Get Ready For A Beating

Much of the content of this blog appeared in magazine form in the Summer Edition (No. 67) of Kyoto Journal.
View the (slow loading) pdf here.

(Re)postscript

After a year or so offline, I’m reposting “In the Hall of the Mountain Kings,” my blog chronicling life among sumo wrestlers. I had taken it offline while I used its entries as notes to write the magazine-length story that served as my journalism school master’s thesis. With that project long finished, I decided there’s no reason not to repost.

I must apologize for never really bringing any closure to the story I told about the wrestlers of the Hanaregoma sumo stable. I started off with daily posts from the stable, presenting my experiences there as I had them. Toward the end, though, I was back at school and struggling to find time to turn my notebook entries into blog posts. I wound up posting only once every couple weeks about events that occurred months earlier, before petering out altogether.

Here’s one final funny story, though:

Soon after starting the blog, I began using statcounter.com to keep track of visitors. A few dozen posts in, I noticed that I was getting hits through a linkage with the French-language sumo fan site www.info-sumo.net. When I checked it out myself, I saw that someone was translating my blog into French. Flattered, I got in touch with the translator and asked him if I could cut and paste his renderings into a French-language mirror image of my blog that I called "Dans l'antre du roi de la montagne." He was generous enough to let me do so. But I had no way of knowing how accurate or faithful his translation was; I don’t know French.

Anyway, I checked up on "Dans l'antre du roi de la montagne"’s traffic every so often and saw it was getting a few hits each week. But a few weeks after the French version went up, I saw a drastic spike in traffic to the site. I was suddenly getting thousands -- literally -- of visitors each day. And they were all coming from the same place: www.jacqueschirac.org

“jacqueschirac.org…?” I thought. “Does that have anything to do with the French president?”

I logged onto that site and saw that, yes, it did have something to do with famously sumo-loving Chirac. “Le Blog personnel de Jacque Chirac” it said along the top of the screen: Jacque Chirac’s personal blog. And then, along the “Liens” column to the right of the screen -- between “Le site de Johnny Hallyday” and “Le Blog de Dominique Strauss-Kahn” was a link to the Francophone rendering of my own words.

“Oh my god…,” I said to myself. “The president of France digs my blog.”

I spent the next week or so beaming with pride at my trans-Atlantic success. I told countless friends and acquaintances -- and especially enemies -- “The president of France digs my blog.”

Now, it just so happened that a technology reporter for Le Monde was in residence that semester at my journalism school. If anyone was going to be taken by such a tale of cross-cultural linkage across the blogosphere, it would be him, I figured. I sat down at my computer one afternoon and told him the whole story.

His reply: “Fun. I am not sure the site is exactly what it says though...”

In other words: “You’ve been punk’d.”

It turned out that jacqueschirac.org was a hoax. It was a site parodying the French president, something I would have known if I had spoken French.

At any rate, thanks again for reading. Check out the version of my Chanko Nabe entry that ran on the Associated Press’ new asap service: Grappling with a weight issue.

Kazuya's Match

Enter here.

Afternoon at the Tournament

Not many matches after the Sekitori's victory on the first day of the January tournament, the juryo bouts ended. I could tell from the printed schedule and the lighted scoreboards hanging over the eastern and western sides of the auditorium that the highest-ranking wrestlers, the makuuchi, would begin fighting. According to the schedule, their ring-entry ceremony, in which they would all be introduced, was about to begin.

But instead, a voice announced something over the public address system that I couldn't clearly understand, and the Japanese national anthem started playing. Everyone stood up, so I stood up too. Standing for the national anthem at a sporting event was normal enough, but then I noticed that everyone was looking up and to the front of the auditorium. I looked up, expecting to see a Japanese flag.

Instead, I saw the Emperor and Empress of Japan seated in a balcony over the auditorium's northern entrance, waving graciously to the crowd. The gray-haired imperial couple smiled and waved like kindly grandparents as the music played and I found myself strangely affected by the experience: I'd never seen a king or queen in person before, let alone an emperor or empress.

When the music stopped, the couple sat down and the tournament proceeded, with some 20 wrestlers lining up in the western hanamichi. They climbed atop the dohyo, which they circled as their names were called. Nobody elicited applause as strong as did Takamisakari, the tall, relatively lean wrestler who appears in television commercials for tea-flavored rice porridge and was famous for his flamboyant, self-consciously stiff pre-fight posturing in the ring, for which he'd earned the nickname "Robot". Rumor in the stable had it that Takamisakari gave Kitamura his cauliflower ears when the two were both on the sumo team at Nihon University.

The wrestlers filed into the ring and shiko-ed in unison, then formed a circle around its border facing the audience as their names were called. Once they had all been announced, they turned around, faced the center, clapped their hands, lifted an arm and tugged up on their apron-like kesho-mawashi, which looked vaguely lewd, like they were lifting up their skirts. Then they threw both their arms up in the air and filed out of the ring. (I'm not sure what all these actions symbolize: like much that I encounter in the sumo world, different writers offer different interpretations.)

Next the "eastern" wrestlers filed down their hanamichi and onto the dohyo. Among the eastern wrestlers, the loudest applause easily went to Kaio, the ozeki-ranked wrestler that many hoped would join the Mongolian Asashoryu as a grand-champion, or yokozuna.



Like the western group, the easterners had a couple Caucasian wrestlers among them. I could guess which one was the Bulgarian Kotooshu from his kesho-mawashi, which said "Bulgaria" in the logotype of the Japanese yogurt brand of the same name.

Kesho-mawashi are actually holdovers from Edo-era sumo. When warring between rival landowners ended in that period, some continued to battle each other in sport by sponsoring sumo wrestlers and pitting them against their adversaries'. At that time, sumo wrestlers wore kesho-mawashi with the family crest of their samurai patron.

These days, though, wrestlers get their kessho-mawashi, which cost thousands of dollars to produce, from corporate sponsors or "support groups" made up of fans. The Sekitori's kesho-mawashi, for instance, is adorned with an image of an eagle, which the guys at the stable told me was the symbol of his Saitama-based support group. Takamisakari's kesho-mawashi, meanwhile, displayed the striped logo of the Nagatanien company, in whose television advertisements for rice-porridge broth he appeared. And the Bulgaria yogurt company apparently sponsored Kotooshu.

After this group of wrestlers left the dohyo, Asashoryu entered, accompanied by two attendant wrestlers—one of whom held a sheathed sword—and a gyoji with a tassel hanging from his paddle. The yokozuna also wore a kesho-mawashi, but its design was hidden by the lightning-bolt-shaped paper cutouts that hung from under the broad white rope tied around his waist. He did his shiko for the audience in what looked like slow motion before leaving the dohyo.



Next there was a brief award ceremony for wrestlers who'd won tournaments or earned other honors in the previous year's matches. Asashoryu came back into the ring in a simple silk mawashi and was handed a giant trophy by an older man in a business suit who was visibly relieved to have it out of his hands. Then the giant portraits of Asashoryu and Kaio—painted in honor of their tournament victories—that I'd seen outside the Kokugikan the previous day were unveiled. They had been hung high over the stands in the row of portraits of wrestlers who had won previous tournaments over the years.

After a few more awards were distributed, the makuuchi wrestlers began fighting. They arrived from the same hanamichi as the lower-ranked wrestlers, but they were preceded by younger attendants who placed plush cushions next to the dohyo for them to sit on. The winners of these matches remained on the stage after their opponents departed and were presented with thin envelopes of cash that the gyoji held out on his paddle.

Before some of the matches, a few young yobidashi in thin yellow topcoats circled the dohyo holding advertisements on banners. The companies being advertised were offering extra prize money to the match's winner, about $500 for each banner. The wrestlers also took this money off the gyoji's paddle after the match; the more banners there were before a match, the more envelopes the victor took from the gyoji's paddle when it was over.

