“Are sumos people?” Emil whispered to me, his hands covering his ears as two mammoth mounds of diapered blubber collided before us with a sickening crack.
It was a fair question. Sumo wrestlers did not resemble any of the varieties of human life Emil had encountered so far in his four years on earth, particularly not in Japan, where, as his brother had already pointed out, there was “no one here as fat as you, Dad.”
The Japanese could hardly have picked a national sport less suited to their physique, but sumo has been it for centuries, having emerged from the rituals of Shintoism to become an imperial spectator sport in the eighth century. Though in something of a decline these days, it is still watched by millions on TV, its protagonists unlikely sex symbols inspiring David Beckham–style mania among their adoring female fans.
I was curious to know how it was that, in a country of almost uniformly slender people with a diet so low in fat, rikishi (“strong men”), as the wrestlers are called, manage to turn themselves into these colossal walrus-people. If I wanted to sumo-size myself, how would I go about it? I had always assumed their diet was made up of fatty meats, ice cream, chips, and chocolate and heard that they slept after meals. It had been a strange source of comfort to know that someone, somewhere, had been living my dream life.
The Onoe stable is situated in the quiet residential suburb of Ikegami, a dense grid of low-rise houses with tiny front gardens and no sidewalks. The stable itself is small, home to just eight rikishi, their trainer (a former wrestler of some note), his wife, and their two small sons. The building is makeshift—a single-story, corrugated warehouse with chipboard walls. From the outside, sitting amid the neat little concrete houses, each with a cigarette paper’s space between them, it looked like little more than a self-storage building. Inside there was just enough room for the brown clay ring, or dohyo, and the raised wooden dais where we sat. In one corner were some weights, but other than that, there was no visible training equipment.
On our way there, on the crowded Yamanote line, sitting with dozens of commuters’ bottoms in our faces, Asger on my lap, Emil on Lissen’s, trying our best not to take up too much valuable space, I had tried to explain to Asger and Emil about sumos and their sport.
“OK, so, it’s like you have two really, really fat men, you know, like Monsieur Laurent at the patisserie, but bigger.”
Emil’s eyes widened. “Bigger?”
“Yes, bigger, really fat. Basically, they throw salt around and slap their thighs for a bit. Then a bell rings, and they have to push each other over. The one who does this first, wins. Then they bow and say, ‘Thank you,’ to each other. Oh yes, and they are naked, except for a, well, it’s a kind of diaper thing, I suppose.”
This last bit of information prompted disbelieving giggles. They weren’t falling for it for a minute. Dad was up to his tricks again, no doubt (like that time he said cars ran on the power of singing).
So it was with some satisfaction that I was able to present the real thing, very much in the flesh. We sat on a tatami-covered dais beneath a large flat-screen TV—the area also served as the rikishis’ living room, dining room, and bedroom. Asger and Emil cowered behind us with their fingers in their ears as the wrestlers continued their training. One or two of them had noticed us and exchanged glances with one another but remained focused on their routines as the trainer, Keishi Hamasu, in a polo shirt and shorts, paced outside the ring.
“They are actually quite beautiful, in a strange way,” Lissen whispered to me. I gave her a funny look. She was watching, rapt, their bending, stretching, pushing, and shadow-sumo-ing. For one exercise, called butsukari-geiko, one rikishi would stand still while the other tried to push him across the ring as if he were a large wardrobe. It was horribly grueling, and the pusher would invariably end up on the floor coughing up his lungs and crying out in pain.
There are no weight divisions in sumo; all sizes and shapes compete against each other. But weight superiority is no guarantee of a win, as was the case when a smaller rikishi sent his opponent, a five-hundred-pound wrestler nicknamed Sumo Monster (real name: Yamamotoyama), hurtling from the ring into the wall with a terrifying crash.
