It’s early Tuesday morning. I’m deliberately skipping over about a day and half; if I don’t catch up soon I never will. Aside from the connectivity issues, my blogging has been impaired because we’ve been putting in some pretty long days and I’m so tired in the evenings that I don’t have the energy to do any writing. I’m pretty sure that the connectivity problem is actually a problem with my blogging software, BlogDesk: it seems to become impatient when I ask it to upload photos over a slow dial-up connection. So, until we reach Kyoto and the fast internet connection in our hotel, I’m probably not going to be able to post any photos here.
We spent yesterday with Tamae, the professional guide we hired in Tokyo last year. Tamae-san is a charming woman in her mid-30s with a staggering amount of knowledge of Tokyo (and Japan in general) on the tip of her tongue. We very much enjoyed her guidance last year so it was quite a treat that we were able to have her show us around again this visit.
At her suggestion, our first destination was a sumo stable. [The word “stable” was hers. It seemed an odd choice to me, but she’s the translator, not I.] It was a building four stories tall in which about eight sumo wrestlers and their coach and his wife live and train. We spent about 30 minutes watching while the wrestlers worked out in the practice ring in the ground level of the building.
It probably goes without saying that we’ve never seen a sumo wrestler in person, much less eight of them, much less at a distance of about fifteen feet. It wasn’t something that I’ll soon forget or be able to describe adequately, but I’ll take a stab at the latter.
They’re big guys, for starters, but they’re fast. (Maybe the word “stable” is appropriate.) They do have a good deal of fat on their frames because sheer mass is an important asset in sumo, but there’s no question that they’re also very, very strong, and very agile. While we were there, pairs of them would have matches [bouts? fights? I don’t know what term is used] while the others stood outside the ring and watched, stretched, drank water, and/or rested. One of them spent much of the time methodically whacking a vertical column of wood in one corner of the room; another repeatedly crouched and sprinted short distances, apparently practicing his opening moves. They spoke to each other very little, but they seemed quite cheerful on the whole.
In my extremely limited understanding, the basic goal of sumo is to get the other guy out of the ring. Most matches went something like this: the wrestlers came together with an audible smack, there was a brief period of very fast grappling and struggling, and the somehow one would achieve the upper hand and the other would be out of the ring. Usually it seemed the winner would defeat the loser by forcing him off balance near the edge of the ring, leaving him no choice but to step out, but on one occasion the winner found a solid grip and literally carried his opponent over the edge. In another match, the loser somehow lost his traction and his feet slid in the dirt as his opponent pushed him. Keep in mind that these guys must weigh around 300 pounds or so, and you can imagine how impressive this was to watch up close.
Photography isn’t allowed at all in sumo stables so I don’t have any photos to share. (Even speaking is forbidden when you’re a visitor.) It’s completely understandable, but there were a couple of moments I wish I had been able to capture and record. Besides the obvious exciting moments during the matches, I would have liked to have made portraits from a couple of outside-the-ring moments. One was when one wrestler re-tied another’s hair topknot; another was when one helped hitch up and re-fasten his fellow’s belt/loincloth/whatever-they-call-it. These brief quiet moments seemed incongruous alongside the flurries of action in the ring, but in retrospect I suppose they were consistent with the disciplined focus and attention that the sumo applies to his practice.
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