Like commercials during network newscasts in the United States, most of the banners advertised medicines, dietary supplements and hospitals. And when I looked around the auditorium, I saw that the sumo demographic is similar to that of network news: old fans clearly outnumbered the young ones, although the apparently foreign spectators, of whom there were many, were on the young side.

Before Takamisakari's bout against Roho, the tall Russian with a vicious pockmarked face, nine yobidashi circled the dohyo, each carrying a striped Nagatanien rice-porridge banner. This was the largest number of banners yet to appear and the crowd cheered wildly as the yobidashi walked around the dohyo and the announcer shilled for the rice porridge.

When Takamisakari first appeared on the hanamichi, the audience had applauded him loudly and called out his name. He'd smiled humbly and sat down on the cushion his attendant had put out for him while he waited for the preceding match to be fought.

Now it was his turn to fight and he mounted the dohyo as the banner-bearing yobidashi left the ring. He played it cool at first, disinterestedly walking into his corner to warm up and scatter a little salt. He returned to the center of the ring to face Roho the first time, then went back to his corner and sprung into action.

First he threw out his huge arms, exhaling so forcefully that I could hear the air leaving his lungs. The crowd went nuts, and he kept the applause coming: he slapped himself in the face like Curly from the Three Stooges; he pounded on his chest with his fists; he did his trademark robotic shiko. When he tossed a heaping handful of salt into the center of the ring, the crowd exploded.

I was getting caught up in the excitement myself. This was easily the most exciting pre-fight posturing I'd seen all day. Before, when the only time I ever watched sumo was on television, I found antics like these hopelessly boring and usually skipped the live sumo broadcasts in favor of the highlights that played on television after the matches, which only showed the bouts themselves.

But here at the tournament, it was a completely different story. Taking everything in at once—the wrestlers working simultaneously to psyche each other out; the shouts from the audience; the salt crystals streaming through the air and catching the glare from the overhead lights—was absolutely exhilarating. (Baseball's the same way: waiting for a pitch while watching a game on television is duller than I can handle; at the ballpark, though, where you can feel the tension, it's exciting.)

If fact, over the years, these pre-fight warm-up/psych-out sessions were abbreviated with broadcast audiences in mind. Until early in the century, they'd go on as long as the wrestlers wanted. But when live radio broadcasts of matches began, the posturing was limited to 10 minutes. Now, with television broadcast schedules to stick to, wrestlers only have four minutes to stretch out and throw salt (over 100 pounds each day).

In most cases, though, four minutes is still often several hundred times longer than it takes for the wrestlers to actually fight. Takamisakari's match against Roho, at about a minute, was an eternity compared to many other matches, which last mere seconds. The two met in the center of the ring, grabbed each other's mawashi and pushed each other by millimeters until Roho thrust Takamisakari forward and out of the ring in one exerted shove. Takamisakari left the ring looking genuinely upset; he actually pouted, something wrestlers usually don't do. Roho, meanwhile, went home with the cash that Takamisakari's sponsor had ponied up.

A few matches later when it was Kaio's turn to fight, even more banner-bearing yobidashi circled the stage: 10 this time. Kaio's opponent, Iwakiyama, had a protruding jaw and forehead that made him resemble Jay Leno—except that his face was likely indented from being repeatedly bashed in by the heads of his opponents. The two seemed well matched during the bout's initial moments, but when his opponent lost his footing near the edge of the dohyo, Kaio easily pushed him out of bounds. Iwakiyama nearly stammered off the raised dohyo.

The cheering reached a new crescendo. Seeing Kaio make his way toward potential elevation to yokozuna rank was arguably what most of the fans had come hoping for. The next and final match, in which Asashoryu beat fellow Mongolian Hakuho, felt like an anticlimax after Kaio's victory.

Notes on the Sekitori

I was glad to see the Sekitori win his match. Having lived under the same roof for a couple weeks, I felt a sort of loyalty toward him, despite his mistreatment of the stable's other wrestlers. But I was also surprised by how much support he got from other fans. Why had he received so many cheers?, I wondered.

One answer came in the form of an email from an English fan who said he trains at the same northeast Tokyo amateur stable where the Sekitori got his start. Most wrestlers grew up far away from Japan's big cities, off of Japan's main island or on it's northern and southern tips. But the Sekitori is from Saitama prefecture, much of which consists of bedroom communities for workers in Tokyo.

He "is basically a local lad of sorts," wrote the English fan.

I also learned from David Shapiro, the American sumo announcer, that the Sekitori is in the middle of a comeback. I knew that the Sekitori was competing in his second tournament as a juryo-ranked wrestler, but I didn't know that he had ascended to—and then fallen from—that rank once before. Shapiro told me that the Sekitori suffers from diabetes and had lost the rank before because he was weakened by his condition.

But, his health having improved, the Sekitori was now on the upswing. "He's a great kid with lots of promise and a great work ethic," Shapiro said.

The Sekitori had actually dropped his old ring name and taken on his current one, Ishide, as a way of distancing himself from his illness and losses. A few people told me that if he ascended even higher—as he stood poised to do if he performed well enough in this tournament—he'd likely change his name yet again.

"There's nothing special about a name like 'Ishide'," Miki explained over lunch the day before the tournament started. "It's like calling yourself 'Miki'."

In fact, the Sekitori did fight well enough to advance to Makuuchi rank in the tournement, winning nine out of 15 matches; but he's competing in the Osaka tournament as "Ishide".

NEXT: Afternoon at the Tournament

The Sekitori Fights

After we left the wrestlers' changing room, Miki took me into the press club office, the walls of which were stained yellow. In an earlier time, before smoking was banned in the entire Kokugikan, only the most devoted chain smokers probably dared enter. Dark smudges spotted the yellow surface and the place smelled like old sesame oil, as though decades of Chinese takeout had permeated the atmosphere.

Sports writers from all of Japan's big newspapers had desks in the room, which was divided into cubicles. The Yomiuri seemed to have a cubicle all to itself. But with the important matches still hours away, the room was nearly empty of reporters.

I left my jacket and bag in the Yomiuri cubicle, then went back into the auditorium to watch more of the matches. I sat in the corral on the west side of the room that was perpetually on reserve by the newspaper. I noticed Haruki, the yobidashi, sitting with a small crowd of other young yobidashi near the mouth of the hanamichi.



When I got hungry a little before one in the afternoon, I went back to the press room to pick up my computer so I could check my email at the McDonald's across the street that had a wireless signal.

I ate a cheeseburger and spent a little time replying to messages, then went back to the tournament. When I returned, a bit past two, the atmosphere in the auditorium had completely changed. It felt more like a park full of boozy cherry-blossom viewers than a stadium of sports fans. About two-thirds of the corrals were now occupied with spectators, who were sitting on their cushions, drinking beer and eating delicate tidbits from sectioned plastic lunch trays. Many had big paper bags overflowing with liquor, snacks and souvenirs that the "tea-house" stands near the building's entrance provide.

These stands are actually a vestige from sumo's days as an outdoor activity, when actual freestanding tea houses set up outside the temporary stadium structures built on temple grounds. In their current incarnation, they not only sell food and drink, but are also where the vast majority of sumo fans go to reserve tickets. According to one estimate, up to 90 percent of ticket sales are handled by these shops, which have been criticized for selling only to preferred patrons and freezing out regular fans. The sumo association's methods of disbursing tickets to the tea houses led to one of the sport's most serious scandals in the late 1950's, when it was revealed that the wife and daughter of the sumo association's chairman were running two of the biggest shops, as P.L. Cuyler explains in her book about sumo. At the height of the scandal, the chairman, Dewanoumi, attempted ritual suicide before being replaced.

