Random Memories #38

This is the last in a series of memories related to my experiences with sumo in Japan. The first part is here and the second is here, though you really don't have to read all of them to follow this part.

Humans experience the world through their senses: sight, sounds, smell, touch, taste. Those of us who have grown up with television have been conditioned to focus on what we see and hear because fictional realities have been conveyed to us without the benefit of other the other types of sensory stimuli. One of the advantages of reading over watching and hearing is that someone just might take the time to fill you in on the part of the picture that isn't filled in by the eyes and ears.

When I had my first experience with sumo "in the flesh" after having only seen it on television, those other aspects became vividly clear. The air around and inside the Kokugikan is filled with scents. It's an aspect of the experience that you'd never imagine sitting at home watching the bulging bubble of your CRT screen show nearly naked guys slapping and shoving each other. As you approach the stadium, you may encounter a sweet scent somewhat reminiscent of baby powder accompanied by the sound of rubbing fabric and clacking geta (wooden Japanese sandals). This is your cue to look around to see if there are any wrestlers making their way to the special entrance through which only they can pass.

The smell of the chamomile oil that is used to slick back and style sumo wrestlers hair always surrounds them like a sweet cloud. Their size and weight often means they're walking with thighs that rub together and make a particular noise. The wearing of traditional Japanese footware means they make a particular sound as they move, especially since they are shuffling from wearing yukata that restrict their leg extension as they walk.

Once you walk into the Kokugikan, you're greeted with wide hallways on either side. The perimeter around the dojo (ring) and theater for viewers is scattered with vendors selling sumo-themed items, some tacking and some tasteful, and food vendors. Most of the food vendors sell boxes of cold, low-quality food that is clearly prepared off-site. It's about the lowest of the low food in Japan and to be avoided if possible. The worst yakitori (grilled chicken sticks) I ever had in my 23 years in Tokyo came from the a box at the Kokugikan. The taste of sumo is far less sweet than the smell. Of course, most of the people there are looking more at the drinking of sake or tea than at the consumption of otsumami (drinking noshes).

When my husband were there in the early 90s, Lynn Matsuoka's work was very well-known and popular so her art was on sale at the sort of prices we lowly English teachers could not afford. Some of it was sold as prints and others as postcards. On a few occasions, there may have been actual original work, but I was just guessing that was the case based on the exorbitant price tags.

I don't believe that we bought anything that day, and there is a reason why. There was a mistake made in our favor, which I shall explain soon enough. We mainly checked out towels, cloths, cups, and paraphernalia as well as the bean cakes. If we bought anything, it was probably something with white bean paste inside as that was one of the few traditional snacks that we enjoyed at that time.

Once we walked into the area with the ring, it felt expansive, but compact enough for nearly anyone, even those with "bad" seats, to have a decent view. We noticed the shrine-like "roof" hanging over the dojo, and noted that it seemed like a bad idea in a country prone to earthquakes. Most impressively though, we saw the ring of huge portraits of tournament winners that ringed the wall around the area. The portraits are about twice a person's height and about as wide as a tall man. I can't remember how many are there, but one old one gets bumped after each tournament as a new one goes up to replace it.

It's hard to get a good shot of them, but the tournament winner portraits are between the scaffolding of the roof and the upper tier of seats.

When we arrived at the Kokugikan with the tickets that we'd purchased via Andy Adams, publisher of Sumo World magazine, we expected that the "box" of 4 seats was going to be the same sort of thing we often saw on T.V. That is, we expected 4 cushions on a tatami mat flooring and to have to endure sitting cross-legged in a cramped space. It turns out that there was another option for those who occupied the very last row of seats on the first level.

For our 32,000 yen, we got 4 seats alright, but not on the floor. The ring of seats around the back of the lower deck were Western-style swivel chairs. To the best of my recollection, they were wine-colored, velour bucket seats. There was a small round table between them so you could put your drinks and snacks on it and eat them like a civilized person. To me, this was the sky box of sumo viewing from a Western point of view. Sure, it was not so close to the ring that a sumo wrestler who fell the wrong way might fall into your lap and crush your pelvis. And, yes, you weren't close enough to toss cushions into the ring when the wrestler you favored upset the one who was in disfavor with you. There were better views, but there were not more comfortable seats.

