler either represents the east side of the ring or the west side of the wing). I assume the song is about which direction won the match, but I can’t be sure.
One thing that surprised me was how many non-Japanese sumo wrestlers there are. In fact, we saw several white men, many of them part Russian, and they performed very well. This also broaches another point: despite what I would have thought, bigger isn’t always better in sumo. I did see some bigger sumo wrestlers basically just overpower some smaller wrestlers, but I also saw some smaller, more nimble wrestlers who dominated in the ring. I saw one small wrestler literally just dart out of the way of a charging opponent, who went barreling out of the ring. Others were just better at balancing, and were able to use the opponents weight against them.

Above: In between matches, several people run into the ring to sweep the dirt around. Not exactly sure what that’s all about.

Below: The more senior sumo wrestlers are being introduced to the crowd. Also, I got a photo with a wrestler who was at the tornament but not competing today (he told me he had a match the next day.) Anytime a sumo wrestler is in a public place, they have to wear this traditional sumo garb; if they are seen in public without it, they receive some kind of punishment/sanctions.
I was a bit worried that I would be bored after 7 hours of sumo, but I found it to be genuinely entertaining. In fact, I wish I could go back and see some more! As I was leaving the tornament, I got a text message from a Japanese friend that I met in Hiroshima. It said: “I was surprised!! When I was watching sumo tv, I see you on tv!” Apparently it’s easy to spot a tall white guy with a mohawk at a sumo tournament.

I took tons of video throughout the day. Here is the video of the final match, the one everyone had been waiting for. The guy on the right (Hakuho) is undefeated so far in this tornament, and he won again today. Leading up to the match, all the little kids in the stadium were screaming "HAKUHOOOO HAKUHOOO!!". The match was pretty short, but it was exciting :) After the end of the match, you'll also see the day's closing ceremony, which basically consists of some sort of funny sword dance.