Hakuho—shaping up as the most dominant sumo wrestler in history—sat out the 2019 Summer Basho with an arm injury, leaving fellow Mongolian Kakuryu as the only participating yokuzuna. Alas, with a 11-4 record, Kakuryu did not distinguish himself, leaving the door open for Asanoyama, a middle-ranked maegashira, to pick up the Emperor's Cup with twelve wins.


In any case, the 2019 Summer Basho will mostly be remembered for President Trump's participation in the awards ceremony (which was totally in keeping with the spirit of sumo awards ceremonies).

But it was the bouts of two other wrestlers that held my attention.


A previous winner of the Emperor's Cup, Georgian Tochinoshin (six-foot-six and 357 pounds) had been demoted after a two-tourney losing streak. He needed ten wins to regain his second-to-highest ozeki rank. He got win number ten on the penultimate day, concluding the tourney 10-5. If he can stay healthy (knees are a big problem for these big guys), I can see him winning again.

Ranking in sumo is similar to promotion and relegation in soccer.


At five-foot-six and 210 pounds, Enho debuted as the smallest wrestler in the makuuchi division, giving up six inches and at least 150 pounds to almost every opponent he faced. He started strong but got beaten up pretty badly the second week and finished with a 7-8 record. Still, an impressive enough performance to stay in the makuuchi. I hope to see him in the Nagoya Basho.


The manga and anime series Hinomaru Sumo features a protagonist who is too short for professional sumo and must earn an exemption by winning the high school national championship. The manga started in 2014 so reality has caught up with fiction. Though Enho (barely) meets the height requirement, he's a good example of what it means for sumo to have no weight classes.

The Summer Basho makuuchi bouts can be viewed at the NHK World website.

Labels: japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, nhk world, sports, sumo

In a commanding series of bouts, the towering (six-foot, eight-inch) Bulgarian Kotooshu handily defeated both yokozuna to become the first European to win the Emperor's Cup, the top prize in sumo. Win or lose, sumo wrestlers tend to go for the same tough-guy mien favored by NFL linebackers. But after defeating yokozuna Hakuho, Kotooshu strode out of the arena boyishly grinning from ear to ear. It was fun to see. And his dad in the crowd enthusiastically waving a little Bulgarian flag.

Labels: sumo

Asashouryu (11-2) defeated Hakuhou (12-1) on Saturday, leaving them tied 12-2 going into the final bouts on Sunday. They both handily defeated their respective opponents--Chiyotaikai (the loss delivering him a disappointing 7-8 record) and Kotooshu--in regular play. Then in an all-Mongolian tiebreaker Hakuhou decisively beat Asashouryu to capture the crown (and the arena was filled with flying seat cushions).

Labels: sumo

More reasons to praise the greatness that is sumo:

1. There's always a winner. The only time judges enter the picture is when the two wrestlers hit the ground or fall out of bounds simultaneously. If the judges can't agree on a winner the bout is immediately re-fought. No ties allowed. (There are cases where an instant replay rule would help, which makes second-guessing the judges all the more fun for the viewer.)

2. Sumo is perfect for short attention spans. The average sumo bout lasts no longer than a running play in football. The referee can restart a match that stalls out after a few minutes, but I've never seen that happen. Most bouts last less than 20 seconds.

3. Everybody fights everybody else. None of this BCS nonsense about how if Team A defeats Team B, and Team B defeats Team C, then obviously Team A is better than Team C. Over the course of a season, every top-ranked wrestler fights every other top-ranked wrestler (there are technical exceptions to this rule).

4. There are no weight categories. Everybody really does fight everybody else. The towering six-eight Bulgarian Kotooshu (featured above) fights wrestlers a foot shorter. The current champion, Asashouryu, at six-even and 326 pounds, fights wrestlers a hundred pounds heavier (and usually beats them).

5. Every underdog eventually has his day. Fighting so many bouts, it's not hard to get a read on an opponent's strategy. After his perfect record at the January meet, Asashouryu opened the Haru Basho 0-2 against the relatively low-ranked Tokitenku and Miyabiyama.

6. Consequently, in few other sports are the particular styles of the players so recognizable. Also unique to Japan, it's a sport that's all about the individual and where fans come to root specifically for individual athletes.