When fans get to the tournament, they check in with the tea house they bought their ticket from and are shown the way to their seat or corral by an usher dressed in a topcoat and knickers who works for the stand. I saw these guys leading their clients through the growing chaos in the auditorium as I made my way back to the press room to drop off my bags.

The press room was now filled with reporters watching the sumo matches on television. I left and went back to the Yomiuri's corral until the paper's official guests for the day arrived, when their usher told me to split. Then I moved down one row to the press seats behind a long desk set into the floor.

By this time, the juryo-ranked wrestlers—like the Sekitori—had started their matches. They wore smooth-looking silk mawashi in various colors, while the wrestlers I saw fighting before lunch wore the same coarse gray canvas mawashi that they practice in at their stables. And their sagari were stiff and stick-like, unlike the loose stingy ones that their juniors wore in the dohyo earlier. (I'd read that the high-ranking wrestlers' sagari were stiffened with starch, though when I asked Hiroki about them later, he said they are treated in a solution of boiling seaweed.) The juryo wrestlers also wore their hair in more elaborate topknots: they fanned out in the back in a shape likened to a gingko leaf, from which the hairstyle gets its name, "oicho."

The juryo matches were also more suspenseful and entertaining. The wrestlers in the morning matches seemed to just bully each other around the ring, pushing and tugging their opponents until someone fell down or was pushed out of bounds. But these guys moved fast and furiously, their arms snaking around each other's bodies wildly searching for the best grip. Even the yobidashi were better: they had stronger voices. And the gyoji wore real robes—not knicker suits—and they had metal ornaments set into their paddles.

The juryo matches were also eliciting considerably more enthusiasm than those of the low-ranked guys. The only wrestler who was cheered for by name during the morning matches was a young Caucasian giant named Baruto, whom I later found out was Estonian. But a lot of the juryo wrestlers were having their names called out as they mounted the dohyo.

However, I don't think any of the juryo wrestlers was cheered as loudly as the Sekitori was when he entered the dohyo. I saw him walk down the hanamichi and sit beside the ring in front of me and was looking forward to seeing him fight.

"Ishide," came voices from all over the auditorium when it was his turn and he climbed onto the dohyo. "You go Ishide!"

Like the rest of the juryo I'd seen since returning from lunch, he took a lot longer getting himself ready for the tussle. Unlike the lower-ranked wrestlers, who just did a few quick shiko in the corner of the dohyo before facing off and charging each other, these guys took their time.

I watched the Sekitori get in the ring and take a ladleful of water into his mouth, which he spewed into a spittoon I only now realized was built into the side of the raised dohyo. He took a handful of salt from a bucket in the corner and sprinkled it onto his feet and legs then walked into the center of the ring and faced his opponent.

But they didn't fight, not yet.

Instead, both returned to their respective corners to sprinkle more salt on themselves, then shiko for the crowd.

"Ishide!" yelled someone behind me.

They returned to the center of the ring again, but again only stared into each other's eyes before going back to their corners, where they toweled themselves off and once more dipped their hands into their salt buckets. The Sekitori's opponent took a huge handful of salt and threw it arrogantly into the ring. The crowd roared.

The Sekitori took a much smaller handful, which he tossed gently into the ring, then softly rubbed it into the earth with his foot. The crowd cheered for this too. The Sekitori's public persona, I was beginning to understand, was the opposite of his character in the stable. In the ring he was temperate and humble.



"Go Ishide!" I heard again to my side.

Again they returned to the center of the ring where they gazed fearsomely into each other's eyes. And this time they stayed put. When the gyoji signaled with his fan, they tapped their fists onto the ground and lunged at each other.

Within moments, the Sekitori had wound his arm behind his opponent's back. Seconds after that, he'd flung him from the ring, while the crowd cheered more loudly than I'd heard all morning.

I caught myself cheering too.



NEXT: Notes on the Sekitori

Morning at the Tournament

I got to Ryogoku on Sunday—the first day of the tournament—at 10 in the morning, about two hours after the matches had started. A wrestler got off the train the same time I did, presumably on his way to compete. Downstairs from the platforms, I saw Tatsuya passing through the ticket gates. He didn't recognize me at first, perhaps because I was wearing a jacket and tie and had let my beard and mustache grow back in.

"Tatsuya," I called out. He looked surprised to see me. "How'd it go?" I asked him.

"I lost," he said matter-of-factly.

I told him I'd see him on Tuesday, when I'd come back to spend a few more nights at the stable. Then I left the station and went into the public relations office at the Kokugikan to pick up my press pass.

In the auditorium, the league's lowest-ranked wrestlers were fighting. The matches were proceeding in quick succession and with little ceremony. When I walked in, the gyoji presiding over the matches wore what looked like a blue jumpsuit that ended at his legs in a pair of knickers.

Meanwhile, the wrestlers' names were being called by a yobidashi in a blue robe with "Natori" printed on his back. I thought that must be his name, but knew I was mistaken when he was replaced by a yobidashi with "Ozeki Sake" on the back of his robe. Then I realized that his robe was actually an advertisement for the Natori snack company.

The dohyo was also surrounded by judges, called "shinpan," in black kimono. They sat one apiece on the floor at the foot of the dohyo on the north, east and west sides, with two sitting beside each other on the south side. The shinpan, I knew, were all former wrestlers who had once wrestled at the sport's highest ranks.

They had the final word on the matches' winners. If a shinpan disagreed with the gyoji, he could call a quick conference with his colleagues atop the dohyo and, if they all agreed, reverse the gyoji's judgment. The chief shinpan—who sat on the north side of the ring—wore an earplug that connected him to a sixth judge hidden away in a control booth where he could watch video replays of a disputed match.

The shinpan to the east and west of the dohyo were each flanked by two wrestlers, the next pair to compete. Wrestlers waited on the side of the side of the dohyo that matched where they were listed on the banzuke, or ranking sheet, (i.e. wrestlers listed under the "east" column on the banzuke waited on the east side of the dohyo).

The next wrestler up waited until the yobidashi sang his name in a drawn-out, quavering voice while opening a white fan. The melody and the singing style reminded me of the song that sweet potato venders play out of the trucks they drive around Tokyo in the winter selling baked yams.

After the yobidashi sang out their names (and compass direction), the wrestlers mounted the dohyo. His place beside the shinpan was filled by the next wrestler in line, who emerged from a corridor under the stands. (The corridor, I'd read, was called a hanamichi, or "flower path." The aisle kabuki performers take to the stage is also called a hanamichi.)

Next the gyoji waved his paddle from one side of the dohyo to the other while calling out the names of the wrestlers a second time. He spoke in the theatrical, forceful voice of a Noh performer or Shinto priest. The wrestlers, in the meantime, did a few shiko in their respective corners at the south side of the ring facing the hanimichi from which they'd arrived. Over their thighs fell their sagari, the rows of thin ropes attached to a belt they wore tucked into their mawashi. Different wrestlers had different color sagari. I'm not sure what their purpose and significance is: one book I consulted said they're related to Shinto; another said they hang over a wrestler's pelvis to specify the part of the mawashi that's off limits for grabbing during the match.

When the gyoji finished calling out the wrestlers' names, he held the paddle level with the ground, lifted it up, and stepped back. At that signal that the wrestlers walked to the center of the ring while their names were announced for a third and final time over the public address system. Then the gyoji signaled with his paddle and the wrestlers bent their knees, tapped on the dirt floor with their fists, threw their sagari over their crouching thighs, and lunged at each other.

The gyoji followed the wrestlers around the ring as they tussled chanting what sounded to me like "teribu-teribu-teribu-tah." It turned out that he was actually saying "nokotta, nokotta, nokotta," which means something like, "You're still going."

When one wrestler had thrust the other out of the ring, or thrown him on the ground, or maneuvered him off his feet, the gyoji pointed his paddle in the compass direction associated with the winner. Then the two wrestlers faced each other in the middle of the ring and bowed. The loser walked off the dohyo, while the winner crouched down before the gyoji, who called out his name.