A twenty-three-year-old Estonian took his place. Kaido Höövelsen, nicknamed Baruto (a mangled Japanese phonetic interpretation of his home region, the Baltic), is a rising star of sumo and was clearly a cut above the rest of the stable, despite weighing a mere 385 pounds. He dispatched five of his Japanese stablemates without losing breath. At one point he pushed a rival all the way across the dohyo, out of the open garage-style doors, and onto the street, where a small crowd had gathered to watch the session. Asger could hardly believe his eyes. “Wow, did you see what he did?”
With the training session at an end, the rikishi washed their hands with a long-handled ladle at the corner sink and began to waddle up to introduce themselves, clearly intrigued by Asger and Emil. Emil hid behind my legs, but Asger offered his hand to the sweaty, pink giants. Baruto lifted him up onto his shoulder, and then, as Emil emerged, he lifted him with another great, meaty palm up onto the other shoulder. Sumo Monster also introduced himself. “Heaviest sumo in world,” he said proudly in English.
Baruto had been in Japan for four years, he told me. “It must have been quite a culture shock to come here while still a teenager,” I said.
“I did struggle when I first arrived in Japan,” he said. “The food, I couldn’t eat it. It is the same for all foreign sumo.” It is also quite normal for young rikishi to be physically beaten by the senior rikishi. That week, the Japanese newspapers had been full of stories about a seventeen-year-old trainee, Tokitaizan, who had been beaten to death in a hazing incident that went badly wrong in a Nagoya stable. The story had given a rare glimpse into stable life, where younger wrestlers awaken at four in the morning to begin cleaning and preparing breakfast, rarely seeing the outside world throughout the day, and get to bed after midnight, their lives consumed by the duties of the stable.
Tokitaizan had died of heart failure after a prolonged training session that culminated in a half-hour butsukari-geiko. The autopsy revealed that he was severely bruised, had a fractured nose and ribs, and was marked with so-called tolerance burns from cigarettes. He had tried to escape the stable three times in the last month, but his father had sent him back.
It couldn’t have been much easier for Baruto, who had the added burden of being a foreigner. The influx of foreign wrestlers—mostly from countries with a similar wrestling tradition, such as Mongolia, Bulgaria, and Greece—has been the single greatest change to sumo since the sport began, and the source of great controversy. The first to break through was a 626-pound Samoan, Konishiki, who began fighting in 1982 and achieved the second-highest rank in the sport. He was said to be able to consume a hundred beers and seventy nigiri at one sitting and retired a few years ago, suffering from gout, a stomach ulcer, and knee problems. Later, a Hawaiian rikishi, Akebono, surpassed Konishiki’s achievements to earn the highest rank, yokozuna, but the sumo establishment still has trouble accepting that foreigners can make as good wrestlers as—or, as is more often the case, superior wrestlers to—the homegrown talent, and overseas champions can find rules mysteriously changed to prevent them from dominating. Watching sumo on TV in Japan, you notice, too, how the camera never lingers on foreign victors. That week the most famous sumo of all, a Mongolian called Asashoryu, had done little for the overseas wrestlers’ cause when he had been caught on YouTube playing football in his hometown, Ulan Bator, when he should have been undertaking various duties in Japan (he had claimed he’d had to return home to treat an injured leg). But still they come, like Baruto, drawn by annual earnings of up to and over half a million dollars for topflight wrestlers.
It was lunchtime: what I had been waiting for. Each day the rikishi take turns making the food for the rest of the stable. Today was Sumo Monster’s turn, and he went off to the kitchen to prepare our lunch, still wearing nothing but his mawashi (the “diaper”).
“Come on, would you like to see where we fight?” asked Baruto, inviting Asger and Emil down to the ring. Emil scuttled behind Lissen, but Asger followed tentatively, removing his shoes. To his astonishment, Baruto squatted down into position in the ring, ready for a bout, inviting Asger to do likewise. Asger glanced nervously toward us, but I smiled and nodded that it was OK. He hurled himself at the Estonian, who fell obligingly onto the dusty brown clay, flinging his legs up in the air for good measure. Asger stood with his mouth open, stunned by his own strength, as Baruto dusted himself off, shaking his head in shock at his defeat at the hands of a six-year-old. As he sat at the edge of the dohyo, he did the splits, a reminder that suppleness is also an important trait for a rikishi. Meanwhile, outside in the street was a sight that will, I suspect, remain indelible in future years even in Emil’s vague recollections of his trip to Japan: a sumo wrestler riding in circles on a bicycle, like a circus elephant.
