Sumo Experiences 2 - Visiting a Sumo Stable

This is another card from our collection of sumo postcards. This one depicts former American yokozuna (grand champion) Musashimaru. The artwork was painted by famous sumo artist Lynn Matsuoka.

A story has been in the news recently about a young professional sumo wrestler who died during a training session. The wrestler's fighting name (shikona) was Tokitaizan and he was 17 years old. The current speculation is that he died because of shock after receiving multiple injuries all over his body. While it is certainly shocking and sad that such a young man died, the condition he was in is absolutely no surprise to anyone who has ever visited a sumo stable and watched the training they undergo.

My husband and I visited a sumo stable about 16 years ago and witnessed the lifestyle and culture of the wrestlers firsthand. At that time, there was a rare opportunity for a small group of people to take a "package" tour of the Ryogouku area and visit Tomozuna Beya (stable). Taking this tour involved getting up extremely early in the morning so we could catch a bus and arrive in time for a practice session that would begin around 7:00 am. This morning practice is called "Asageiko" and the fine folks at Tomozuna Beya have put up a great many pictures of this on their English language site so you can see for yourself what it looks like.

While the pictures do a good job of showing you certain interesting aspects of the practice like the thigh muscle busting stretching they undergo, there were things we saw which aren't shown there. There is a part of the training where a wrestler is worked over to a near point of exhaustion to build his physical toughness and endurance. He pushes another wrestler across the training ring and when they reach the edge, he is rolled down to the ground and gets up and pushes again. This wouldn't be such a big deal if the ground in the practice area weren't hard as a rock.

When we were there, the fellow who was doing this endurance training was covered in bruises. He had a nasty black eye and pushed the other fellow (who wasn't really exerting himself), fell to the hard ground, and got back up so many times that he was gasping and panting so hard that we could hear him clearly 20 feet away. He was worked incredibly hard and sometimes hit with sticks. I felt very sorry for him given how beat up he looked. The thing is that this fellow wasn't the only one who looked a bit worse for wear. I have read that the worst of the brutal training (beating with sticks) has been phased out for the most part but the training itself is still pretty rough on the body.

The point of this training isn't to be cruel or to beat up the wrestlers, of course. This form of training is traditional and allows the wrestlers to develop the strength to (hopefully) succeed in their professional careers. Sumo is an extremely competitive sport with a great many low level wrestlers who don't make much money at all or become famous and very few rise to the top ranks. If they don't train hard, they will never get anywhere. A lot of people don't realize this because they only see sumo on television but there are low level ranks that compete hours before what is broadcast on television. These low level competitors aren't making much more than the allowance their parents would give them unless they can reach the upper ranks.

In addition to the hard training they endure, the lower level wrestlers are responsible for taking care of the higher level wrestlers. One of the reasons our visit was so early was that we were watching the lower level training. The low level guys get to train first then go off afterwards to clean up and prepare food for the higher level guys who train after them. I've seen and read that part of what the plebeian fellows must do is scrub the backs and even wipe the back-sides of high-ranked wrestlers in the stable though we didn't personally witness either of these activities. ;-)

During our visit, the low level wrestlers made chanko nabe ("sumo stew") for us and served it up in the huge tatami room they slept in along with copious amounts of oolong tea. They stood around the room in yukata (light cotton robes) while the stable leader (oyakata) held court and yakked to the assembled package tourists. At one point, Sentoryu, an American from Saint Louis who was a low-ranking wrestler at that time, spoke to the group though I don't recall if he did so in Japanese or English (but I'm guessing it was Japanese). Unfortunately, our visit occurred early on in our stay in Japan and we couldn't understand most of what was being said by the oyakata.

In terms of the environment at the stable, it seemed like a smallish place for so many big people. It was simply decorated but quite clean and there was a lot of wooden architecture. I remember also there was a second floor with an extremely narrow set of stairs. I'm sure that no one enjoyed tromping up and down them. The atmosphere wasn't oppressive though the younger, lower-level fellows were quiet and respectful. I'm sure that it can be quite a warm and friendly place when they aren't being forced to parade around in front of tourists or act as wait staff for them. However, it was also clearly a hard life where these guys were getting up early, doing a lot of work, and enduring grueling training. After witnessing their life first hand, I can see why sumo is losing ground to imported western sports.

I don't know if they offer such tours of stables anymore but, if they do, I'd very much recommend taking part in one. You learn a lot about how the sumo world continues to embrace the feudal spirit as well as how hard it is to live in that little old-style Japanese cultural bubble on a daily basis.

Sumo Experiences - How and Why We Became Interested in It

This is a scan of one card from our collection of sumo postcards. This one is called "Five Giant Sumo Wrestlers" and the fellows pictured on the card are: top left - Mitoizumi, top right - Onokuni, center - Asashio, lower right - Konishiki, lower left - Kitao (later Yokozuna Futahaguro who was bounced from sumo after roughing up his stable leader a little). Konishiki is the only non-Japanese wrestler on the card.

Sumo is Japan's national sport but it seems to be so mainly because of inertia. The Japanese people, by and large, have little or no interest in sumo and know relatively little about it. They prefer baseball and soccer. Because of this, sumo is likely the one area of Japanese culture in which my husband and I can often run circles around Japanese people when it comes to our knowledge of it.

