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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Journeys |
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Journeys |
Credo of a Giant Killer
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| In Japan, a nation that doesn’t take tradition lightly, the scandals of modern sumo are a heavy burden for the country’s national sport |
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Published : 1 September 2010 |
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ALL PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVE BESSELING |
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| Bulgarian sumo wrestler Kotoōshū [left] prepares for a bout at Tokyo’s sumo stadium
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OUR SETS OF KNUCKLES on two parallel faceoff lines signal the head-on charge. The slap of skin, lots of skin. Cameras flash from all sides and within a few seconds, sumo grand champion Asashōryū has a hold of his opponent’s belt, his mawashi. The hulking, near-nude wrestler gnashes his foe out of the ring like a shark flinging a seal from its jaws, and
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just as quickly is walking away from the ring with a thick, yen-stuffed envelope from his sponsors.
I am watching one of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments from a four-person seating box in the Ryōgoku Kokugikan (Tokyo’s sumo stadium, the largest in the country), one box seat amongst hundreds encircling the raised clay battleground built especially for the occasion. Indents are carved from the sides for combatants to step up onto their violent podium—straw hewn circularly into the 4.5 metre diameter dohyo centred on the clay block. Above the ring is suspended a mobile of a Shinto shrine roof. The battles are, metaphorically, taking place in a temple. Traditionally, the ring is sacred ground. From its spiritual roots that date back to the creation myths of Japan, sumo gained Imperial recognition as the country’s national sport in the Edo period of the 17th-18th centuries and has remained a cultural hinge ever since. To watch a tournament day’s roster of fights from one of the waiter-tended seating boxes is something of a status symbol.
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wrestlers line up before their division’s matches begin. |
Our box, like most, is strewn with the casualties of bento lunches and empty beer bottles by the time the day’s matches culminate with those of the two grand champions, yokozuna, and their opponents. I watch the challengers with a specific interest, for in the near future, I will be meeting the wrestler who retired having defeated the most yokozuna in the sport’s history. An impressive statistic, I think, as I watch the second yokozuna, Hakuhō, win his match by steamrolling over his opponent in about four seconds.
Before every tournament match, wrestlers go through a series of ceremonial gestures and rites that date back to pre-Buddhist Japan, when the animistic Shinto religion was rote, and fights were to the death. After the pomp and ceremony, the rules are simple: when a part of your body other than the soles of your feet hits the clay, you’re out.
After taking a sip of purifying water from a bamboo ladle and lobbing salt into the ring, fighters go through motions that once proved they were not hiding any weapons. They engage in stare-downs and fake-outs. They return to their corners, cracking slaps to their arms and chests, throwing more ceremonial salt into the ring.
This peacocking around is a summary of the sport’s lineage, and the fact that tradition is such a big part of sumo comes as no surprise to anyone who’s spent time in Japan, where there is a ‘do’—a ‘way’—for everything from sipping tea to swordplay.
The pre-bout rituals last exponentially longer than the fights. Shoko, the woman who has invited my friend Izumi and I to this nearly ringside experience, leans in: “It’s really more of a show than a sport.”
What she means is, for many Japanese, sumo has lost its cultural relevance; we’re watching living artefacts in a stadium that’s really more of a museum.
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Like any other sport in the world, merchandising is big business during the course of Japan’s six annual sumo tournaments. |
This can also appear true for other Japanese traditions and artforms. The government has gone as far as labelling masters of ancient crafts ‘Living National Treasures,’ as the sword-maker struggles to pass on his art to an apprentice more interested in turntables than katana blades and young women need to pay someone to tie the sashes of their kimonos (girls aren’t always taught how to do that anymore).
But the decline of ‘the sumo spirit’ has nothing to do with a lack of participants: it’s their bad behaviour. There has been a death as a result of hazing in one of the heya, sumo stables, where wrestlers live and train under their stablemaster, their oyakata. There has been an arrest for marijuana use and rumours of boozed-up sexcapades in others. Former yokozuna Asashōryū called in sick for a tournament two years ago in southern Japan, and was then spotted kicking around a football in his hometown of Ulan Bator, Mongolia. He has since ‘retired’ in a tsunami of bad publicity surrounding a drunken assault outside a Tokyo nightclub that he doesn’t remember. The perennial problem of match fixing just won’t go away, and most recently, 13 stables have been linked with making illegal bets on baseball games, facilitated by the Japanese mafia, the yakuza, prompting the national TV station, NHK, to black out daily coverage of this year’s tournament in Nagoya—the first visual ban since televised sumo broadcasts began in 1953.
As far as the degradation of Japanese custom goes, some fingers from within the sumo world have pointed to Westernisation or any number of non-Japanese wrestlers, like Asashōryū, as excuses for the sport’s problems—their unwillingness to adhere to the Japanese ‘way,’ for example. But with long suspected, now exposed ties to the yakuza, today more than ever, sumo must turn its gaze inward. The uncomfortable task of self-examination in a society so preoccupied with saving face is now the biggest struggle for Japan’s national sport.