When I walked in, there was only a smattering of spectators—a lot of them Caucasians—in the lower-tier corrals and the mezzanine above was virtually empty. Miki had told me the day before that some sumo fans buy single-seat tickets on the mezzanine level, which can cost as little as $40, and watch from the ground level until the spectators who'd paid at least $370 for their four-seater corral arrived. Foreigners are especially notorious for that practice, Miki said; most Japanese don't care about the early matches and only arrive at around 2:30 or three o'clock, when the highly ranked, higher-profile wrestlers face off.

I had been sitting in an empty corral myself while I watched the matches. The first ones I saw were between jonidan-ranked wrestlers, but as the morning progressed, more highly ranked wrestlers began fighting. Every few matches, new gyoji and yobidashi were rotated in, their ranks increasing along with the wrestlers'. A couple of the matches I watched were decided by the gyoji that lived at the stable where I stayed, and one of the yobidashi whom I'd seen help remake the stable's dohyo announced the names of the combatants in a few consecutive matches.

I had been watching for about an hour when Miki arrived. He brought me under the stands and into one of the "west-side" wrestlers' changing room. It was a long room with a narrow corridor running between raised tatami floors, on which dozens of wrestlers sat in various stages of undress. Kazuya, who must have wrestled moments before I arrived, was on his way out. I asked him how his match went.

"I won," he said with healthy self-satisfaction in his voice.

NEXT: The Sekitori Fights

Eko-in

THE "POWER MOUND"

Just inside the Kokugikan's entrance hall was a glass display case filled with sumo trophies. There was a giant chrome Coke bottle—"the Coca-Cola trophy," according to the plaque at its base. Another trophy was a huge glass cylinder filled with dehydrated mushrooms. The "Czech cup" was a giant crystal goblet that stood in front of a Pilsner Urquell beer poster.

I was looking over the trophies when I heard someone call my name. I looked up and saw a youngish guy with slicked-back bangs in a gray-checked blazer and black pants. I guessed, correctly, that it was Miki.

Miki hustled me out of the entry hall and into the public relations office, the same place where I had met the Oyakata. He had a Yomiuri photographer take me into the hallway and shoot my picture for the tournament press pass he'd promised me. Back inside the office, the newspaper reporters and photographers who'd collected there were picking over a tableful of press swag: press releases, DVD's, photos.

Also on the table was a small selection of Hello Kitty figurines wearing sumo-related costumes: Kitty in a gyoji's vestments, Kitty in a kesho mawashi. One even had Kitty's white kitten head perversely transposed onto the round, flesh-colored body of a mawashi-wearing sumo wrestler.

Miki had me wait for him while he typed into his laptop, which he had jacked into his cellular phone. Then he took me to lunch at a tempura restaurant and ordered us both bowls of scrambled shellfish over rice, with which we drank beer.

Miki ate quickly. When we left the restaurant, he told me I could come to the Kokugikan any time the next day—the first of the tournament—and pick up my press pass, which would let me come and go as I pleased. Before we split up, I had him show me the way to the Eko-in temple, which I was interested in checking out because of its connection to sumo wrestling.

Eko-in, in fact, is what brought sumo to the Ryogoku section of what's now Tokyo in the first place. It was built in the mid-18th century to inter and memorialize the 100,000-plus victims of a fire that had destroyed much of the city about 100 years earlier. But Eko-in didn't have access to the cash stream that supported most temples: since its graves were anonymous, it couldn't collect dues from the family members of those that it interred. So it began sustaining itself with biannual sumo matches, which thousands attended.

Sumo on temple grounds was nothing new. Temples and shrines had long raised money by hosting the hodgepodge of disenfranchised samurai and migrants from the countryside that performed the prizefights that became modern sumo. Before Eko-in began hosting the matches, most were held on the grounds of the Fukagawa Hachiman shrine down the Sumida river. But once they moved to Eko-in, it became the chief venue for sumo and Ryogoku soon became the sport's de facto headquarters.

In the early 20th century, sumo gained new prestige, as the flurry of national pride that followed Japan's victories in its recent wars with China and Russia turned the Westernizing country's gaze back toward its native culture. As a uniquely Japanese expression, sumo wrestling was elevated to Japan's national sport and given a permanent home: the Kokugikan that was built near the temple.

These days, though, the only thing that seems to link Eko-in to its sumo past is the stone with the inscription "power mound" near its entryway, which was erected in the 1930's as a memorial to a wrestler. The temple itself sits at the end of a busy road behind a corporate-looking cement-and-steel archway. Gone are the vast temple grounds that allowed it to house the massive temporary structures in which sumo was once performed. It's now a cluttered compound of modern one-story buildings. But its history as a graveyard remains on clear display in the dense block of tombs off to the side.



NEXT: Morning at the Tournament

The Big Dohyo-Matsuri

The day after I saw the wrestlers train in front of the yokozuna promotion council, Miki, the Yomiuri reporter who'd arranged my stay at the stable—and whom I still hadn't met in person—sent me an email. He wrote that the sumo association was going to hold a dohyo-matsuri on Saturday morning to sanctify the ring at the Kokugikan before the start of the January tournament. He invited me to drop by and said he would meet me there afterwards.

I arrived late and by the time I got there, a small crowd had formed along the roped-off entrance to the stadium. People held cameras and craned their necks for a clear view of whoever was supposed to emerge from the doors. Leaning against the doors were two almost billboard-sized paintings of wrestlers, whom I recognized from the sumo magazine I bought a few days earlier.

One was Kaio, standing with his muscular arms at his side; the other was the Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu, pictured kneeling midway through an elaborate shiko. Both wore the ornate apron-like kesho-mawashi that designated their advanced rank. Asashoryu wore a broad rope around his waist with lightning-bolt-shaped paper cutouts hanging between his crouching thighs. The rope and cutouts identified him as a yokozuna.

These portraits, I later learned, memorialized the wrestlers' victories in the tournaments held last year. Asashoryu had won five championships; Kaio had won only one.

At first I thought that the crowd was waiting to get into the dohyo-matsuri, but now and then a guard would usher someone through the pack and into the entrance. I worried I was missing the ceremony inside, so I wandered over to the side entrance by the sumo museum and walked in without being stopped. I saw a guard and asked him where the dohyo-matsuri was being held; he motioned toward a nearby set of three doors. I assumed my jacket and tie were affording me this unfettered access.

I stepped through the doors and into the enormous wrestling hall. The dohyo was at its center, set into a raised trapezoid of packed earth barely larger than the ring itself. A wooden Shinto-style roof was suspended over the dohyo, with thick red, white, black and green tassels hanging from each corner. These four tassels are said to represent the four seasons, the four points on the compass, or four mythical beings, depending on whose explanation you're reading. But nobody seems to dispute that they at least symbolize the four pillars that once supported the canopy.

Until the 20th century, sumo matches were held outdoors, often in dohyo under canopies to protect wrestlers from rain and snow. When the sport moved inside the Kokugikan (literally, "national sport hall") that was built specifically for sumo matches in 1909, the roof came with it. But now that matches were held indoors, the roof served no practical purpose and the pillars that supported it blocked spectators' views of the ring. So in the 1930's (or the 1950's, depending, again, on your source), the thick tassels replaced the pillars.

The canopy itself, meanwhile, was modeled after the roofs that cover many Shinto shrines. I've read that it bears an especially close resemblance to the roof of the Ise Shrine in Mie prefecture. The Ise Shrine is dedicated to the Sun Goddess that, according to Japan's native cosmology, began Japan's imperial line. This makes it one of the country's most important religious sites.

