Fun, Fat and a little Furry

So I finally made it to the long awaited sumo tournament. It was me and the boys, Philip, Jez and Matt. Matt is from New Zealand, has and plans to stay in this country too long for his own good, but is a fountain of sumo knowledge, and follows it on TV and knows all the players little quirks. We arrived at the sumo stadium around two in the afternoon when some of the less advance matches were going on. The best wrestlers and matches are left until the end of the day, between 4-6. We reserved a “box” which seats four people, but was really a 3ft by 3ft square with four cushions to sit on, a bit cramped but very Japanese. All around were Japanese families eating boxed lunches and munching on dried squid which smells like one would imagine it to. But for me at a sporting event, I was thoroughly entertained and enjoyed the spirit of it all.

There is a whole lot of ceremony to the event, as one might expect, but the gist of the match is one guy has one chance to push the other out of the ring or to get him to fall down inside the ring to win. The longest match I saw maybe lasted a minute and a half or two. Most were over in thirty seconds. It’s fun to take bets on who will win, because it isn’t necessarily the fattest, a certain amount of agility is involved. Longer than the match itself, it seemed, was the amount of time it took the “announcer” to sing the wrestler’s names, which comes out sounding like off-key moaning vowels.

Sumo wrestlers aren’t just Japanese either. There are some successful wrestlers from Korea, Mongolia, and Russia. They are required to grow their hair long so it can be slicked into the traditional looking topknot. They eat several large meals a day and try to sleep right after so as to not burn any precious calories. I’d say an average sized guy was 300lbs. But the biggest was nearly 400lbs. The scariest part was the occasional appearance of back and breast hair.