The Work of Sumo

Sumo — a Japanese word (相撲) that literally means “striking one another” — is a sport that is almost wholly alien to the American experience. I write almost here because the one point of familiarity is that all of the athletes (who average 366 pounds, up from 276 pounds in 1969), like most American football players, are obese, morbidly so in most cases. But everything else is different: it is formal, excessively so, and the record-keeping — which began in earnest in the mid-to-late 19th century — puts the best efforts of the Society for American Baseball Research (the efforts of which are insanely, absurdly good!) to shame.

We Americans and Western Europeans simply have no sport that is an analog for sumo, which has 82 recognized kimarite, or winning techniques, and decides in mere seconds which one resulted in the victory, thanks to the efforts of an eminent judge, usually a former sumo (illegal techniques, such as striking an opponent with a closed fist, hair-pulling, finger-bending, and strangulation, are called kinjite). And setting aside the scandals that plagued the sport in terms of opponents gifting each other wins — a bit of trivia shared widely via the lame, undercooked pop-statistics bestseller Freakonomics — no other combat sport in the entire world has a more carefully ranked hierarchy: six ranked divisions comprising hundreds of athletes, which are further subdivided in the makuuchi, or top division, into the lesser maegashira (ranked in descending numerical order by performance) and then the san’yaku, or champions, who comprise the ranks of komusubi, sekiwake, ōzeki, and most illustrious of all, the yokozuna. Of the latter — the sport’s recognized highest rank since 1909 — there have only been 73 dating back to the 17th century. Everything about the sport is old: the circular dohyō (ring), the customary mawashi (the belt worn by the competitors; sumo is the world’s highest-profile and highest-revenue belt wrestling variant), the quaintly-attired gyōji (the referee), the tossing of salt into the ring by the wrestlers to purify it, the rinsing of the mouth with chikara-mizu ("power water") before a fight, the ground-pounding warm-up routine called the shikiri, the fact that the entire “season” of Grand Sumo plays out across six 15-day honbasho, or tournaments (three at the Ryōgoku Kokugikan in Ryōgoku, Tokyo in January, May, and September), one in Osaka in March, another in Nagoya in July, and a final event in Fukuoka in November).

Bewildered yet? You should be. This isn’t the same as being born in football-loving and wrestling-mad Iowa City, Iowa, then later moving to New York City and passing oneself off as a sophisticated lifelong fan of European soccer. One cannot affect an air of expertise in sumo; I still feel as though I know nothing yet have followed the sport for over a decade, ever since my uncle — fresh off the sensory overload that accompanied a day’s visit to the Ryōgoku Kokugikan during one of his periodic State Department trips to Japan — gave me a copy of David Benjamin’s Sumo: A Thinking Fan’s Guide to Japan’s National Sport. Benjamin’s book is the best and most comprehensive English-language work on the subject, not because it is very good (although it is, covering all the major players and key points, albeit in the breathlessly overwritten style of much writing from the 90s and 00s) but simply because it is all there is. Search high and low and you will find little else. Fortunately, NHK World-Japan offers accessible English-language coverage — Hiro Morita, for example, was a fine play-by-play announcer — and the assorted sumo channels on YouTube, like Chris Sumo, Don Don, SumoParis, and Sumostew, have produced thousands of hours of content. Such content rewards the intrepid spelunker in the online depths who wishes to assemble their own private history of this unusual world, which will always be incomplete given that there is a near-infinite amount of history to unpack.

Allow me to share a few tidbits. Perhaps you’d like to learn about Takeji Harada, whose struggle with the 5’8” height requirement of the sport (which now stands at 5’6”) led him to undertake four surgeries to inject silicone into his scalp, creating a protruding bulge that finally allowed him to “measure up.” Or maybe you’d fancy the story of Konishiki Yasokichi — the stage name of Hawaiian-born Saleva'a Fuauli Atisano'e — whose peak weight of 633 pounds saw his career crest at ōzeki, just shy of yokozuna, but not before he earned such flattering monikers as “meat bomb” and “dump truck.” Many of the greatest Japanese professional wrestlers of all time started in the sumo ranks, most notably Korean-born Rikidōzan, who essentially inaugurated the modern version of the sport in the late 1950s by inviting hated foreign champions to lose to him before his murder in 1963, and all-time talents like All Japan Pro Wrestling stalwarts Genichiro Tenyru and Akira Taue; it’s a fertile proving ground for big boys who can move. And if you’re looking for big boys who can really move, consider the current crop of Mongolian superstars that displaced the barge-sized, Konishiki-style Pacific Islanders of the 1990s and 2000s — of whom the recently retired Hakuhō Shō might be, per Washington Post columnist Stephen Stromberg, “the greatest figure in sports, maybe ever” (Japanese uber-athlete Shohei Ohtani, who is very nearly both the best hitter and best pitcher in baseball, might disagree politely).