But while the Ise Shrine was established millennia ago, it has only shared roof styles with sumo dohyo since the 1930's, when it was introduced to the Kokugikan to make sumo look more classically Japanese. Before then, the canopy over the dohyo was modeled after roofs of traditional farmhouses in the Japanese countryside.

Around the dohyo were two tiers of seating. The lower tier consisted of floor seating with 15 gradually sloping levels of corrals divided by calf-high metal rails. Each corral was just large enough for four people, and four square cushions divided the orange-carpeted enclosures into quarters. A small wooden tray with four ceramic teacups waited in the center of each corral. Below the levels of corrals, there were a few rows of cushions directly on the ground around the dohyo. The upper mezzanine tier extended over the corrals on the lower levels and was made up of 15 or so rows of red folding seats.

A few spectators, mostly lone watchers who had claimed a coral for themselves, watched the dohyo-matsuri, which seemed to be following the same basic sequence as the one I saw performed at the stable. But this one was far more intricate, with three gyoji performing the rites, each looking more explicitly priestly than Hage-san. Unlike Hage-san's flamboyant costume, their formal hats and robes were identical to the vestments worn by actual Shinto priests. The main gyoji, who recited the prayers, wore a gold robe; the other two wore white ones.



The dohyo was surrounded by Oyakata and other sumo functionaries in dark suits. They shared the sake and other offerings that the wrestlers sampled at the dohyo-matsuri I watched at the stable.

When the ceremony ended, I followed the small audience outside, where the crowd around the front entrance had grown. Soon after I joined the crowd, Kaio and Asashoryu emerged from the building wearing formal kimono. I recognized Kaio's ursine face from when he appeared before the yokozuna promotion council. But I'd never seen Asashoryu in person and was surprised by how young he appeared with his pudgy unlined face.



An older Japanese man ceremoniously handed each of them a smaller version of the giant portraits of themselves that they now stood in front of. I couldn't make out who the old guy was, but assumed he was either a member of the sumo association or a representative from the Mainichi newspaper, which commissioned the paintings. When he handed Asashoryu his portrait, a short, old Japanese woman in front of me remarked bitterly to an equally short old woman beside her: "He just came back from Mongolia last week."

Then the two wrestlers edged up close to one another and shook hands for the cameras that everyone in the crowd seemed to be holding. "You go, Kaio!" shouted the old woman in front of me.



Indeed, with the tournament a day away, the question that seemed to be on the minds of all sumo fans was whether Kaio would perform well enough to become a yokozuna in this tournament. Japanese fans, I had read, were tired of having a foreigner alone at the pinnacle of their national sport. They wanted a Japanese yokozuna.

But, so far, Kaio's chances didn't seem very good. He had suffered multiple losses to lower ranked wrestlers during the yokozuna promotion council session—I even saw one of the oyakata there publicly chide him for losing so many matches, though I didn't know who he was at the time.

Some fans and commentators blamed his poor performance before the council on Asashoryu. The yokozuna missed the session, his oyakata said, because he had returned from his New Year's vacation in Mongolia with a cold. Kaio lost so many matches because he had to pick up Asashoryu's slack and fight more than he would have otherwise had to, some were saying.

Implicit in many fans' comments, it seemed to me, was some resentment that Asashoryu had left Japan for the New Year's holiday.

"It's been a longstanding tradition in the sumo world that wrestlers wait and take their New Year's holiday after the year's opening tournament," wrote one commentator in the Asahi newspaper. "If Asashoryu loses several matches [because of his illness], he will likely receive the criticism that he deserves."

I don't think this bitterness stemmed from resentment over a lack of a Japanese yokozuna. Instead, I feel like Japanese see Asashoryu as not living up to the demands of his esteemed position.

Sumo wrestlers dress like Japanese of centuries past, surround themselves with emblems of Japan's native religion and observe traditional Japanese social mores and customs with a greater gusto than the rest of the population. In all this, they are kind of like a distilled version of an exaggerated form of Japanese-ness. So the sport's sole champion should be an exemplar of Japanese behavior, whether he's Japanese or not. Slacking off on pre-tournament practice after splitting for Mongolia just wasn't becoming for a yokozuna, the subtext seemed to be.

At any rate, once the brief award ceremony ended, the crowd dispersed and the rope boundary was taken down. I wandered back into the Kokugikan to kill time until I heard from Miki, from whom I expected a phone call.

NEXT: Eko-in

Brutality

Once, while I was typing up some notes in the bedroom at the stable, I asked Murayoshi what the real name was for what I'd been calling the "Zamboni sessions," during which the wrestlers push each other across the ring between grappling matches.

"Butsukarigeiko," he answered. "It's the most brutal part of practice."

After a moment, he asked me, "Do you think we're rough on each other?"

"Yes," I answered without missing a beat. At practice that day, I saw Moriyasu pull Batto around by his neck and throw him on the ground every time the Mongolian failed to push him across the ring during butsukarigeiko. Moriyasu tortured him like this endlessly, until Batto was covered in dirt, hyperventilating and weeping. I could barely watch after a while, but nobody else seemed to regard it as a very big deal.

"I thought Moriyasu was really rough on Batto today," I said.

"Oh, that?" said Murayoshi. "That was nothing. It used to be much more rougher."

When Murayoshi joined the stable 11 years ago, such brutality during butsukarigeiko was a daily occurrence, he said. And he said wrestlers went even harder on their subordinate stablemates before his time.

"But Japanese people these days aren't as thick-skinned," he said. "They whine and get homesick. They wouldn't put up with too many beatings; they'd just pack up and leave."

In addition to being beaten by each other, Murayoshi said, they were also whacked around pretty regularly by the Oyakata and the Kashira. "When I started, the Kashira used to beat me with a stick if I made the same mistake more than once," he said. "Sometimes he hit me because he thought I had a bad attitude."

A few days later, Hiroki substantiated Murayoshi's description of the Kashira of years' past. Now a harmless if thuggish presence in the stable, the Kashira was apparently once a real mean son of a bitch. He used to sit, watching practice in the same spot before the heater that he still occupies, with a long, menacing stick across his lap. "If someone fouled up during practice, he'd whack him in the ass or the thigh—sometimes he'd even knock him in the head," he said.

But about four years ago, Hiroki said, the Kashira changed. His temper cooled down and he stopped attacking the wrestlers during practice. And the stick disappeared.

David Shapiro, the American sumo expert I talked to after I left the stable, offered a similar reason as Murayoshi's for sumo having grown more gentle: modern Japanese kids won't put up with too many beatings.

"It's how they're being raised at home," Shapiro told me. "Before the war, if a kid goes out to do sumo, his dad says, 'Don't come back home until you reach juryo," which is the Sekitori's rank. "Now his mom says, 'If you don't like it, just come home.' It's hard for a kid who's raised like this to take a beating and then come back for more."

This trend of young Japanese growing less indulgent of their superiors is beneficial to a modern country trying to raise a questioning, assertive citizenry, Shapiro said. But it's no good for producing tough-as-nails sumo wrestlers.

When I visited the Oyakata in his office, I asked him if he thought sumo was getting gentler. He did, but he didn't see it as a consequence of the decline of corporal punishment in the sport. Rather he thought it was because young sumo wrestlers are unwilling to push themselves as hard as their forerunners were.

"Maybe it's getting gentler," he said. "But the problem is with the wrestlers themselves. If someone works hard, then the sport if tougher."

The Oyakata didn't seem to miss the days when training involved a healthy dose of physical abuse. "Wrestlers don't get better through beatings," he said. "They get better through good training advice. Everyone's body is different, so everyone needs to be trained differently. Just beating someone with a stick is easy."

NEXT: The Big Dohyo-Matsuri

The Stablemates and I

I went directly from the Oyakata's office back to the stable. There was more I wanted to talk to the wrestlers about.