I followed Sumo Monster’s dimpled, spotty thighs into the small kitchen, most of it taken up with two fridge-freezers. Amused at my interest in his lunch plans, Sumo Monster explained that he was making a chanko nabe, the traditional sumo hot pot. “There are lots of different kinds,” he said. “Maybe as many as ten. We all take turns to make it, and each of us has a specialty. This is a chicken and soy sauce one.” As if sharpening a pencil, he chopped daikon radish and then carrots into a pot of simmering water seasoned with soy (a cut known as sogi giri). He then added half a ladle of salt. Did he have a recipe? “No, this is man’s cooking; we don’t really worry about the details. The important thing is that there is enough—this is how the chanko nabe developed. Sumo stables used to be much larger, up to a hundred wrestlers, and they needed a dish that could be cooked in one pot but feed many.”
With Sumo Monster engrossed in his chanko nabe, I took my chance to sneak a look into the fridges. Instead of the cakes and chocolates I was hoping to find, they were full of sweet corn, tofu, chicken, and other vegetables—a veritable showcase of healthy eating. I was a little crestfallen.
Sumo Monster had been studying economics before becoming a pro sumo, he told me. I asked him if there were riches to be made in the ring. “Only seventy or so rikishi make much money out of nine hundred. I still worry about the money.” He chopped some chicken pieces and added them to the pot. They cooked for a few minutes before he threw in some Chinese cabbage and then the tofu. “You must cut tofu in your hand like this,” he said, using his broad palm as a chopping board, before swiftly adding shiitake and enoki mushrooms. “It is the only way; otherwise, it falls apart. You cook the hardest things first, and then work your way to the softer things.”
Back in the training room, Lissen had gotten us all an invitation to lunch from the stable master, Keishi Hamasu, and his wife. As we sat down on the floor by the low dining table, Oyakata-san, as Hamasu is addressed at the stable, beckoned for me to sit with him.
“They are kind of like my sons,” he explained, gesturing to the rikishi who were milling around the room. One was watering the dohyo; the others were waiting, I later realized, for us to eat so they could come to the table and eat themselves. “Expensive sons! We live like a family, my wife does their washing, they sleep right here, my own children are like siblings to them. I tell my [actual] sons that we eat because of their work.”
I told him I was disappointed not to see more chocolate in the fridges. He laughed. “For us, carbohydrate is the best way to make our size, along with meat and fish, but it has to go hand in hand with training. We have got to build muscle that won’t get damaged, not fat. But the sumo diet has changed. We get many more imported things now, like sausages. It used to be more fish-oriented.”
Rikishi begin their careers in their teens and tend to finish in their early thirties, although it has been known for some sumos’ careers to last into their forties. Oyakata-san had retired only three years ago, aged thirty-six, but already seemed relatively slim. He told me he had lost almost seventy pounds since he’d stopped. Only a cauliflower ear betrayed a lifetime of combat at the highest level. How had he lost all that weight? “When I stopped, I just ate less, particularly less carbohydrate; my appetite died down naturally because I was using less energy. But I have diabetes from the time when I was a rikishi.”
Diabetes is just one of the illnesses to which rikishi are prone, along with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and heart problems. In the nineties, the sport’s governing body implemented a regime of medical checks to try to control wrestlers’ health, and things have improved. Many of the problems rikishi suffer from in later life arise through the use of performance-enhancing drugs: there is no testing in the sport, and use of steroids and similar drugs is apparently rife. As with pro cyclists, rikishi will, it seems, put their bodies through almost any stress to achieve success. They used to have a similar life expectancy to normal Japanese, but as the rest of the population started living longer, their average life expectancy remained at around the midfifties to early sixties. That said, recent studies have shown that wrestlers don’t have absurdly high body-fat levels and are remarkably fit, with fairly normal levels of uric acid and glucose—usually high among us bona fide fatties.
