During my first sojourn abroad as a wide eyed 19-year-old studying at Kyushu University in Japan, I sent out a series of e-mails to friends and family back home detailing the various adventures from one of the best years of my life. While my youth and naivety are glaringly apparent, these were my first attempts at writing travelogues and I look back at these silly little e-mails with a good bit of nostalgia and fondness. And it’s interesting to see how much the world and I have both changed over the years.
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Hey you silly Americans,
Before you go off and trash this e-mail because my last one was too long, don’t worry… this one won’t be near as long because it is really only a small addition to the last one, giving an account of my action-packed weekend. It all began last Friday when I received a ticket (priced at the equivalent of about $100) to the sumo tournament here in Fukuoka (one of only six tournaments held throughout Japan each year and the only one in Kyushu) from the staff of my program. However, before I can tell you about my experience at the tournament, I need to give you a quick bit of info on how the sumo thing works (I can assure you its now by far my favorite one-on-one sport and that I’ve finally given up my addiction for WWF and GLOW wrestling). First of all, there are about 800 “professional” sumo wrestlers in Japan, with the majority of these attending all of the 6 annual tournaments. Three of these tournaments are held in Tokyo, one in Nagoya, one in Osaka, and one in Fukuoka (it’s great because you get to see sumo wrestlers walking around all over town in their special kimonos – they can’t wear regular clothes because they just don’t fit). Each tournament lasts 15 days, with each of the higher ranking wrestlers fighting once per day. The winner of the tournament is the wrestler with the most wins (however, it can only go to one of the higher ranking wrestlers). Anyway, after each tournament, a really nifty list of rankings is hand-drawn in some funky calligraphy style somewhere in Tokyo and distributed throughout Japan. Rankings are decided by a wrestler’s performance in the tournament and are constantly changing. The rankings are made up of several higher and lower brackets, the highest bracket (maku-uchi) consisting of 5 separate brackets of its own (the guys in this bracket get to do their own special little ceremony each day before their bracket begins fighting). However, I’m not even about to explain how the rankings work because it’s a bit complicated… oh, I know everyone’s just dying to know all about the sumo wrestling ranking system and all, but it will just have to wait.
Saturday was about the 8th day of the tournament, so the wrestlers had already differentiated their records from one another fairly well (which made for some exciting betting with my German friend who also had a free ticket). I arrived a little after noon to the pavilion, but the good fights (the higher lever sumo studs) didn’t start until around four. First of all, I was rather surprised at the whole seating arrangement in the building… first of all, an attendant accompanied every group of people from the door to seat… I found it a bit odd that some nice but very old woman was assigned to hobble into the arena with me (at least she wasn’t using a walker) and show me where my seat was, even though I would have had no problem finding it myself (the place was actually a lot smaller than I though it would be). Also, when I got to my seat, I was quite surprised to find that it was Japanese-style seating… yup, no plush little chairs like you’ll find in American sports arenas… just four mats in each little box for four people to squeeze into… and let me assure you, these things were not made to seat four gaijin (foreigners), so me and the other three people who accompanied me were just a bit uncomfortable.
So now to the good stuff…. the fights were awesome. The lower ranking wrestlers fought continuously up until 4 PM, at which time the maku-uchi did their little ceremony thing and fought one another, which is the part everybody comes for. Anyway, even the lower-ranked matches were pretty exciting, partly because once they stepped into the ring and did their little sumo thing (you know, where they lift their big fat legs in the air and slap them several times), they had to start the match, whereas the maku-uchi are given four minutes to stare each other down and drink water to purify themselves and throw salt on the rink to prevent injury (of course, the actual fighting between the maku-uchi was much more impressive, but waiting four minutes for each match to begin wasn’t). These guys are really tough… they fight in a special rink made of hard earth, and its raised two feet off the ground, so that in at least a fourth of the matches, one or both of the wrestlers fall off the side onto the hard ground, the judges, or a few lucky (unlucky) spectators (but they’ve got plenty of padding, so they rarely get hurt). In the case that one of the wrestlers does get seriously injured, he still has to climb back into the ring and bow to the other wrestler, and in the case he won he has to kneel down and do his little winner’s ceremony. One guy, who took a really nasty fall on his ankle and pretty much crushed it, managed to hop back into the ring on his good foot and bow to the other wrestler, then hopped down and was put into a wheel chair (that was the biggest wheel chair I have ever seen!). Like I said, these guys are much tougher than their excess fat would have you believe.