It was obvious to me what motivated them to progress through the ranks: like I wrote before, promotion means an exponential improvement in the quality of their lives. But what motivated them to join the stable in the first place has was a mystery to me. I asked them, of course, but never got a satisfying answer. They generally said something along the lines of, "I got recruited," and left it at that.

Despite the warmth and openness with which the wrestlers treated me, I wasn't able to get too far below the surface to see what makes them tick. One reason, of course, was the language barrier that mucked up our communications. These guys speak a pastiche of youth culture slang, regional dialect and sumo patois that left me clueless to what they said to each other and sometimes even to what they said directly to me.

There were also the dissimilarities between them and myself. Sure, there was the physical aspect, which often made me feel like a guppy swimming among catfish, especially when I put on a mawashi and got into the dohyo with them. And there were the general cultural differences, with me being American and they - except the one Mongolian - all being Japanese.

There are class differences too. The Oyakata insisted when I dropped by his office that the wrestlers come from all different social and educational levels. Indeed, Kitamura joined the stable after doing college sumo at a fairly prestigious, pricey university. But most of the guys I talked to do come from working-class families, which is a lot different from me and the bookish middle-middle-class family that I come from.

These guys are also devoted athletes and, in some cases, accomplished ones. I, meanwhile, didn't play a single sport between Cub Scout softball and the intramural soccer team I played on until my teammates—tired of me dragging them down—stopped telling me when the games were. And they are working through commitments of a decade or more that they made to themselves and the stable, while I have trouble committing to an entrée when I'm ordering dinner.

Of course, being at the stable to write about the wrestlers, their sport and their lives, I had a responsibility to overcome these differences and find a way to understand them a little bit. I thought by spending a lot of time with them and allowing a level of trust to grow between us, I could do this, and I was somewhat successful. But in a way, it was also counterproductive.

A reporter's standard routine is to drop into people's lives with a notebook for a brief snatch of time and ask them questions. If you don't like the answer you get, you ask harder, more probing questions. In fact, you keep asking questions until you get a satisfying answer and if that alienates the person you're talking to, well, that's too bad. After all, you're looking for quotes and insights, not new friends.

But in the stable, while I always had my notebook and was constantly writing in it, I didn't report in the same way as if I'd dropped by for the afternoon. My information gathering was done during chats over dinner or during commercials. They were friendly conversations more than formal interviews. And if I asked a guy over dinner why he became a sumo wrestler in the first place, and he says, "I got recruited," I wasn't comfortable saying, "No, come on, really, why? Why'd you let yourself get recruited?" It wouldn't have been friendly.

The best way to deal with this, I decided was to wait until I left the stable, then come back on a brief visit for the sole purpose of interviewing the wrestlers about how they got into sumo and what they thought of the lifestyle. So after meeting with the Oyakata, I went back to the stable to sit down with some of the guys. That's where much of the information in the "Stablemates" interludes comes from.

NEXT: Brutality

The Photo Hall

Visit The Photo Hall of the Mountain Kings.

NEXT: The Stablemates and I

A Chat With the Oyakata

THE OYAKATA, AT THE STABLE

At three o'clock, I arrived at the Oyakata's office, the same place that Usuda brought me to weeks ago when I moved into the stable. I saw the Oyakata marking up papers at his desk in the back of the room.

"My name is Jacob," I told the receptionist by the door. "I have an appointment with Hanaregomo Oyakata."

She asked me to wait and walked to the back of the room, where I saw her say something to the Oyakata. He looked up and waved me back toward him.

"Happy New Year," I said when I reached his desk.

"Uh, happy New Year," he responded, sounding like he'd forgotten that the previous year had ended so recently. He motioned for me to sit down in the chair in front of his desk. "You have a beard," he said with the trace of a grin.

"I actually shaved before I entered the stable," I explained. "I thought I'd be putting on a mawashi more often and I'd never seen a sumo wrestler with a beard…until I saw that big Eastern European guy at the practice this morning."

"Oh, you were there?" he said. "You must be thinking of Kokkai. He's from Georgia."

Meanwhile, the receptionist had brought each of us a plastic cup of coffee set in a reusable rubber holder with a handle. The Oyakata sipped his and lit a cigarette. I ignored mine, still wired from the coffee I drank at McDonald's while checking my email and at the café while awaiting my appointment with the Oyakata. I started in with my questions about how he became a sumo wrestler.

It turned out that he entered the sport reluctantly. As a 19-year-old, he was happily enrolled in college in his hometown in Yamaguchi prefecture, where he studied law and wrestled on the judo team, but his parents had other ideas for him.

"They said, 'Go, give sumo a try," he said. "I didn't want to, but I didn't have a choice: they weren't going to pay my college tuition anymore."

I asked him why his parents wanted him to be a sumo wrestler so badly, while the receptionist, seeing my untouched cup of coffee, replaced it with a mug of green tea.

"My father loved sumo," he answered, and left it at that.

He entered Hanakago stable, not far from where he would later establish his own Hanaregoma stable. Stable life, he told me, was actually easier than life as a student athlete. In college, he said, his judo training sessions were just as intense as sumo practice in the stable, and he had to spend nearly the same amount of time looking after his senpai and helping cook meals in the house that the judo team shared. But when he was a student, he had schoolwork to do on top of all this; as a wrestler, he spent the afternoons napping and his evenings relaxing with his stablemates.

He spent 12 years wrestling with the stable, eventually reaching ozeki rank and becoming, it seems, a household name. Whenever I tell people here that I stayed in the stable run by the former ozeki Kaiketsu, they know exactly who I'm talking about and are deeply impressed, assuming they're old enough to have been paying attention to sumo when he was active in the 1970's.

As Kaiketsu, the Oyakata had a reputation as a solid, hardworking wrestler, I later learned from David Shapiro, an English-language sumo announcer on Japan's public television network and the author of a book on sumo. Kaiketsu was demoted from ozeki after losing a series of matches that he fought with an injury, but was one of the few wrestlers to have ever lost and then regained that rank. "He was famous for saying that dropping out of a match because of an injury was the same throwing a match," Shapiro later told me. "The entire nation loved that."

At the end of each tournament, a series of awards are handed to wrestlers in each division for the most wins, best technique, and so on. Kaiketsu won the kantosho award for fighting spirit seven times in his career. I don't know if that's a record, but I couldn't find any wrestlers who had won it more times.

In 1979, when he was 31, Kaiketsu retired from wrestling and became Hanaregoma Oyakata. He started his stable two years later. Not all oyakata have their own stable—some help coach at others' stables or have roles in administering the sumo association—but all stablemasters must be oyakata.

I asked the Oyakata why he wanted his own stable, and he looked at me like I'd asked the most naïve question imaginable. "I knew when I stopped sumo that I wanted to bring up wrestlers," he said. "It's a natural feeling—everyone feels like that. And even if you can't start your own stable, you want to remain involved with sumo."

The Oyakata even had a yokozuna come out of his stable. I didn't know it at the time, but one of the oyakata that came to the stable with his wrestlers weeks earlier—the rotund one I joked looked a little like a mobster—was the former yokozuna Onokuni, who wrestled in the 1980's.

Shapiro later told me that the Oyakata is now known for his competence as the head of the sumo association's busy public relations office. This has its downside, since it discourages the association's executives from rotating him into a less time-consuming post. "He's so busy that it's hard for him to recruit and difficult for him to train his guys the way he wants to train them," Shapiro said.

I had actually also asked the Oyakata about how he does his recruiting. He said he has friends all over the country who nominate wrestlers for his stable. He follows up with a phone call or a visit.

"I look for tall people; I look at whether they've done sports," he said. "But even if they've never played sports, if they really want to do sumo, it's okay. The most important thing is that they'll put their hearts into it."

His own experience—and, for that matter, that of Haruki—notwithstanding, the Oyakata said he's not interested in wrestlers whose parents pressure them to join. "It's got to be their own choice," he said.

