Sumo Wrestlers hold Championship, are Fat.

Sumo Wrestlers hold Championship, are Fat.

As I got off the subway at Namba Station in Osaka, I thought, ‘what could possibly be so wonderful about fat guys in thongs wrestling each other out of a circle?’ The answer is, ‘everything’. The lot of us (my friends plus KAJET people—an organization that sets up events such as this one for everyone in the prefecture) crowded into some tiny seats around the ring. Many of the foreigners I was with had trouble with the size of the seats, but they did their best to squeeze into them. The sumo match started off with lesser players (I don’t know any sports terms so please bear with me). The group of sumo-san come out and ascend the stage as their names are called out. When the entire group has been called out, they clap their hands and lift them to the sky while standing in a circle. Then everyone cheers, and they waddle off stage. During this opening, the sumo-san will wear sort of flags of their sponsors over their nether regions.

The fighting was the most exciting part, although it is the briefest part of the match. First the sumo-san have to approach the stage. A man in a very old, oriental looking get-up sings to a fan (someone told me that he sings their names). Sumo-san then climb up into the circle, face each other, and lift their legs high in the air, stomping them to the ground. The crowd yells ‘yoisho!’ Then the sumo squat, have some towels brought to them, squat some more, throw salt around the arena (to cleanse)… eventually they face each other and the match begins. The goal, from what I understand, is for one wrestler to toss/shimmy/push/elbow the other one out of the circle of chalk that surrounds them. Sometimes the matches are really quick, sometimes they are very long (by long I mean almost a minute). We saw wrestlers pick up their opponents and chuck them out of the ring, or fall trying to do so. We saw slap fights! Some sumo would grapple with each other then takes breaks while hugging, which was odd. The most exciting part of this is that the sumo wrestlers look to be about 300-400 pounds. When a 350 pound man in a diaper is tossed out of a ring, it is INCREDIBLE. Boy, some of those men took some real tumbles.

I also want to mention that the majority of watching the matches was mostly chatting, with brief pauses to return to the action. Megan and I began to rename the sumo wrestlers and take bets on them. ‘I call the one in the aqua diaper! His name will be Bel’aqua!’ “Alright… then I want the one in the CRIMSON diaper. I will name him Noodles.” Megan made much better choices than I did.

I was interested in some of the wrestlers who weren’t Japanese. The top sumo wrestler (who won this match among many others in the past few years) is Mongolian. We also saw a Russian sumo, a Romanian sumo, and a Hungarian one, I believe. It was really strange seeing them dressed as sumo. I don’t know who pulled off the diaper better, the Asians or the Caucasians.

In the end, I highly recommend taking in a sumo match at least once in your life. I believe alcohol might make it even more exciting, although I don’t have that as first hand experience.