Another thing that was really cool was the fact that their are no weight divisions in sumo… that’s right, everyone is placed in a bracket based on performance (which is often proportional to weight, but not always). So many times, especially amongst the lower ranks (who are for the most part much younger), there would be one wrestler pitted against another wrestler twice his weight (or more). I always cheered for the smaller guy, and many times he won because of his agility. However, it appears that agility won’t get you as far as brute fat (yes, I just made that up – it sounds more appropriate than “brute strength”) in this sport. But even amongst the highest tier of fighters, there was still a dramatic difference among the weight of the fighters. One of the best known wrestlers, though not the best performer, is also the fattest… this guy competes with Fat Albert… he weighs in at 275 kilograms… let’s see, I suppose that’s about 600 lbs! We’re talking humongous!!! I’m not sure if it was really cool to see this guy step into the rink or really disgusting… he had big clumps of fat hanging off his appendages… uuuuughh! Also, as far as the size thing goes, it boggles my mind that these guys are really Japanese. I mean, they are almost all at least six feet tall (that’s right, they have height as well as width) and weigh on average about 150 kilos (that’s about 330 lbs. for all you academs). Now, when you look at the average Japanese guy…. let’s see… maybe 5’6″ and a whopping 140 lbs (if he’s lucky)… there is obviously a big discrepancy here. I mean, how the heck do they make these guys so big? We don’t even breed Americans this big! I guess the funniest part to me, however, is that some guy as fat as the 275 kilo guy can be called professional athletes. This of course isn’t to say that these guys are all fat… in fact, they have to have a lot of muscle to move around all that weight, and for the most part these guys have the most muscular legs I’ve ever seen. But they are still funny to watch for the first time as an uninitiated foreigner.
One more note I’d like to make about sumo before I let you get back to your boring lives of American boxing and WWF (hee hee)… it is the one of the oldest sports in the world still played in its original form. Even all the pre-fight rituals and ceremonial dress are still attended to and the sport as a whole is very uncorrupted. I also loved the fact that there weren’t all sorts of banners around the rink with advertisements from the sponsors… in fact, the only place in the entire building I saw a company’s name displayed was the little Hitachi name printed in red on the cigarette cans placed in each little seating square (the Japanese smoke everywhere and they do it entirely too much… but I’ll get to that in a later e-mail).
Even with the excitement of the sumo tournament this past weekend, I figured I needed to be just a little more adventuresome… I decided to attend a bilingual Christian church. I should have figured when I saw that the name was “New Life Christian Church” that it was going to be just a bit different from my home congregation, but different just doesn’t cover it. I think the right word in this case would be “charismatic”, but that might not even reach the full extent of what I’m trying to say. They were definitely lively singers (which was great… however, coming from an acapella-based church, the base guitar and electric piano jamming in the front of the room didn’t exactly remind me of home). They were also very convicted to what they believe… but it was a bit awkward the way they expressed it… there was a lot of mumbling from some of the members during prayers, and many times whoever was speaking would be backed up by a lot of loud “Amen”s and “Praise the Lord”s… which isn’t bad, just very different for me. Also, when they prayed for someone in the congregation, that person would stand at the front of the room and several people would come and gather around him/her and one guy would put his hand just above his/her forehead. But the craziest part of all was that some lady was trying her best to translate everything that was being said. So it was just very noisy having some guy at the front talking or praying, some lady up front translating to Japanese, and then everyone around me mumbling something different… to say the least, I was overwhelmed. However, after the service, I was very impressed with the people I met… as odd as they seemed in service, they were the most down to earth people I could ever hope to meet in Japan (by the way, they were for the most part foreigners, primarily from America and Canada, with some other nationalities mixed in and then maybe a fourth of the group being Japanese – I guess the total number was about 50 people). And I must admit that even though their way of performing the church service was a bit odd, I didn’t see any sacrifices involved or Satanic symbols posted on the wall… just a bunch of people who really love Jesus and express it in a little different way than I’m used to… so I suppose I’ll see them again this Sunday! However, if the speaking-in-tongues thing begins (and I mean more tongues than Japanese and English), I might just have to find another congregation… and as a last resort, I can always join up with the Mormons =0)
Well, this turned out a little longer than I wanted it to be, but now you are all experts on sumo wrestling and Christian churches in Japan… and if that’s not interesting enough for you, I promise my issue on geisha (let’s just suffice to call them traditional female Japanese entertainers) is coming soon!
Ja mata,
Jay