Sumo

Thursday we attended the last few hours of the sumo wrestling tournament held in Osaka every year. Apparently there are 6 Grand Tournaments each year (3 in Tokyo, 1 each in Osaka, Nagoya, and Kyushu) and the same 800 or so professional sumo wrestlers compete in these tournaments, getting ranked and re-ranked each time. The basic idea is that the tournaments are 15 days long and each wrestler competes in one match per day against a different opponent. The person with the best record at the end (wins versus losses of those 15 matches) wins the tournament.

Upon entering the gymnasium, it took us a while to find our seats and figure out what was going on. Once we finally got seated in our cheap seats, we watched for about three hours of continuous wrestling matches, or “bouts”. The funny thing about the seating arrangement in the arena was that the cheapo seats in the back were regular flip up chairs like at a movie theater, with a pillow strapped to the top for added comfort. The expensive seats, closer to the wrestlers, were big pillows on the floor. The floor was tiered so that each row could see over the one below it, and the separate “boxes” of seats were separated by metal bars about 6” off the ground, so that you're not just bleeding over into your neighbors little seating area. Each “box” of seats held 4 people (hence had 4 pillows). I was glad we weren't sitting there, that seemed far more uncomfortable to me (here's a picture of the "expensive" seats).

When we went by the ticket checker on the way in, we received a little booklet containing some information about sumo wrestling as a tradition, its evolution into a modern sport, the rules and rankings, and about all the little intricacies and rituals they do during the bouts. It was all quite interesting and helped to understand what we were watching. The wiki article is also pretty comprehensive if you'd like more info. Here are a couple of the big boys waiting for a taxi after the match. The taxi was noticeably lower to the ground after they got in...

The layout of a match is this: a man with a fan announces the next two contenders in a weird singing voice. Then the two dudes get up onto the little 18' square x 2' tall platform and the ref, dressed in a big silk get-up, mediates a bow between them. Then they begin their ritualistic preparation for the actual fight. They each stand in a corner (adjacent corners, incidentally, rather than opposing corners) facing outward toward the audience, clap their hands in front of them once, and raise their legs up in the air one at a time and stomp them on the ground. This is the classic sumo move that you would imitate if you were a kid. They then take a little towel, wipe their face and sometimes their arms or body with it. From a little pouch on the floor, they grab a small handful of salt, turn toward the ring, and toss the salt onto the sandy floor of the ring. Then they enter the 15' circle in the center of the platform, face each other, crouch down on tip toes with their feet out 180 degrees apart and glare at each other for a second. Then they stand, move back a step, and crouch again with their feet flat and place their fists on the ground for a second.

They look at each other and stand up again, turn to face the audience, and saunter back to their respective corners while slapping their arms and bodies as they walk. They do the towel and salt thing again in their corners. They step into the ring again and do the crouching bit. They can do this over and over as much as they want as long as they keep it all under four minutes.

Apparently, before 1928, the wrestlers could continue this ritual preparation indefinitely. In 1928 a 10 minute time limit was imposed, which was later reduced to 7 minutes, then 5, and finally 4. We're getting less patient as time goes on, apparently. I don't blame them; there's only so many times that these repetitive motions are interesting to watch.

They usually do this prep a few times, during which the crowd gets more and more excited. People start yelling more, and sometimes a bit of a cheer goes off when the wrestlers finish glaring and start to walk back to their corners. When the contenders are finally ready to go, they get down in the steady crouch position, hesitate for a second, then run at each other full force. Most matches were over in a matter of seconds – you have to be careful not to look away during the less exciting part lest you miss the action. The “moves” are mostly executed by pulling or pushing on the opponent's waist bands, though a lot of face pushing and general man-handling seems to go on before then. Here's a quick video to show what happens:



The goal is to make your opponent either touch the ground with anything other than his feet, or push him out of the ring. If either of those happen, the match is over. Like I said, it usually goes pretty quickly; the longest match we watched was probably 30 seconds (they stopped to rest in a nice little hug for a bit, like ultimate fighters or boxers often do).

We all found it to be quite interesting to watch and were really happy that we went. It's such a strange and unique sport and the way each match was over so quickly was sort of refreshing. Alana and I agreed that we liked it better than any sporting event we've ever watched in our own countries (or any country, really). The matches start at like 8am and go all day – we didn't like it so much that we wanted to watch for 10 hours, but the last 3 hours were very cool. The order of the matches in a day goes worst ranked to best, so the last three hours have the biggest and best guys and the seats tend to fill up at that time. The very best guy was in the last match (he won) and I took a video of the last 3 minutes of that match. It's a bit long, but here it is if you're interested. Go sumo!!