My Brush with Sumo Greatness

Who remembers the great Saturday afternoon sports show, ABC's Wide World of Sports? In the days before cable TV, ESPN, and multiple 24 hour a day sports channels, WWS offered a rare glimpse at sports from around the world that Americans infrequently got to watch on TV, like skiing, rugby, rodeo, and swimming. In the 1970s, with the rise of the first American sumo wrestler, Takamiyama (Jesse James Wailani Kuhaulua, from Hawaii), WWS exposed Americans to sumo for the first time. While my friends made fun of the "fat guys pushing each other around," I was fascinated and watched sumo every time it was on WWS. Naturally, ABC's coverage focused on Takamiyama, with his trademark mutton-chop sideburns.

Watching sumo did not lead to an interest in Japan. After WWS stopped showing sumo, I forgot all about it and Takamiyama. And when I suffered an upset stomach after a school trip to a Japanese steakhouse in fourth grade, I decided that I hated Japanese food and all things Japanese.

I didn't see another sumo match until shortly after moving to Japan in 1991, when I watched sumo on TV with my dorm-mates at the First Canon Fujigaoka Dorm one Saturday afternoon. It was then that I remembered Wide World of Sports and Takamiyama, and recalled my childhood fascination with sumo. My interest deepened when I started hanging out regularly with my mother's former student from Wisconsin in the 1960s, David Benjamin ("Benjie"), and his wife Junko Yoshida, who were living in Tokyo at the time. As it turned out, Benjie and Junko were sumo aficionados, and Benjie was then writing a book on sumo, The Joy of Sumo (soon to be republished in an updated edition under a new title). Sumo tournaments (basho) take place in odd-numbered months, last for fifteen days, and culminate in a final day when the championship (yusho) is often decided (by total number of wins). Benjie, Junko and I developed a custom of having an early dinner together at their house while watching the final day of the tournament.

Benjie and Junko gave me an education in sumo as a sport, the kind of education you couldn't get from most sumo books at the time (other than Benjie's), because they focused on sumo as Shinto ritual and mostly avoided the fact that sumo is a sport. Benjie and Junko would explain things like how the quality of wrestlers was declining as Japan became wealthier and fewer young men viewed sumo as a ticket out of poverty, and we'd try to pick out which matches were being thrown -- which often happened on the last day with wrestlers who entered the day 7-7 and needed a win to avoid demotion in ranking and the accompanying reduction in salary. (Sumo wrestlers are paid according to rank, but only the wrestlers in the top two divisions receive salaries, and these wrestlers support their sumo stables and the lower-ranking non-salaried wrestlers.)

Between my watching the Wide World of Sports in the 1970s and arriving in Japan in 1991, Takamiyama retired from wrestling (in 1984 to be exact), obtained Japanese citizenship, and became an oyakata, a sumo stable owner and coach. In accordance with tradition in sumo and many other areas of Japanese life, upon changing status, he also changed his name -- to Azumazeki Daigoro, and became referred to by his title, Azumazeki-oyakata. He also recruited to his stable a young Hawaiian wrestler named Chad Rowan, or, as he came to be known in the sumo world, Akebono.

Shortly after arriving at Look Japan magazine in September 1992, I learned that my colleague Ann Safir had arranged an interview with Akebono and, although I did not learn until much later that Azumazeki-oyakata was Takamiyama, I asked if I could go along because I liked sumo. Ann, who wasn't that interested in sumo, told me I could do the interview if I wanted. It took place on a Saturday morning, at the Azumazeki stable in a working-class section of eastern Tokyo. Akebono was already the highest-ranking wrestler in the stable, having achieved the rank of sekiwake, the third-highest in sumo. Because his salary was the highest, and sumo stables live off the earnings of their wrestlers, what Akebono said, went. And what he said that morning was that they would hold an extra training session for our benefit.

The training area in the Azumazeki stable consisted of a dirt floor, lined on two sides by a wall with poles against which the wrestlers would push for upper-body strengthening, and on two sides by an elevated viewing platform from which the coaches could watch. The wrestlers all wore beige training belts (mawashi), rather than the colorful mawashi they wore in tournaments, and their hair was tied up in bundles on their heads, rather than in the elaborate tournament hairstyles. Because sumo wrestlers are heavy, they look short on TV, but from a few feet away, it was clear that all of these men were tall, too. (Akebono, of course, was famous for being unusually tall for a sumo wrestler, at 6'8".) They were huge, and under the fat is bulging muscle. And when they crashed into each other to practice the sumo face-off, the sound was tremendous. Anyone who thinks that sumo is just a couple of fat guys pushing each other around should see sumo up close. The face-off is like an offensive linesman crashing into a defensive linesman in football -- except that the sumo wrestlers do it without pads, helmets, or any protection whatsoever. These guys are seriously strong athletes.

After the practice, the wrestlers cleaned up, and Akebono invited us to a lunch being held for him and a few other wrestlers at a nearby restaurant. It was there we conducted the interview. Akebono seemed more interested in talking to a couple of fawning young women that someone had brought along to meet him, and it was hard to get him to focus on the interview, but we were eventually able to get enough from him for our article. Sumo also has a well-known connection with both organized crime and the revanchist extreme right wing of Japanese politics (which are pretty much one and the same), and there were a few dubious people at the lunch with us (who I think brought the fawning young women for Akebono). When Ann and I wrapped up the interview, and Ann took off, Akebono invited me to hang out with them, but feeling a little uncomfortable hanging around with people I was pretty sure were gangsters, I told him I had to get going, thanked him, and left. Of course, now I regret passing up the chance to become buddies with Akebono and see more of sumo's seamy underside, but at the time beating it seemed like the best thing to do.

I followed sumo religiously through the rest of my time in Japan, and rooted Akebono on from afar as he climbed the ranks to become the first-ever foreign-born yokozuna (Grand Champion, the highest rank in sumo) in the face of great nationalist and xenophobic opposition, but I lost touch with sumo when I returned to the US and had no way to watch the matches. However, in the last three years, since marrying Kaori and subscribing to Japan TV on cable, I get to watch most basho and have turned Kaori into a sumo fan. Benjie calls me a wimp for watching the tape-delayed matches in the afternoons, rather than getting up at 3:00 am to watch the matches live, but I think I'm doing okay. I drink Japanese beer and pretend I am back in Tokyo, watching on a weekend afternoon, as the goddess Amaterasu intended.