The Japanese-style boxes and seats which cost about 3-6 months rent. 

With a Western-sized ass and a spine that was shaped by seats that allowed shorter legs to actually dangle, this was the bee's knees of accommodations. It seemed too good to be true, especially since we'd heard so many times that the cramped little Japanese-style boxes would have cost ten to fifteen times what we were paying for our box. Not only that, but it had little partitions between so it was about as "private" as a space at the national stadium could be. Seated in our cushy chairs, we settled in to watch some sumo.

I can't honestly say that I remember the bouts, but I do remember the energy in the air. This is the biggest reason to see any sport in person instead of just watching it on T.V. Though it is not talked about as a "sense", there is a palpable feeling when you are exposed to a a large number of people who are reacting emotionally to the events they are all there to witness. We lack good words to describe it so we fall back on inadequate language and talk about the "vibe", as if it were like a cheap hotel bed that can shake our bodies if we put a quarter in the slot. I think it's something we can't measure and therefore are afraid to truly name.

If we gave it a proper label, we'd have to acknowledge that there is something humans feel when in the presence of other humans which does not exist when we are around inanimate objects. Science and those who are only at peace with things which can be measured by our current technology would then mock and attempt to humiliate us for having the audacity to claim something which could not be perceived by our five puny senses existed. However, we can all feel it, and it is in the air and has its own unique feel and shape when you're sharing an experience with a large number of people.  Watching sumo was no different. I felt that, and I loved it. It was what kept my husband and I going back for more throughout the years to watch sumo. That was where the real "magic" of the experience lay.

The staging area for goodie bag preparation.

At some point just before the major players started engaging in their bouts, a man came by our box with a shopping bag. For reasons unknown to us, he handed the bag over to us and insisted that it was okay for us to take it. We felt a bit strange about it because he didn't ask for money and we couldn't communicate well enough to ask any questions. Rather tentatively and almost surreptitiously, as if someone was going to come and "catch" us doing something "wrong", we poked around in the bag. It had a few boxes of the Kokugikan's bad yakitori, cold and conjealed in cardboard boxes, some sembei which we ignored, and a box of something heavy.

Terrible tsukune (like a chicken meatball) and yakitori (grilled chicken) - pre-cooked, dry, and cold.

After waiting long enough to be sure someone wasn't going to come out and slap our hands or demand money, we opened the box and found that it was full of eight little blue and white dishes with two different designs. I cannot recall what both patterns were, but one was a sumo referee's fan. We had those small plates, which looked about the right size for Japanese pickles or yakitori dipping sauce, for many years. Eventually, one by one, they all broke from clumsy mishandling.

(these are pictures from 2011 - we didn't have a camera back when we started going to sumo)

It turned out that someone had made a mistake. One of the benefits of those super expensive Japanese-style boxes was that you got a goodie bag as part of the ticket price. That was not supposed to be the case with the press box we had purchased the rights to inhabit. Someone in the concessions area had made a mistake and gave us one that first time. During four or so subsequent uses of that same space, we never got such gifts again.

Our first experience with sumo was a great one, full of surprises and new experiences. It was the sort of thing that you couldn't choreograph if you tried and definitely contributed to our desire to continue to go to the Kokugikan. That being said, as with all things, the novelty eventually wore off and our interest in going waned as the sumo itself started to become more formulaic.

When we first started watching sumo, there was no true dominance and the potential for upsets always existed. Chiyonofuji, who was the greatest wrestler of the modern era, was someone who worked for every win. He wasn't a big guy and you could tell that he worked hard to be strong and muscular as well as to develop good technique. It was always possible, though not necessarily probable, that he'd lose. Once the sumo "royalty" of Takanohana and Wakanohana started to ascend, things go much less interesting. It's hard to explain this to people who have nothing more than a passing interest, but imagine that there are "teams" in sumo and the members of the same team can't compete against one another. If you get too many very good members of that team in the upper levels and not so many teams with good members to defeat them, one team will essentially be hitting softballs for much of the tournament. It's boring watching good players spend most of their days beating much weaker players, and that's when our fandom started to fade away.