But when the Oyakata finds someone he really wants in his stable, he'll sometimes spend years, as he did with Kazuya, trying to convince him to join, he said. "I tell them about the sumo life and how it will make them strong," he told me.

Yet, in today's Japan, with so many other, easier paths leading to clearer rewards, getting new wrestlers to join the stable is difficult, he said. "There are a lot of stables and so few people out there who want to join," the Oyakata said. "Everyone thinks sumo life is hard and exhausting, and they know they'll probably never make it far enough to become famous or earn much money."

I wondered if the difficulty of recruiting varied at all with the economy. Maybe, I reasoned, it was easier for him to find new wrestlers at the start of his tenure as an oyakata, before Japan's affluent "bubble economy" exposed the infinite number of easier ways to get by. And now perhaps it was getting easier for him to recruit again, since the start of the country's recession.

But this wasn't the case. "It' been difficult the whole time," he said. "It was difficult then; it's difficult now."

I'd been talking to the Oyakata for less than 30 minutes at this point and had already worked through most of my questions. The Oyakata, it turned out, was a man of few words. He'd answered my questions succinctly, but not always satisfactorily. It still wasn't entirely clear to me how he convinces wrestlers to join his stable, for instance. I'd also asked him what wrestlers from his stable have done after retiring from the sport. "Some of them work for companies. Some of them start companies," was his answer.

The Oyakata was not cagey, but he sure was vague.

I tried to think of questions that might get him to talk a little more. "How does it feel when one of your wrestlers wins a match?" I asked.

"When someone is successful, it feels good," he said. "When they lose, it's terrible."

"How about when you see one of your guys advance up the banzuke?" I pushed a little more.

"I'm always glad when they are promoted," he said. "But I'm nervous they'll come back down."

I decided to take one more shot at getting him to open up a bit before surrendering. "How do you feel about your wrestlers now, with the tournament about to start?" I asked.

"Everyone just had a long break," he said. The wrestlers had finished their four-day New Year's break two days ago. "Now I really feel like no one is working hard enough."

I realized I wasn't going to get much more out of him and decided to wrap up our interview there. I just had two more questions I was saving until the end.

"There's one more thing I wanted to ask," I started. "I've been wondering how the atmosphere at the stable might be different during the tournament. Do you think it might be okay for me to come back for a few nights once the tournament starts up?"

"Sure," he answered with as much forethought as if I'd merely asked him to break a dollar. "You've just got to understand one thing: no two stables are alike. Ours is on the small side—I mean, the building itself is small—and you shouldn't walk away with the idea that all stables are like that."

"Got it," I said. "I really appreciate it." I'd been kicking myself the past couple days for leaving the stable before the tournament and was grateful for the chance to return. But I still wanted to ask one last thing. "You know, actually, I did have another question for you, if you don't mind."

He nodded.

"What do your kids call you?" I asked.

"What?" he said, looking confused.

"It's kind of interesting to me how you were born with one name, then wrestled under a different name, and now are known as Hanaregoma Oyakata," I said. "So I was wondering: What do your kids call you?"

"They call me 'Dad,'" he answered.

NEXT: The Photo Hall

Afternoon in Ryogoku

Once Usuda and the wrestler he was trailing disappeared down the street, I headed back toward the Kokugikan and ducked into the sumo museum housed on its grounds. It was smaller than I'd expected: just one room, with exhibits lining the walls and a display case running down the middle of the floor.

The museum's exhibits were arranged chronologically, implying a continuum in sumo from the ancient past to the present. The first items were photocopies of early manuscripts of the Kojiki, the eighth-century chronicle that recounts Japan's creation myth, and the Nihon Shoki, which appeared a few years later and contains an account of the country's earliest dynasties. Both were compiled as the Yamato clan was shoring up its dominance over much of central and western Japan; the chronicles contained a narrative that legitimized Yamato control of the imperial court that had emerged based on the Chinese model.

I couldn't read the manuscript pages at the sumo museum, but noticed that lines from them were highlighted. I assumed they were passages that recounted the legendary wrestling matches between the gods of Japanese antiquity that are often cited as the origins of sumo. Nearly every book on sumo that I've encountered starts off with an explanation of these mythical matches as modern sumo's ancient antecedents.

The pages shared the display case with haniwa, grave statues from Japan's third- to sixth-century Kofun period. That era gets its name from the "kofun," or burial mounds, in which Japan's proto-aristocracy was interred, before cremation became customary with the spread of Buddhism. Those burial mounds were surrounded by haniwa, nearly-human-sized clay hollow clay figures.

The haniwa at the sumo museum were apparently supposed to represent wrestlers. Now, I'm no archeologist, but the only thing about them that resembled sumo wrestlers to me was their disproportionately large thighs and hips. And other haniwa I've seen—representing soldiers or women—have the same large thighs and hips.

Then, on the adjacent wall, there was a scroll painting of chubby guys in loincloths about to go at it with a gyoji standing by, which really did look like a sumo match. I could only read enough of the caption to understand that it was being presented as an example of a match from the eight- to twelfth-century Heian era. The caption didn't seem to give the date that the painting was actually created, but in my uninformed opinion as a non-art historian, it did look like it was painted before the Edo period. And I had thought sumo adopted many of the accoutrements of contemporary sumo featured in the painting during Edo.

The next display case had photos of famous wrestlers of the past, old banzuke, Edo-era woodblock prints of sumo matches, and rows of elaborately embroidered kesho-mawashi. The museum's exhibits ended with rows of portraits of each of the 68 wrestlers to have held yokozuna rank over the past four centuries. The first 16 were woodblock prints; the rest mostly photographs, with a few photorealistic paintings mixed in. I only recognized the last few: Akebono; the brothers Takanohana and Wakanohana; the second Hawaiian (born Samoan) yokozuna Musashimaru; and Asashoryu.

In fact, the rank of yokozuna actually didn't exist until the late 19th century, when the designation was first granted to especially talented ozeki-ranked wrestlers. The 15 wrestlers featured on the wall who were active before this time had been awarded the rank posthumously; the first two are legendary fighters, whom most scholars believe never really existed.

After taking a look at these portraits, I left the museum to find a place to eat lunch. Being the center of the sumo universe, Ryogoku is dense with chanko nabe restaurants; a building across from the train station had chanko nabe shops on each of its eight floors, except the fifth, which had on it something called the "Philadelphia Motor City Soul Bar."

But I had already eaten my fill of chanko nabe while in the stable, so I skipped those shops and circled the block adjacent to the train station. I passed a cake shop that was decorated with sumo pictures and purported to sell some kind of sumo snack, and I stopped by a bookstore to buy a magazine featuring the names and statistics of the upcoming tournament's top-ranked wrestlers. Then I popped into a ramen shop—it had a sumo calendar on the wall—and ordered a bowl of noodle soup with a miso broth and chunks of pork and a soft-boiled egg in it.

While I waited, I flipped through the sumo magazine. The big white guy with the pockmarked face, I read, was a Russian who wrestled under the Japanese ring name Roho. The squat guy with the stubble was from Georgia and his ring name was Kokkai, which means "Black Sea."

I also identified the wrestlers that the journalists were interviewing outside the stadium building. The first was Chiyotaikai, one of the two ozeki currently on the banzuke, whom I'd read was in danger of demotion if he did not perform well in this tournament. The one who disappeared down the street with Usuda was Hakuho, a 20-year-old Mongolian wrestler who had been promoted from a lower rank at the most recent tournament and was being portrayed as a rising star of the sumo world.

When I finished my noodles, I stopped by the McDonald's next to the eight-floor chanko emporium—probably the only McDonald's in the world with a banzuke posted to the wall. It had wireless Internet service and I wanted to check my email. Then I sat down in a café to wait for my appointment with the Oyakata.