7. Where else can you see a 325 pound man actually body slam--lifting him clean off his feet--a 375 pound man? Don't let those big bellies fool you--these guys are as strong as oxen.

8. Audience participation. The sumo ring is approximately the same size and elevation as a boxing area and the spectators are seated accordingly. Except there aren't any ropes. This means that once or twice a day during a tournament, 300-plus pounds of sumo wrestler is going to come crashing down into the front rows. Having a ringside seat in this sport means taking your life in your hands.

9. The sumo referee has the greatest uniform in any sport (see above).

10. The spectators aren't too shabby either. At a sumo meet you'll see a man in a yukata sitting next to a man in a business suit sitting next to a woman in a kimono sitting next to a kid in jeans and a T-shirt. Yet after a big bout, these same fans will fling their seat cushions through the air like Frisbees. It's quite the sight to behold.

Labels: japanese culture, personal favs, sports, sumo

Meaning the "spring tournament," held every year in Osaka. Of all the full-contact martial sports, only one deserves the same coverage accorded to prime-time sports like golf, basketball, baseball and football.

That's right. Sumo.

Boxing used to hold this position, but these days you can't make a regular feature of two guys beating the crap out of each other except in the movies. Even boxers who rise to the top of the profession and parcel out big matches once in a blue moon--thus making boxing impossible to follow as an individual "fan" sport--will still probably end up with mush for brains.

Efforts to "clean up" boxing with idiocies like the hit-count scoring system employed at the Olympics reveal the inherit weakness of martial arts in general: no real spectator sport is scored by judges. One reason wrestling is vanishing from collegiant sports (besides Title 9) is that nobody except ex-wrestlers can tell what the heck is happening on the wrestling mat.

To say nothing of the far-to-common, not-made-for-prime-time moment of two wrestlers locked together for seeming hours in a tangle of arms and legs, and then one being declared the winner because of some move (indetectable to the casual viewer) that pushed him ahead on "points." Altogether now: boring!

Sumo tolerates none of such nonsense.

It's a winner-take-all sport with simple rules (first wrestler to go out of bounds or touch any part of the body above the sole of the foot loses). Like golf (hit the little white ball in the hole), sumo is a strict meritocracy where you prove your worth by beating the field. It doesn't take a golf fanatic to know that Tiger Woods is that good, and the same goes for the top sumo wrestlers.

Sumo as a sport can most simply be described as what the center and nose guard in American football do immediately after the ball is snapped. In fact, a visitor from outer space could be forgiven for assuming that sumo was somehow a byproduct of football or the other way around. Sumo could very well be advertised as "Requium for the lineman."

And like football, sumo looks great in instant-replay, which in turn invites vigorous armchair analysis and Monday-morning quarterbacking, the elixirs of fan participation.

The mistake American networks make when broadcasting sumo matches (as a curiosity time filler) is to show the "live" NHK feed. Except that most Japanese fans watch the nightly wrap-up, which features the individual bouts with the pre-game rituals and warm-ups removed, pared down to the actual combat. Granted, the ritual is part of the fun, but a day's sekitori bouts can be summed up in thirty minutes.

That makes it possible for even the casual viewer to follow the entire drama of a tournament, such as Chiyotaikai's 5-4 collapse during the current March meet and Hakuhou's unexpected 8-1 surge, pushing 7-2 Asashouryu out of first place.

Offered in this format and accompanied by informed commentary, I think American audiences could better grasp what a dynamic, suprisingly individualistic, upset-rich, "high-scoring" (best of 15 consecutive bouts fought on 15 consecutive days wins), fast-moving, rock'em sock'em, full-contact sport sumo is. All the things Americans want in a spectator sport (and hate about soccer).

Labels: nhk, soccer, sumo

Explaining why foreign sumo wrestlers quickly acquire communicative competence in Japanese while foreign baseball players don't, Satoshi Miyazaki, professor of Linguistics at Waseda University, pinpoints the critical factor in his book (「外国人力士はなぜ日本語がうまいのか」):

Foreign rikishi [wrestlers] are not here to learn Japanese, but to learn sumo. But by learning sumo they have to learn Japanese. That's their motivation. Many students who learn in classroom studies don't know what to do with the language they learn.