I believe that sumo was integral to keeping my husband in Japan far longer than planned. It provided us with a strong cultural connection and a deeper interest through the hard adjustment years when we were confused, sometimes angry, and, at least in my case, depressed at all of the differences which could be so vexing. I can't say for sure that we wouldn't have stayed for 23 years had it not been for sumo, but I think it's possible that we may not have made it through the first five.

Random Memories #37

The Kokugikan, or "national stadium", located in Ryogoku, Tokyo. 

This is a continuation of last week's post about random memories.

One of the things about being new to a place, any place, including a new city in your home country, is that you don't know the ropes. Before information became something anyone could access via a Google search, it could take years to learn what was possible, if you ever learned at all. In the absence of a central database of information and in the presence of a language we could not read or speak particularly well, we relied on word of mouth in our early days in Japan.

When it came to seeing sumo live, the words coming from the mouths of everyone we spoke to was that it was insanely expensive. This was back in the days of the last great yokozuna, Chiyonofuji. Sumo at that time was probably just as corrupt as it is now, but it wasn't public knowledge, at least not to the extent that it is now. It was also before there were any foreign grand champions (yokozuna) and the only well-known foreign wrestler was Hawaiian behemoth, Konishiki.

At that point, foreigners were not a threat to Japanese domination of their national sport as they are now. They were simply novelties to construct rivalries around in order to add color and a more competitive spirit to the game. Seeing Konishiki lose was an affirmation of Japanese superiority at their own game. Seeing him win was seeing an underdog triumph. It was all good back then, except if you were Konishiki and being denied a promotion to "grand champion" that you debatably deserved because the fans simply could not bear granting the status of "yokozuna" on a gaijin (foreigner).

Because the balance of power was favorable, and the wrestlers appeared to have integrity and skill, sumo was immensely popular in the late 80s and early 90s. That meant demand for the box seats that were close to the ring was high and prices were in a range only successful executives and indulgent small company owners could afford. These seats, called "masu-seki" in Japanese, were going for around 500,000 yen apiece. At modern exchange rates, that's $5,000 for a box that seated 2-4 people depending on the "box" size, and more importantly, the patron size. You might cram 4 tiny, shrunken grannies in one of some of them, but I wouldn't bet on it.

For the privilege of occupying these spots closest to the ring, you sat on a thin cushion and were served tea and snacks for "free" as well as received a bag full of souvenir goodies. The cushion came in handy when a bout ended in a particularly gratifying way, such as when Konishiki lost to a Japanese wrestler. You could huck the "zabuton" at the ring to show your approval of the result. Of course, then your bony ass would be sitting on the hard ground, but a pillow about as thick as a matzo wasn't going to be providing much comfort anyway.

Since even most of the Japanese folks around us had no experience actually seeing sumo outside of their viewing of it on the idiot box, they always told us it was too monstrously expensive to contemplate going, ever. Seemingly miraculously, Andy Adams, the editor and publisher of the English language sumo magazine, Sumo World, started to offer up his press box tickets on select days. He was obliged to buy the box for 32,000 yen for every single day of a 15-day tournament, and he didn't want to go all of the time.

Considering that we thought the alternative was to pay 500,000 yen, we lept at the chance to buy the box for this "bargain" price and arranged to go on one of the weekdays that we, as teachers, were not working, and that, he, as a journalist who was getting perhaps a little bored with seeing so often and sick of having empty his wallet, did not care about. For him, what really mattered was the first day and the last day. I'm guessing he sold the popular weekend days to buddies at the press club. The "dregs", weekdays during which the more affluent set among foreign folks in Japan were working like normal people, were offered to readers for purchase.

