Tournaments start with a line of burly males sporting little greater than elaborately adorned aprons strolling in a line onto a raised earthen stage. Their names are known as as they circle round a ring made of partially buried bales of rice straw. Turning towards the middle, they clap, raise their aprons, increase their arms upward, and then exit with out a phrase.
Then two of these males face one another, crouching, clapping their palms collectively and stomping on the bottom. They pause repeatedly to rinse their mouths with water and toss salt into the ring.
Overseeing their actions is a man outfitted in a colourful kimono and a black hat resembling that of a Shinto priest and holding a tasseled fan. After a refined gesture together with his fan, they lastly grapple – and solely then would the uninformed observer understand that the efficiency was an athletic occasion.
Every sport has its rituals, from the All Blacks rugby staff’s pregame haka to the well mannered handshake between victor and vanquished over the tennis court docket internet. Some, like many sumo rituals, have roots in spiritual practices. A couple of hundred years in the past, competitions had been regularly held at temples and shrines as half of festivals.
Today, sumo is a modern sport with data, guidelines and a governing establishment that celebrated its one centesimal anniversary in October 2025. But these spiritual roots are nonetheless seen. The salt the wrestlers throw, for instance, is a purifying factor. The clapping is a means of drawing the eye of the gods.
As a historian of modern Japan and a scholar of sports activities and diplomacy, I’ve seen some ways through which sports activities are way more than “just a game.” Sport rituals are an essential half of these wider meanings. In reality, sumo and its rituals have helped form overseas perceptions of Japan for a minimum of 170 years.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
The first sumo event identified to have been noticed by American spectators was held in March 1854, in honor of a treaty establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan. Described within the private journal saved by Commodore Matthew Perry, the chief of the mission to Japan, the exhibition earlier than gawking American sailors appeared designed to impress.
Before the matches started, the athletes placed on a efficiency of energy, loading the American ships with a reward of some 200 bales of rice from the Japanese authorities. Perry describes how two dozen large males, “naked with the exception of a narrow girdle around the loins,” paraded earlier than the American crew earlier than attending to work, every shouldering two 135-pound bales.
If the precise sumo competitors was meant to encourage appreciation of Japanese tradition, it backfired. Perry’s descriptions of the wrestlers had been full of unflattering animal metaphors. He wrote that they resembled “stall-fed bulls” greater than human beings and made noises like “dogs in combat.”
At the time, sports activities as we all know them in the present day had been simply rising in England and the United States. Some of the earliest guidelines of soccer had been recorded within the 1840s, and baseball’s rising recognition led to the event of skilled leagues after the U.S. Civil War.
With this American thought of sports activities in Perry’s thoughts, the sumo event didn’t impress him. He known as the bouts a “farce” and judged the wrestlers’ physique as one which “to our ideas of athletic qualities would seem to incapacitate him from any violent exercise.”
In the mid-Nineteenth century, Japan was comparatively remoted from the Western world. Most Americans knew virtually nothing in regards to the nation and thought-about it backward, even barbaric. The two cultures’ differing concepts of sports activities meant that sumo solely added to American views of Japan as unusual and uncivilized.
A COMPETING SPORT
Sports diplomacy had a extra constructive affect on American views of Japan within the early twentieth century, due to a totally different sport: baseball.
After the autumn of the shogunate in 1868, the brand new Japanese authorities – made up of oligarchs ruling within the title of the Meiji Emperor – employed Americans to assist implement reforms. Some of them introduced alongside America’s pastime, which grew to become highly regarded inside a few many years.
By the 1910s and Nineteen Twenties, Japanese faculty groups had been commonly touring to the U.S., the place newspapers praised their abilities and their sportsmanship.
Some of the rituals in a Japanese baseball sport, like a ceremonial first pitch, had been acquainted to American observers. Others, like a staff bow towards the umpire, had been fairly a distinction, however struck them as superior to the rowdiness of American gamers and followers.
At the time, Japan’s Westernizing reforms and latest navy victories over China and Russia had already improved Americans’ impressions of the nation. Former baseball participant Harry Kingman, writing about a sport he watched throughout a 1927 stint teaching a Tokyo faculty staff, defined the Japanese flip towards baseball as half of the nation’s modernization.
Sumo, nonetheless, continued to be the most well-liked sport in Japan till the Nineteen Nineties, when baseball took that title. But the preliminary recognition of this American import precipitated some nervousness throughout the sumo world: A overseas sport gave the impression to be taking up and stealing sumo’s followers.
Amid these modifications, skilled sumo’s governing establishments, which had been divided into competing associations based mostly in Tokyo and Osaka, joined forces. They formally unified in 1925 because the group that may grow to be in the present day’s Japan Sumo Association.
CAN SUMO BE COOL?
Japanese widespread tradition now captivates individuals around the globe. In 2002, journalist Douglas McGray wrote in regards to the mushy energy conferred by what he known as the nation’s “gross national cool.” But he famous sumo as an exception, blaming its management’s insular attitudes.
Perhaps sumo’s largest hurdle to constructing a world fan base is its perspective towards foreigners. Immigration is controversial in Japan. The inhabitants is comparatively homogeneous, and boundaries to naturalization are excessive.
In distinction to sports activities like baseball, soccer, and rugby, the place “imported” gamers abound, there are few overseas sumo wrestlers, and their success appears to rankle. In 1993, a Hawaiian named Akebono grew to become the primary foreigner to achieve the highest rank of “yokozuna,” sparking a non permanent maintain on recruiting sumo wrestlers from outdoors Japan.
Constraints had been step by step softened, and the quantity of non-Japanese skilled wrestlers has been rising. They nonetheless symbolize a small minority, however their success typically sparks discussions in regards to the place of foreigners within the sport.
Though sumo has gained some traction outdoors of Japan, its rituals nonetheless often create detrimental impressions of Japanese tradition. At a event in 2018, for instance, a native official collapsed whereas giving a speech. Female medics who rushed to assist him had been advised to depart the sumo ring, thought-about a sacred area polluted by a girl’s presence. The chairman of the Japan Sumo Association later apologized, however the incident introduced criticism that the sumo world was clinging to anachronistic traditions.
Sumo continues to vary. A 1926 Tokyo authorities ban on girls’s sumo is not in drive, and there at the moment are some feminine wrestlers in beginner golf equipment. But girls are nonetheless barred from skilled competitors.
Tournaments are actually widespread with vacationers, however they typically go for a one-time expertise. One may ask if sumo can change sufficient to play an efficient position in Japan’s sports activities diplomacy. The reply depends upon whether or not sumo leaders are extra eager about sustaining the sport’s Japanese identification or constructing world connections.