I am barely scratching the surface. My own preferences are distinct: I fancy the freakish strength of Georgian-born Tochinoshin Tsuyoshi (Levan Gorgadze), almost certainly the only 400-pound man in history to ever sport well-defined abs stuffed between a pair of 36” thighs, who in his injury-shortened prime could simply fix his hands on an opponent’s mawashi, then perform the tsudirashi, a kimarite in which he picked up his helpless foe and carried him out of the ring. As a sheer physical specimen, the 280-pound, ripped-to-shreds Chiyonofuji Mitsugu — who spent an extraordinary decade, from 1981 to 1991, holding the top rank of yokozuna — was built unlike any athlete found in American football in the 1980s short of steroid-infused hulks such as Lyle Alzado and Brian Bosworth. Steroid rumors have followed Chiyonofuji as well, with careless commenters attributing his early death from pancreatic cancer at age 61 to their use, but in his prime the man with the “metal body” was known for the migi-yotsu, or left-hand outside, right-hand inside grip on the mawashi that many called the “death grip.” But Chiyonofuji, even more than Hakuhō (whose Mongolian contingent forced the Japanese to add a host of speed-influenced kimarite to their authorized list), was a master of the entire sumo repertoire, performing 41 different kimarite in his career, including tsudirashi that were every bit as impressive as Tochinoshin’s, albeit less frequent and used during a time when the average weight of a sumo was closer to 300 pounds than 400.

Even with all of this out of the way, I am still tap-dancing, like balletic 5’7”, 215-pound sumo Mainoumi Shūhei, around what really drew me to sumo — the fact that it offered everything I wanted from folkstyle wrestling when I competed in high school. At the top division of the sport, most matches are decided in seconds but at any rate rarely last longer than four minutes (with another four-minute period occurring after a mizu-iri, or water break, after which an undecided bout is declared a hikiwake, or draw, the last of which occurred in 1974). Meanwhile, folkstyle matches run six minutes in high school, seven in college — and they often can, and do, run into overtime, even if skyrocketing high school pinfall rates have recently reduced the average.

In sumo, the single match, as opposed to the slow-moving, days-long tournament — which can strike those who attend, particularly during the hot summer months, as interminable affairs interrupted by moments of brief action — distills competition to its essence. Two huge bodies collide, and one competitor makes the right move. Most of the time, he simply pushes his overmatched foes out of the ring, like Konishiki, the “dump truck,” did when ascending to the rank of ōzeki. Or maybe he picks them up like a baby, as Chiyonofuji and Tochinoshin were wont to do. Or, best of all, he employs a keen bit of strategy, as the aforementioned mini-Mainoumi, considered the “department store of kimarite,” did in 1991 when he used the oh-so-rare mitokorozeme (a triple attack consisting of an inside trip, a leg grab, and a forward push into the opponent’s chest, not used again by a different sumo until fellow undersized kimarite master Ishiura Shikanosuke utilized it in 2019) to vanquish 515-pound Hawaiian-born Akebono — a future yokozuna, the 64th overall and first foreigner to achieve that rank.

Men like Mainoumi and the similarly-sized Enhō Akira (arguably his latter-day equivalent) are the reason I watch sumo — they embody the Japanese “fighting spirit” and obsession with the repetition of technique, willing and able to take on much larger opponents knowing that most of the time they will lose (a leitmotif of Japanese mixed martial arts as well, where men like Kazushi Sakuraba and Shinya Aoki will gladly fight two or three weight classes above their own). When it comes to the practice of technique, former San Francisco Giant and Kintetsu Buffalo pitcher Chris Arnold told American-born Japanese sports journalist Robert Whiting in his wonderful book You Gotta Have Wa, “when it comes to practice, the Japanese believe there is no peak point…they don’t recognize limits.” One drills the mitokorozeme incessantly not in the hope of hitting it frequently, but merely once — at the time of greatest need, in a moment that the sport’s archivists have been recording in the pages of its history for a century. Other sports offer more than their fair share of spectacular feats, but none packs so much meaning into so little space while a solitary man stands in direct competition against.

My father, who played on the offensive and defensive line at West Virginia University during the late 1950s, often told me that he played the game not because he enjoyed football — he hated its labored, stop-and-start pace — but because he enjoyed the frisson that came from laying one’s hands on an opponent and feeling their strength or weakness. It was this distillate of pure competition that he chased and also what drew me to folkstyle wrestling; both of us were disappointed by all the rest of these sports, which often turned on referee discretion in football and tedious grinding in wrestling, particularly in the heavier weight classes. Meanwhile, in that one half of a split second, you recognize in your heart who is the better man — and if you know, you know. What is the point of going any further? We win or lose in the flutter of an eyelid; everything else amounts to the tedious labor of setting the table or mopping up. America offers no such do-or-die pastime for its large, aimless boys, but Japan at least gives them sumo.

Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.