That knowledge is somewhat rusty in terms of who is hot and who's not in the current sumo scene but, in regards to the traditions, techniques, rituals, and rules of play, we still know it quite well. There was a time when we were absolutely potty for sumo. It was a love affair that began around 1990 and ended around 1996 and is marked by a collection of cherished sumo memorabilia that is in the closet right now but will be taken home and lovingly displayed when we get there.

In the earliest days of our time in Japan, we had a tiny little television which could offer bilingual broadcasts on the rare occasions when they were offered. This is done by essentially dividing the stereo up into a Japanese "channel" and an English "sub-channel". Bilingual T.V.s allowed you to turn off the Japanese part and only listen to the English. Cable T.V. was either in limited use or not available in our area at that time and English language programming was relatively hard to find. One of the things that you could watch in English was sumo. This was why and how we learned about sumo initially. With limited options, we chose the only English programming we could find.

Later, we just started to watch the "Sumo Digest" in Japanese since it was shorter and we were working during much of the original English language broadcast but we could only understand the all Japanese broadcast after listening to the English for some time. One of the good things about watching sumo so much is that the vocabulary is specialized and you heard the same words again and again. This helped one memorize them pretty rapidly. The only down side is that the vocabulary is so specialized that it's not very useful in everyday living in Japan.

Those who don't know sumo think it's a couple of fat guys pushing each other around until one of them falls down. This is a notion that is reinforced by the brevity of the matches. Like many things in life, the view of the outsider underestimates what is involved and only those who are on the inside or who carefully study the situation know that it's much harder and more complex than it looks. Winning at sumo is not all about weight, speed, and center of gravity. There's also a fair amount of technique involved as well as psychology and the use of the belt (mawashi) is very important in determining a win.

The psychological aspect comes during the part most people find boring where the wrestlers spend time before each bout pacing around the ring and occasionally crouching to stare at each other. There is no time limit on this "warm-up" period and no signal to say that the wrestlers are ready to start. They just work it out by the look in each others eyes which says "let's do it now". On rare occasions, one wrestler or another will misinterpret the subtle signal to begin and there will be a false start. This type of vagueness and communication that relies on reading between the lines rather than any sort of obvious signaling is incredibly Japanese.

If you watch this stare down, you can really see a lot of interesting things going on in the faces of the wrestlers. They don't grimace or pull faces. The look is mainly in the eyes and the slightest look around the mouth. Sometimes the looks really could wilt a fresh flower. Those who are a part of the sumo culture and business say sometimes a bout is won or lost at this point and I can believe it. You can also see a lack of confidence in a wrestler's eyes sometimes. When American grand champion (yokozuna) Akebono was on his game, his looks were extremely fierce. When he was off his game, you could see the doubt in his eyes. It was amazing how clear this was.

As for the belt, you could often tell once a wrestler got his hands on his opponent's belt in a certain way that he was going to win or lose. Getting the hands inside or outside and the point along the belt where one grabs goes a long way toward determining a win or loss. Sometimes this could result in extremely dramatic turns of play. There is a technique whereby someone who is up against the edge of the ring and looks like he's about to be pushed out (for a loss) will grab his opponent's belt and twist his body so he forces him down before he is pushed out. It's a dramatic come-back maneuver. This technique is called utchari and is extremely impressive to see. Unless a wrestler has the right grip of the belt though, he cannot get the leverage to perform this move.

So, sumo is definitely a lot more than a couple of almost naked beefy guys shoving and slapping at each other but a lot of the technique can only be seen if you pay attention to the subtle and small things that are going on. This is what really makes it so uniquely Japanese as it's a byproduct of distinctly Japanese cultural aspects.

Sumo Cups

About a decade or so ago, my husband and I were rabid sumo fans. Our interest started near the end of the career of the incredible grand champion Chiyonofuji and continued up until around the point in time when the first American grand champion, Akebono, retired. Most foreign residents of Japan have limited interest in sumo and it's somewhat easy to understand why. The "sport" or "skill" as it's probably more aptly translated to, is very complicated under the surface but appears to be two fat guys shoving each other for a few seconds at first glance.

The way sumo wrestlers train is by living at and training in a "stable" (or "heya" in Japanese). Each stable has a different name and is ran by a master, usually a retired high level wrestler, along with several other managers who are also retired wrestlers though likely those who never reached the upper ranks. The rule is that no wrestler has to wrestle someone in his own stable. This makes sense in that it reduces the chance of a wrestler taking a dive to a stable-mate. Unfortunately, at one point one stable, Futagoyama, had about 8 wrestlers in the upper ranks. This meant that their wrestlers were exempt from fighting some of the toughest people because they happened to belong to the same stable. The problem with this is that the competition was so poorly balanced that this group of wrestlers were staying at the top in part because they had all made it to the top. This made sumo far less interesting to watch and was the point at which my husband and I lost interest.

The cups pictured above were used to serve beer at the Kokugikan in Tokyo. The Kokugikan is the main stadium for tournaments and all official Tokyo championships are held there. The Kokugikan is situated in Ryogoku which also happens to host a lot of sumo stables. However, there are stables in other areas including where my husband and I live. We occasionally see a wrestler walking around or at the train station. While seeing a wrestler is interesting, the thing most people notice is that you smell them. Their topknots are created using chammomile oil and they have a pleasant semi-floral, semi-talcum powder smell about them.

Anyway, my husband and I collected those cups during the height of our interest in sumo and the wrestlers shown on them are some of the ones we enjoyed watching the most. On the bottom row, the second, third and fourth from the left are all Americans - Musashimaru, Akebono, and Konishiki.