Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament

Today was a long one, but filled with non stop excitement. After a light breakfast we made a straight shot to the Nagoya Gymnasium for the Grand Sumo competition.

Sumo is a traditional competition to show feats of strength and power. Though it’s origins predate the Edo period (samurai, shogun and swords era), an organized tournament was not initiated until mid 1600s. Through out the years, Shinto religion played a huge part in morphing the sport from a brute based scene to a ritualistic one.

I use to watch Sumo a lot when I was younger. It was the only interesting thing on ESPN at 6am. After today I realized they cut out a lot from the tournament and individual bouts. Lets start from the beggining of the tournament.
Its East vs West, and the day is broken up into three main competitions; the juniors, the mid levels, and the head hanchos. These classes aren’t broken up by age but instead level of skill and experience. As you would assume though, the junior class had a majority of young, aspiring Rikishi 力士 (this is the name of the person who competes. Sumo is the event and sport itself). The classes arent linked to ech other, each has their own winner between the East and West. I’ll skip a head to the kings of the ring since the lower two classes are very similar except for having less rituals.

“Rituals? What rituals? They just stomp there feet and run at each other!”, you might say. It was surprising how much of the competition was ritualistic and how much was actual action. Before anyone does battle, all the Rikishi from the East walk out in these beautiful aprons (costing up to $20,000 each) and circle the ring while having there names called. They do a chant, walk off and then the West does the same. The ring is made of of dirt and is constantly swept and cleaned. This person called a 呼び出し (which is actually multiple people who switch out with each other to give the others a break) yell out the names of each Rikishi using an almost singing – like voice. This call wasn’t just to announce who was up next, but to call upon the opponents to do battle such that the gods would hear. Once the opponents entered the ring, there is approximately seven more minutes of tradition as the Rikishi continuosly reach their hands to the gods asking for their aid in battle,  throw salt in the ring to purify it of evil, and bow to one another and the gods. Once all this was done, the Rikishi would have at it. And what lasts for all of a minute (at most), is the stupendous force of to immovable clashing together in a fight for victory. 

So, about 12% of the match is action. And while it may seem odd that ESPN always chose to cut out the other 88% when I was younger, I’m glad they did. Watching all of the tradition unfold on television just wouldn’t have done it justice. There was a universal atmosphere that really gets under your skins and excites you to be part of the crowd, to watch with constant anticipation, and to feel like that one minute of battle lasted forever.