The lunch spread, though relatively healthy, was on an impressive scale. As well as the protein-rich chanko nabe, there was omelet, rice, cocktail sausages, and, of all things, fried Spam. Traditionally, sumo wrestlers don’t eat four-legged animals, because a rikishi on all fours is a loser, but processed pork apparently doesn’t count. We barely made an impression on the amount of food at the table and left them to enjoy their well-earned feast and afternoon beauty nap.
The training at the Onoe stable had been particularly intensive that day, as the September Grand Tournament was starting the next day, the first week of the month. We rose early and took the train across the river to Ryogoku, in eastern Tokyo, for three hundred years the traditional sumo quarter and home of the national sumo stadium, Kokugikan. Outside the stadium were rows of flagpoles with multicolored banners. Crowds of fans swarmed over the rikishi as they arrived. As we queued for tickets, four wrestlers climbed out of a visibly sagging taxi, dressed in kimonos with bold floral patterns, their hair heavily oiled and perfectly arranged. They looked like a Hawaiian welcoming committee of silverback gorillas.
I had never been especially taken by the sumo I had seen on TV—the small screen seems to render sumo even more ridiculous somehow. But watching real, live bouts inside the stadium, sitting cross-legged on red cushions, it all made sense. The preamble was the best bit, as the wrestlers waddled into the ring, clutching the sticks that dangle in front of their crotches, slapping imaginary mosquitoes on their thighs and belts and cocking their legs. Next comes one of the most bewildering rituals in sport: the pre-bout jockeying for psychological advantage, during which each wrestler will start to bend down as if readying for action. The knuckles of one hand might even touch the clay, but just as you think the other is about to touch down, signaling the start of the fight, one of the wrestlers will apparently have second thoughts, feign indifference to the whole affair, stand up, turn his back on his opponent, and launch into the whole face-wiping, salt-scattering, thigh-slapping rigmarole once again. They can go on like this for minutes, with five or more false starts, during which a knowledgeable audience will applaud eagerly at a particularly audacious sumo tease.
Though the bouts themselves usually last mere seconds, there are few more thrilling moments in sport. Two great fatties slapping each other, then tumbling on top of each other in a great blubbery heap? Bring it on! (Although I can’t help thinking some stout ropes around the ring might be a good idea.) Techniques for winning varied from frenzied, girly slapping to locking horns and standing in stalemate until one began to flag. One sumo, who would go on to win the tournament outright, simply picked up his opponent and dumped him out of the ring as if he were a large barrel.
Afterward, Asger, Emil, Lissen, and I retired to a sumo restaurant around the corner for lunch. Yoshiba is housed in a former sumo stable—much larger than the one we had visited the day before—and staffed by ex–sumo wrestlers, some of whom were engaged in what seemed to be sumo stand-up comedy when we arrived. Several diners shoved thousand-yen notes into their mawashi belts as if they were lap dancers. Our still-simmering chanko nabe arrived within minutes. It was a more refined version of the one we had tried the day before, with shiitake mushrooms, prawns, red snapper, scallops, pork, chicken, tuna dumplings, potato noodles, fried tofu, and omelet. It was terrific, though, in the manner of all nabemono and suimono dishes (Japanese “one-pot” and “soups”), screamingly hot. Long after the others had eaten a seemly amount, I was still forcing down mouthfuls, my stomach stretched like a haggis skin. I was determined to finish the lot, but as I did, the waitress arrived with a vast mound of noodles, which she added to the pot before giving it all a quick stir with her chopsticks.
Reluctantly, I had to draw the line. That was enough for me. I was as sumo-sized as I was going to get, for now.