Baseball players, on the other hand, come to Japan pretty much as temporary workers, with hopes of returning to the major leagues in the U.S. And though originally an "American" game, you don't need to speak a word of Japanese to hit a home run or catch a pop fly.

The foreign sumo wrestler, Miyazaki notes, has "no prior Japanese study experience before coming to Japan"; is placed in a "total immersion" environment, and "has to learn Japanese to survive." Consequently, he has a "strong motivation to learn" and will use whatever resources are available. As a result of these language acquisition strategies, sumo wrestlers "don't need a teacher or a dictionary. They just learn through osmosis."

This sounds like hocus-pocus, but it jives with my experiences as a missionary a quarter century ago. Before arriving in Japan, I went through a two-month intensive course in Japanese (having never studied it before). My teachers were earnest, but not very well trained, and the curriculum was based on the antiquated audio-lingual method. That was the end of my formal Japanese instruction for two years.

(Actually, I did look up words in the dictionary—all the time—but as the real world wasn't slowing down while I did so, toting around a dictionary did little for my real-time comprehension.)

I floundered the first six months or so, making little headway. Then out of the blue, my language skills jumped several orders of magnitude. Language acquisition does not proceed on a smooth, linear curve, but progresses in a sawtooth fashion (the classic example being the mastery of the past tense by children), which can't be easily scheduled and plotted in a classroom.

Now, full-bore immersion has its problems. A day of intensive instruction every month would have gone a long way toward preventing bad language habits (after two years I still didn't use the personal pronoun correctly, and didn't understand why itte-imasu didn't mean "going.") But I'm talking about a day every month, not 18 credit hours a week.

The second factor Miyazaki points to is perhaps more important, and it applies equally in non-immersion environments: language is the tool, not the objective. Well, it is the objective if you're a linguist. But unless your goal is linguistics, studying language for the sake of language will get you nowhere.

USC linguistic Stephen Krashen makes the same argument quite forcefully. Teachers and students who focus on grammar, he says, are deceiving themselves if they believe that language is learned through the study of grammar. In fact, whatever progress they make "is coming from the medium and not the message. Any subject matter that held their interest would do just as well."

When I returned to Japan to teach English, many of my fellow teachers were there on educational visas, which meant they attended about 20 hours of Japanese classes a week, or the equivalent of a full academic schedule. I couldn't get over how little headway they made, for all their work and classroom time. (About as little headway as our English students made.)

Most language instruction is completely generic and unfocused: a mile wide and an inch deep. But sumo wrestlers, Miyazaki points out, come to Japan "to enter a new profession," one that demands the ability to communicate in Japanese. Like missionaries, in the process, they first acquire the specific vocabulary required to work in that profession.

Of course, the supposed flaw is immediately apparent: outside your narrow field of expertise, you become pretty illiterate. To a certain extent, though, that's true of your first language as well. Jay Leno's "Jay-walking" bits prove that you can be "fluent" in a language, yet dumb as a stump.

It may seem counterintuitive, but such a corpus—a few inches wide and a mile deep—is ultimately far more useful to the language student. That's because the syntactical engine powering human language machine doesn't care what vocabulary it uses as long as it's got a lot of it in what Stephen Krashen terms "comprehensible input."

What Noam Chomsky identified as the Language Acquisition Device, the biological catalyst that enables the automatic acquisition of language by children in a language-rich environment, has in adults gone from a roaring jet engine to a puttering biplane. But it still works. It still flies. It just needs a lot more care and attention.

And attention is key—that focused effort that keeps you hitting the books. As Miyazaki says, the focus isn't the language, it's what you want to do with the language. Large anime and foreign film libraries are available from Netflix and with online bookstores such as Book 1 and Amazon, you can develop a specialty in any subject.

I'm a great fan of studying Japanese through manga. You can start with an elementary title and work your way through the series, concentrating on a single author(s) and genre. The story is ultimately going to matter more than the language or the grammar, and that's why you'll keep reading and studying.

Labels: english, japanese culture, language, netflix, sports, sumo