Remember what I said about not knowing how to navigate a new environment and not having the magic of the internet to assist? Later, we were to find that all of the word of mouth we'd heard about outrageous ticket prices wasn't exactly the whole truth of the matter. While tickets were in incredibly high demand, the people who ran the Kokugikan, the national stadium in Tokyo at which three of the year's six tournaments were held, kept back a certain number of the "worst" seat tickets to sell on the day of the match. I'm sure this move was done to ensure at least some access for the less advantaged in the population, because they absolutely could have sold them for higher prices as pre-sale tickets during sumo's heyday.

These "general admission" tickets could be purchased at the office of the stadium and the number, which my husband and I used to know exactly but is lost in the cobwebby recesses of my mind, was around 250-300, I believe. If you got up super early and stood in a long line for two or three hours, you could buy these tickets for 2100 yen (about $21). It wasn't until we learned more about how things worked and a bit more Japanese that we found out that this option existed. Granted, it cost you hours standing in a line and the stress of worrying that, somehow, they'd sell out before you got up to the office, but it was certainly a more economical option.

A seating plan and information about the stadium in both Japanese and English. This picture was taken in 2012 when we walked by the Kokugikan and a woman out front was offering to help foreigners buy tickets. Sumo is far less popular now, and much more international. Such service and information in English was not available in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.

In later years, my husband and I would get up at 6:00 am, rush out the door to catch the earliest train to Ryogoku and hustle from the station to the line that had already formed. During the popular years, we tended to hit near the 200th spot in line. I recall that I'd stand and hold our place while he'd leave the line and count the number of people in front of us. If we were close to the cut-off point, we'd fret about wasting our time and not getting tickets, but I don't believe that ever actually happened.

We'd happily get the tickets when the office opened at 8:30 or 9:00 am and then wander around Ryogoku until the first matches with the greenhorn wrestlers started. We'd sleepily hang around, sometimes trying and failing to get in a nap in our uncomfortable cheap-theater-style seats, until the big boys came out to play. During these times, we'd spend about 6 hours inside the stadium with only about 2 hours of "important" action to watch. From 4:00-6:00 was when the highest ranked players did their thing, with the final hour being the one most people really came to see.

Going for the general admission tickets over the press box ones saved us money, though at the expense of sleep and time, but it also had a particular advantage. We spent hours and hours in the Kokugikan and came to know its nooks and crannies well. We also watched the lower level players and developed a keener sense of what it was to be "really good at" sumo and what sort of mistakes those who were not yet there in their abilities were making. The full scope and range of what was going on opened up to a far greater extent as a result of those experiences. That was worth a little lost sleep.

In the next and final installment in this little series, I'll be talking about what it was actually like occupying the press box and watching sumo live.

Random Memories #36

Image from "sumo forum". This was an issue we almost certainly once owned. It shows Kirishima fighting Konishiki.  

I have always felt that people approach cultural experiences backwards. They go to Japan, watch kabuki, attend a tea ceremony, climb Mt. Fuji, or attend a sumo match. These things are done without any real understanding of the events that one is witnessing or taking part in. The complexities tend to pass the participant by and they only gain the most superficial of value from the experience.

While I would never suggest that one should be an expert before taking part in a cultural enterprise, I would say that it's not a bad idea to get a pretty good handle on what is going on before paying a lot of money or going to a lot of trouble to see or do something. I wouldn't fly to Japan on vacation and watch kabuki cold, as Dave Barry did when he formed the basis of his book, "Dave Barry Does Japan." As he wrote about it, it was a lot of "shrieking" and "mincing". I'm sure that it does entail both of these things, but I'm also sure that the types of movements are done for a reason. Since I never was drawn to kabuki theater, despite my many years as a KISS fan and being exposed to guys who wore similar make-up in their performances, so I don't know what the deeper meaning is. I do know, however, that knowing what you're watching transforms an experience into something better and more engrossing.

