Fight-Sport Review 1: Sumo

As you may already know, I'm a huge fan of MMA and I also enjoy some other variations such as Kickboxing and Grappling (boxing is boring), so I'll be attending a number of live shows over here to see it first hand.

The first of which happened this past weekend on Saturday, right after I dropped a disappointing match in my return to squash (my partner had played for over 20 yrs...), I caught a train over to Ryogoku Kokugikan - the main sumo arena servicing Tokyo.
mural outside the entrance

The stadium had a capacity of about 13,000 and my friends and I got the cheap seats all the way in the back. Luckily for us, since the stadium was small, there wasn't really a bad seat in the house and we could see the action pretty well.

They had preliminary matches starting at 11:00 am but we didn't arrive until 1:45, right before the 2:00 start of the main tournament. They ran matches in the lower division through until 3:30 before announcing the premier division with the best sumo wrestlers compete in a 15 day tournament in an effort to reach the rank of Yokozuna - the highest rank possible. In order to become a Yokozuna, wrestlers must win two tournaments to demonstrate their power & skill, while also displaying 'hinkaku' - rougly meaning dignity & grace. The Japanese in the past had used the principle of hinkaku to preclude foreign wrestlers from being crowned Yokozunas even if they demonstrated superior strength and victories, but recently they have become more lax on the issue.

For us, we stayed until the end at 6:00 PM and we saw around 25 sumo matches during that time.
Although entertaining, my opinion is that the matches are over far too quickly and it's very hard to determine the very elite wrestlers from all the rest since most victories end up looking fairly similar. We had some good food during the event and I got to speak with a 65 year old Japanese guy who was a big fan of the sport throughout the whole event. His English was almost as limited as the Japanese I know and have learned so far, but we managed to understand each other on a surprising amount of topics.


During a lull in the action, I went to look for some snacks and ended up spotting one of the Russian Sumo wrestlers sitting on the side. I got a picture with him and wished him luck in his match later in the night (which he won!)In the end, two of the Yokozunas fought against competitors in the top division and both, expectedly, won.

Yokozuna celebrating after his victory in the final match of the day

Sumo makes for a fun day, but I won't be following it religiously like I do with MMA.

Click the play icon in the video below to watch one of the matches I filmed....

Next in the Fight-Sport Series: Dream.6: Middle-Weight Grand Prix Finals 2008

...to be followed by K-1 Max World Grand Prix Final 2008