Sumo

On Saturday March 15^th, 2014, I saw my first sumo competition. I was super lucky to come across tickets. My first year in Japan, I didn’t even think about sumo, but this year when people started mentioning that the season was coming up soon, I thought that it would be a really cool thing to see! Not many people can say they’ve seen a live sumo match. I was dumb not to write down the date the tickets went on sale because when the day came, the people who had bought tickets excitedly wrote about it on Facebook and explained how the tickets sell out super quick. I felt like I had missed a huge opportunity. Luckily, one of my friends posted online that she had a spare ticket and was looking for someone who would buy it and accompany her! I was so lucky to have seen that post before anyone else, and I jumped right on it! That’s how I got my ticket.

The sumo season is very short. Matches take place in Osaka for only a few days, and it’s a big deal. I got really excited when I was riding on the Osaka Loop Line and came across my first sumo wrestler. On the day of the tournament I was going to, I got to meet my first sumo wrestler. We got there around 2 pm (that’s when the higher rank matches start…many people go around this time otherwise if you went from 10 am to 6 pm, which is the whole time, it’d be exhausting). The sumo wrestler I met was sitting outside of the arena. He must have been one of the lower rank wrestlers because he was done for the day. My friend and I approached him and asked if we could take pictures with him. He was really nice. When I stood next to him, I was surprised by the wonderful smell coming from him. I told him that he smelled really good. After laughing at my use of Kansai-ben, he explained that it’s the oil that sumo wrestlers use in their hair.

M sumo wrestler friend.

There were huge lines of people waiting for the top rank wrestlers to enter the gym. It was like a red carpet event. When a wrestler would arrive and get out of the car, people would start clapping and cheering.

When we entered the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium where the event was held, a person escorted us all the way from the entrance to our seats. We were shocked to find that we were sitting next to several of our JET friends! What a coincidence!

We all got to sit together!

I should that I really don’t know much about sumo. It would probably be good to do some research about the rules and whatnot before going to see in live. Thank goodness for the power of technology. I was able to look up some things with my iPhone while watching.

Here are some of my thoughts about sumo in list form:

·         They are huge! Their boobs are really big!

·         Despite being so fat, they are really agile and strong.

·         Their diaper things (which I’m sure have a legit name that I’m too lazy to look up right now) are funny.

·         Sumo is kind of scary. The reason being that it looks really painful when they slam into each other at first and when they throw each other on the ground really hard.

·         Being a spectator up close wouldn’t be as fun as it sounds because first, you have to sit seiza (where your legs are folded underneath your body…it’s painful) on a thin cushion. Second, you risk getting seriously injured! There is nothing blocking the people in the first few rows from the wrestlers. Numerous times the wrestlers fell on and rolled into the spectators! I Googled it, and there have been cases of people getting injured and even paralyzed from sitting in the front rows at a sumo competition!

·         There are some foreign sumo wrestlers!

·         Sumo is cool!

·         It’s interesting how there are no TV screens for advertising in the gym, so they instead have people holding banners walk around the rink ever so often.

I think sumo is something you should try to experience if your are living in Japan because it is pretty cool!  You should at least try to smell a sumo wrestler. You won’t be disappointed!

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A foreigner!

Palm to FACE!

SLAM!

Doing some sort of ceremony to purify the rink, I think.

Closing ceremony.