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.

"Someday, You'll Be President of the United States"

"Someday, you'll be president of the United States."

This was the highest compliment that Shacho ("president") could think to pay me. As far as I know, it was based solely on one fact: I arrived in the office before Shacho arrived every day. I don't think that Shacho really knew whether I was a good employee or not. After all, he did not understand English, and I am sure that he never even tried to read the English-language news magazine, Look Japan, that he published every month.

I was so used to rising early to get to work on time at Canon, that even after I changed jobs and dormitory locations, I continued to rise early to go to work. Once I moved into Oshikawa-san's dormitory in Ohta-ku and began working at Look Japan, I took the Keihin-Tohoku line from Kamata Station in the south easternmost corner of Tokyo to Tokyo Station to get to work -- the busiest line in metropolitan Tokyo on the busiest stretch of its route. The Keihin-Tohoku line passed through Kamakura, Yokohama and Kawasaki and was already sardine-jammed when it finally reached the Tokyo city limits at Kamata.

Getting a seat was out of the question. I just wanted to get a strap to hang on, so that I could read a book or a newspaper over the heads of the exalted souls who could sit. Otherwise, I was condemned to riding in the open space between the doors, where -- even if I could raise my arms -- there was nothing to hold on to, and the only thing stopping me from falling to the floor when the train rounded a curve at speed was the other people jammed against me, arms also pinned to their sides, propping me up.

To avoid the crowded trains, I took to getting on the train at 7:00 a.m. and eating breakfast at my desk while I read the paper and otherwise killed time until work started at 9:00. My Japanese colleagues found my usual breakfast of covenience-store onigiri (rice balls) and coffee endlessly amusing. Everyone knows, they said, that you eat onigiri with green tea, not coffee. Mixing Japanese food with western drink apparently knocked the universe out of its delicate balance. As for me, green tea did not pack enough of a caffeine punch. I needed the hard stuff.

As a result of my early arrival, I was always there when Shacho arrived, and Shacho usually arrived before everyone else. My desk was directly in front of the office door, and when Shacho arrived, there I would be, reading the paper. He'd greet me with a robust Ohayo gozaimasu ("good morning") and a big grin, and it was clear he was happy to see me there, because it signaled my enthusiasm for my job and the company he had built from the ground up over the last 35 years.

I, however, felt like a fraud. I hated working at Look Japan. I never had enough work to do, and was always bored. The company was too uptight, with too many meaningless rules, and the photographers we used for stories used to laugh and tell us we weren't really journalists, because we had to wear suits. This was fine with Shacho, who loved to tell us that he wanted businessmen, not journalists, working for him -- part of the problem in my mind. Working there also made me uncomfortable because I felt that Shacho liked me for the wrong reason. While I am sure that our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san, reported to him that I was a good employee, Shacho himself never read a word I wrote or edited. But, because I was there every morning when he arrived, Shacho frequently told me that, one day, I'd be President.

Only one employee arrived earlier than I did, Kamiya-san, our accountant, whose responsibility it was to open the office and get the coffee started. Kamiya-san hated me as much as Shacho loved me, and for equally irrelevant reasons. Our magazine had 48 pages each month, and there was a set amount of work to do for each issue. I wrote one article and was responsible for editing half of the articles written by outside authors each month. However, I worked very efficiently and generally wound up editing more than half of the magazine each month. Still, I usually ran out of work part-way through the month and had nothing to do. After a while, I started passing the time by translating Japanese newspaper articles to increase my vocabulary.

Nishimura-san and the Japanese editors were extremely happy with me. I turned around the work quickly and there were no last-minute rushes, no missed deadlines, no end-of-month panic. But, Kamiya-san, who, like Shacho, did not speak English and probably never read the magazine, saw me sitting around for half the month, reading Japanese magazines and not "working." Every time she looked at me, her disapproval was written clearly on her face. She was convinced I was a slacker and a fraud, and I am sure it burned her up inside every time Shacho told me, "Someday, you're going to be President of the United States."

In a way, Shacho and Kamiya-san epitomized my Look Japan experience: I was bored out of my mind while two people who did not understand what my job entailed reached completely opposite conclusions about my value as an employee based on observations that had nothing to do with my work.

Look Japan

In September 1991, I finished my Canon internship and started a new job at Look Japan, Inc., an English-language magazine dedicated to explaining Japan to the outside world. A product of the free-wheeling post-Occupation days when independent entrepreneurial ventures sprouted like mushrooms after the rain, Look Japan was started as a newsletter by our president, Kimura-san (or shacho ("president"), as we called him), who neither spoke nor read English, but saw the value of getting Japanese business news to the outside world back in the 1950s.

By the time I arrived, 35 years later, Look Japan had developed a unique business model. We had a circulation of 50,000 copies per month, which later rose to 75,000. But we only had about 200 subscriptions. The remainder of the issue was purchased by the Foreign Ministry and then distributed for free to universities and libraries around the English-speaking world. When the company wanted to sell more copies, it went to the Foreign Ministry and lobbied for them to buy more.

Because of its connection with the government, Look Japan was hardly impartial. With an editorial staff of seven people, and a business side staff of about the same number of people, we had three separate editorial review panels consisting of 15 people each. All of the panel members were former government officials, university professors, and businessmen with a government connection or a pro-government agenda. Whenever we published any article giving that tried to balance the good with the bad of Japan, no matter how much more emphasis we gave to the good, we were criticized for being partial. In other words, any deviation from the Japan-is-great message was perceived as an attack. I would have been perfectly happy getting paid money to write Japanese government propaganda -- if that's how the job was presented to me. But the company maintained the fiction that we were completely independent journalists, so working under these constraints was irritating, to say the least.

Although we wrote a few regular columns in house, most of the articles were contributed by outside authors drawn from the same pool of pro-government academics and businessmen as our editorial review panels. The magazine paid very generously for articles -- a great way of lubricating relations with people who had influence with those who controlled the Foreign Ministry's budget. Some of these authors insisted in writing in English to show their erudition and sophistication. Others wrote in Japanese and had their articles translated by our staff. My job, in addition to writing a piece per issue of my own, was to turn these articles into coherent English. Sometimes this led to fights with a Japanese author who believed that, because he was a Tokyo University professor or government official and therefore outranked me in hierarchical Japanese society, he outranked me in deciding what constituted proper English grammar or vocabulary as well. Fortunately, since we edited the galleys of the magazine, we had the final say, and we were backed up by our editor-in-chief, Nishimura-san. And, since the business staff, which had the relationships with these authors did not appear to read the magazine, we were almost never challenged on the text of the final edition.

I spent a year in total at Look Japan, which had its ups and downs, but which I mostly remember favorably two decades later. I made some good friends there, like Nishimura-san and my co-editor Seo-san. I also got to meet some interesting people as a result of working there, from a government economist with whom I am still friends, to foreign baseball players active in Japan, to Akebono, the first non-Japanese Grand Champion (yokozuna) in sumo. I'll be blogging on my experiences at Look Japan over the next few weeks, until I run out of stories. Stay tuned.