Go to a sumo tournament... check.

So one of the items on the Japan to-do list was to attend a sumo tournament. There are six tournaments each year, three of which are held in Tokyo. The other three are held at locations around Japan (for example, Kyoto is one of them). The winter tournament (or banzuke, if you will) started about two weeks ago and wrapped up this past Sunday.

I won't get into a lot of sumo minutiae here, but each tournament runs for 15 days. Each wrestler has one match each day. The sumo day starts at about 9 or 10 each morning with what could be considered the sumo minor leagues. Matches run all day with top tier starting about 4 each day. Between each tier or rank of sumo matches, there is a ceremony where the wrestlers come out and parade around the ring.

The top level is the yokozuna, of which there were only two in this tournament. Each day finishes about 6 in the evening. After each tournament, the wrestlers are re-ranked for the following tournament. Unless you are yokozuna, you can be moved up or moved down. Yokozuna are at that rank until they retire, which is expected when they start losing.

We got there about 2 on Saturday (two weekends ago). I would say the arena (which is a dedicated use building - they only do sumo there) was probably about 30% full. We walked around a bit and snapped some photos. It may be hard to tell from the pics, but the entire lower level is basically floor seating - there is a small box with four pillows and those are your seats. Outside the arena, there are vendors selling food who will deliver it to your box. It could best be described as a picnic-type of deal. People sit in their boxes and eat and watch the sumo.

Fortunately (I think...we would not have enjoyed sitting in those boxes), our seats were in the upper deck, where they are actually seats. We grabbed some bento boxes (Jenn got a hotdog later) and took in sumo. As you will be able to tell in the video, there is a lot of ceremony and posturing in a sumo match. The actual action part of the match may only be about 5 seconds. It was also interesting how advertising was interjected into the higher-level matches.... as the wrestlers were going through their rituals, guys would parade around the ring with banners for various advertisers. By the time the yokozuna were wrestling, the guys were making two laps of the ring with two different sets of banners. It was kind of amusing since there was little other advertising in the arena.

If you don't know, the rules are pretty simple. If you step out of the ring, you lose. If any part of your body touches the ground, you lose. A match is one round. That's about it.

Some pics...

Some sumo action...

A low level match:

This very easily could have been a broken arm:

A good, top-level match:

All in all, it was a really cool experience. The sport is steeped in tradition - the pagentry and ceremony are fascinating to watch. And you can say all you want about the dress, but these guys hit each other, hard. The guy above nearly had his arm broken, so the risk of injury is certainly there. And that probably applies to the spectators as well.... they are sitting right on the edge of the ring and wrestlers went flying into the first couple of rows a few times. It was cool to see, but now that we've see it I don't know that we will make it again. There are pretty long periods where nothing really happens.

It was a pretty big story for the guy who won... you can read more here if you wish. The guy is a character basically. And interestingly enough, both of the yokozuna are Mongolian. Before we went, I asked one of my co-workers if he ever goes to sumo. He said not really and then paused. Then he said, "many of the sumo now are foreigners." A very Japanese comment.