The process, at least for one stablemaster, has already begun, and the man known as ‘the Giant Killer’ is adamant— that at least where the wrestlers in his stable are concerned, the fight to maintain the sumo credo is a fight he’s going to finish.
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KINOSHIMA KATSUMI was born in a small town in Hiroshima prefecture in southern Japan, and says he dreamed of being a sumo wrestler from a young age. After a chance meeting with then yokozuna Takanohana I, he was invited to join the champion’s stable. Akinoshima rose quickly, and went pro in 1982. Though he earned his ‘Giant Killer’ moniker by |
besting the most yokozuna in sumo history, he never became a grand champion himself. Today, the Giant Killer runs his own stable of 25 wrestlers, the Takadagawa stable in eastern Tokyo, a couple of metro stops from Ryōgoku—the centre of the sumo universe.
“I am not satisfied with my achievements,” he says, sitting cross-legged on the raised viewing platform, a metre or so above the clay-floored practise room at Takadagawa stable. There are five wooden pillars for wrestlers to hone their charging skills on the left wall, the straw-framed dohyo in the centre, and a Shinto shrine—a kind of micro version of the shrine roof in the sumo stadium—perched on the far wall like a deified birdhouse for holy crows.
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The Giant Killer gives a pep-talk to his exhausted wrestlers after a morning of intense practise at Takadagawa stable in eastern Tokyo. |
“My superficial reason [to become a stablemaster] is to repay a debt of gratitude to those who trained me,” he explains in humble, provincial Japanese, “but my real motivation is to gratify my desire to become an ozeki or a yokozuna. I couldn’t accomplish this, so I want my apprentices to achieve these goals.”
Whoever says sumo is not really a sport has never sat beside the Giant Killer and watched his brood pound each other into tofu for two hours. There is no ceremony before these matches, just an assembly line of two men ramming bodies over and over and at great frequency. Unlike in tournaments, during daily practise, the athletes are their own referees.
For the first hour, it’s an opera score of butting heads, cracking joints, jutting jowls, grunting, screaming, hissing and panting. Some apprentices are away stretching or doing push-ups. A few are frog-hopping the length of the back wall, then shuffling along the ground on their haunches with hands out—left-right, left-right—as if pulling themselves along an invisible rope; all exercises to get the squat position as strong as possible. A few are off to the left, palming and shouldering the thick posts. Under the layers of blubber, a sumo wrestler is a highly muscled athlete.
The sounds are constant, flinching, loud, intrusive; then, after a while, soporific. Or maybe I’m just lulled into the patterns, this layering of aggressive rhythm, from waking up at six something in the morning to get here to see this. I feel like such a wimp.
After the wrestlers rise at 4 am, this punishing workout is performed on an empty stomach. “If they eat before practise, they’ll puke,” says Akinoshima. And all this before you’ve likely had your first cup of morning coffee, fruitcake.
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There is no pre-match ceremony during daily training, just a constant stream of fights. The winner stays in the ring until he loses. |
“We are like a family,” he continues. “I am the father, these are my children.” The stablemaster smiles his eyes into narrow slits, two dinner plates in profile above his round cheeks. “We have to have the trust of a family for me to be able to discipline them as you have seen.”
I’d seen. I’d cringed. Akinoshima isn’t as big as he was in his fighting days, but his cauliflower ears attest to a life of macho frottage, and he walks awkwardly—a life of pistoned thighs and twisting spines. He carries a battered old bamboo cane, more of a vicious reprimand to a trainee’s faux pas than to help him walk.
He says despite his own grappling style, he teaches each wrestler differently, in hope they will eventually internalise the learning process and be able to teach themselves. But if he sees what he considers a cardinal error, he won’t hesitate to leave a bruise on the back of a thigh or on a shoulder cap. I see a few real vessel-fests, and hear a few more being created.
“Sometimes it’s like training a dog,” the Giant Killer snarls, glaring at me over his right shoulder after delivering a thwack to the torso of a wrestler who’d carelessly lost a match.
Yet the apprentices are dedicated and disciplined, volunteering immediately for drills, even if they can’t stand straight from exhaustion. One clash ends right in front of me, dried clay treadmarked green down cottage-cheese thighs. Deep panting fills my ears. I try not to seem phased by nearly being crushed, but Jesus—that was close.
One wrestler runs from the right wall towards me, and begins to towel off the flaked clay that has fallen from one of the participants onto the polished wood by my feet. He gathers the cloth, bows politely and returns to the group waiting around the ring’s edges. This is how Akinoshima wants it—for his athletes to carry on sumo’s traditional spirit of honour and respect. He feels today’s sumo is losing this, and he seeks to maintain it at whatever cost. I get the feeling a few bruises are the least of their worries.
“Without the sumo spirit,” the Giant Killer sneers, “this is nothing more than pigs colliding.”
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