To that end, I want to talk about my memories of being a fan of sumo. If you don't know what's going on, it's just a couple of fat or chubby guys in fashionable diapers pimp- or bitch-slapping each other around a raised clump of clay until one of them falls over. The seconds of actual action are preceded, in the eyes of the uneducated, by a long, tedious phase of prowling the ring, stopping to crouch and stare occasionally and huck salt into the ring. That's the sum total of the experience unless you understand the culture of sumo.

Before I ever saw sumo live, I watched bits of it on occasion on the "Sumo Digest". Live sumo spans an entire day and hundreds of bouts played by men whose ranks start at rock bottom and work their way to the top, to the "grand champion", or "yokozuna". The "Sumo Digest", which used to be one of the few bilingual programs on Japanese T.V., compressed the day's major bouts into about a half hour of programming so that businessmen who liked the sport but couldn't sit around for the hours it aired on NHK (Japan's public television network). The long-form airing was for the old men who had retired. The shorter one catered to those who worked and wanted to skip the preparatory casing of the dojo (ring) and psyching out with stares.

After watching bits and pieces of the "Sumo Digest" after a day of slaving away at Nova conversation school, I started to figure out what was going on. Why was some guy in an elaborate headpiece and kimono holding a fan and yelling next to them? Why did it take forever to get started on a match that was over so fast in most cases? What was put on top of the fan at the end of some bouts and grabbed by the winner before he left the ring? Why are they wearing such undignified attire? How is it that enormous guys sometimes lose to little guys, but always seem to defeat strong, bigger wrestlers?

Watching sumo little by little didn't answer these questions. What it did was give me enough experience with it to think about asking them. Seeing sumo again and again took it from the superficial observation that this was a sport in which "two fat guys were shoving each other around" to something with details and nuances. I just didn't understand them. I imagine this is the same way that someone who has a cursory experience with tea ceremony is aware that tea is being stirred, but they don't notice how it's being stirred or why it's being stirred in a particular manner (it's to reduce foam).

Once I had enough sumo viewing from T.V. under my belt to think to ask such questions, I had to find a way to answer them. During my embryonic stages as a sumo fan, from 1989-1991, there was no internet as we know it and very little in the way of English language information on it. What little there was tended to be very cursory and offered with an eye toward giving English speakers just enough education to not go rushing up the the dojo and give the wrestlers bear hugs. Just in case you may think they look like big, sweaty, nearly naked teddy bears and are inclined to rush them for a cuddle, that's a big "no-no", especially if you're a woman.

Fortunately, there was one bastion of sumo information out there in the form of an English language magazine called "Sumo World". This print publication came out six times a year, one issue before every tournament, and provided English-language sumo enthusiasts with a conduit to the inner workings of sumo. If you couldn't catch the names of the wrestlers because the referee called them out in such a sing-song manner that they were incredibly distorted to the untrained foreigner ear, the magazine provided you with a clearer pronunciation.

There was also a bit of history, some insider tidbits, and a focus on various aspects of the sport that the Japanese could access easily, but English speakers could not. One of the features in each issue focused on one of the 70 "winning moves". It spoon-fed the neophytes the details which taught us that they weren't merely slapping, shoving, and pushing each other around. There was a method to the madness. In fact, there were a great many methods, but you couldn't see them unless you knew enough to look and, with bouts lasting mere seconds in many cases, you'd have to have a keen eye to distinguish the grip one guy had on the others belt before he got hucked over the edge.

Early on in our stay, one of our great pleasures was finding the new "Sumo World" magazine at Kinokuniya book store (one of the few places that carried English language magazines). It became part of our regular routine to pick up an issue as soon as it was released. Little did we know that it would also be the conduit through which we'd access our first live experience with sumo (to be continued next week).

Will Miss #93 - sumo

My early years in Japan were spent immersed in sumo. I watched it every night on the Sumo Digest, on weekends on NHK (Japanese public television), visited a sumo training stable, and watched it in the flesh about a half dozen times at the national stadium in Ryogoku (Ryogoku Kokugikan). It's the only sport in the world that I really understand thoroughly.

Even though I'm no longer a rabid fan, I enjoy its presence in the culture and will miss it when I leave.