NEXT: A Chat With the Oyakata

Morning in Ryogoku

When the Oyakata was born about a half century ago on the south end of Japan's main island, his parents named him Teruyuki Nishimori. As a wrestler, he adopted Kaiketsu as his shikona, or ring name. Soon after retiring from wrestling in 1979 as an ozeki, he started Hanaregoma stable and began to be known as Hanaregoma-oyakata, literally "Master Hanaregoma."

One man. Three names. Like geisha, kabuki performers and other practitioners of Japan's traditional arts, sumo wrestlers can go through numerous names over the course of their lives and careers. A wrestler might change his name to mark his ascent to a higher rank, or to make a clean break from a rough patch in his career. He might take on a mentor's name as a gesture of respect. Or, in the Oyakata's case, he might relinquish his shikona and take on the name of his stable when he becomes an oyakata.

So two Tuesdays ago, when I called the Oyakata's office to make an appointment to drop by on him, I didn't ask if I could speak with Mr. Nishimori. I asked if I could speak with "Master Hanaregoma." This nameshifting fascinated me. I wondered what his family called him. Do his kids call him "Oyakata" too?

I wasn't really able to talk to the Oyakata much during my stay at the stable. The wrestlers rarely entered his apartment, other than to pay him brief deferential visits. And while I wasn't really bound to all the rules and conventions of the stable's real residents, I didn't feel comfortable intruding into his home for a chat.

But I wanted to talk to him about how the sport has changed during his time in its orbit, and what it was like to run a stable. So right before I left, I asked for the phone number of the public relations office he supervises in Ryogoku at the Kokugikan, the stadium complex that serves as the sumo association's headquarters.

When I called him, he invited me to come by the next day, the same day that Miki had invited me to the meeting of the yokozuna promotion council. At this gathering, the sumo association's "elders" and prominent associates watch the sport's highest-ranked wrestlers train together to get an idea of how they'll perform in the upcoming tournament. This gathering would also be held at the Kokugikan, so I figured I'd hang around Ryogoku from the time it ended until my meeting with the Oyakata.

The next morning, while I was taking the train to Ryogoku, I got a call from Miki's colleague Usuda (whom I misidentified in a previous posting as "Usaoa"). I couldn't answer his call because people don't talk on the phone on buses and trains in Japan; it's bad manners. But when I listened to the message he left, I learned that Miki couldn't make it that morning, so Usuda would meet me at the train station and take me into the Kokugikan instead.

I met Usuda at the same spot as when he brought me over to meet the Oyakata a few weeks earlier. "How's the stable?" he asked me while we walked toward the stadium building.

"I had a good time there," I said. "It was interesting."

"Oh, so you already left," he said, sounding surprised.

We climbed a flight of steps set into the exterior of the building and entered a large dirt-floored meeting hall with a dohyo on each end. The dohyo to the rear of the room wasn't being used, but there were rows and rows of chairs on a long plastic tarp, all full, facing the front dohyo, around which stood about two-dozen wrestlers. Their mawashi were white like the Sekitori's, indicating their advanced rank.

Before the first row of chairs, directly in front of the dohyo, important looking men sat at a long table with a white tablecloth. There was another row of seats facing the dohyo from against the wall; the Oyakata sat in one of them, but I didn't notice him at first because he was wearing a suit. Photographers were packed onto a raised platform across the dohyo from the rows of seats, shooting pictures under an elevated shrine identical to the one in the stable.

Usuda and I took what looked like the only remaining seats, in the front row behind the men sitting at the table. The wrestlers in the dohyo faced off, threw each other out of the ring, dropped one another on the floor. I knew that these were the sport's absolute top wrestlers. I'd gotten used to seeing the Sekitori as a figure of almost incomprehensible prestige because that's how he was treated at the stable. But at the stable, I now realized, he was a big fish in a little pond; these guys were the biggest fish of all.

Yet, embarrassingly, I didn't know who any of them were. The last time I'd really followed sumo was when I lived in Japan about five years ago, when there was an entirely different cast of characters at its highest echelons. And even then I didn't follow it very closely, at most watching the highlights of the day's matches on NHK during the tournaments.

I knew who the yokozuna were at the time: Akebono, from Hawaii, and the brothers Wakanohana and Takanohana, whose Futagoyama stable was about two blocks away from where I lived. I used to see that stable's wrestlers shopping in the local 7-11, and we frequently washed our clothes together in the Laundromat. In fact, when I first walked into Hanaregoma stable a few weeks back, the smell of their fragrant hair oil brought on a wave of nostalgia.

But I'd failed to get myself up to speed on who the current sumo stars were and was embarrassed to ask Usuda, who was busily scribbling down who won each match and what maneuver, or kimarite, he used to beat his opponent. Which one was the Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu? I wondered. And which one was Kaio, whom I'd read was a contender for promotion to yokozuna?

But the most puzzling question of all was: Where did all these white guys come from? It seemed like about a quarter of the wrestlers in the dohyo were big, burly Caucasians. I'd heard that there was a contingent of wrestlers from the former Soviet bloc, but it was still a bit of a shock to see them for real. With their double chins and big bellies, a few looked like American truck drivers in loincloths with topknots on their heads. One was a blonde-haired giant with a fierce pockmarked face. Another dark-haired, pale-skinned wrestler looked almost as broad as he was tall and wore what I guessed was a terminal five o'clock shadow. It was disarming at first to see these guys in the ring with the Japanese wrestlers and their less conspicuous Mongolian counterparts going through the exact same routines I'd seen performed each morning in the stable.

But as I watched, I stopped noticing anything different about them. They fought as well as the Asian wrestlers and their repertoire of kimarite was just as advanced. Every match—whether or not one of the white guys was a contender—seemed to end differently. Sometimes the victor would push his opponent from the dohyo with brute force. Sometimes he'd get him near the edge and lift him out by his mawashi. Sometimes he'd kick his opponent's leg out from under him and drop him to the ground.

Distressingly often, though, I couldn't even tell how the matches ended. The frequently finished in a matter of seconds, leaving me wondering what had happened. Sumo, I've heard said, is a sport for connoisseurs. A true sumo fan knows the full gamut of kimarite by name, and understands which wrestlers have the greatest mastery of the various maneuvers. Usuda was writing down the kimarite that ended each match because that's something his readers wanted to know.

Just like in the stable, the practice session between these elite wrestlers ended with a few rounds of butsukarigeiko. Then the seats started emptying out and Usuda ran out of the room, presumably to catch up with a wrestler he wanted a quote from.

I wandered outside, passing a row of reporters standing by the entrance to a locker room. Down the steps, a crowd of reporters, photographers and cameramen were laying in wait. One wrestler came down and was quickly surrounded by reporters. I joined the huddle, trying to listen in on what they were asking him and what he was saying, but I couldn't get close enough. Then a second wrestler came down the steps and most of the reporters shifted over to him. In the meantime, chauffeured black luxury cars were passing by; behind tinted glass, I could see the men who had sat at the long white table in front of the dohyo.

I kept my distance from Usuda while he jockeyed for quotes. He followed a wrestler out of the stadium compound and onto the sidewalk, where he stood trying to hail a cab. It was cold—I was bundled up in a wool coat and a heavy scarf, but the wrestler was just wearing a thin robe and a pair of sandals, with his knees and calves completely exposed. When the wrestler gave up on the cab and took off toward to train station with Usuda in tow, I backed off and watched them disappear down the street.

I needed to figure out who these guys were.

NEXT: Afternoon in Ryogoku

Pride

The morning after the bon-en-kai, I was sitting in my usual spot behind the Kashira when the Oyakata came downstairs and sat on his cushion. He nodded off the wrestlers' deferential greeting and leaned toward me.

"You're leaving today?" he asked.

"That's right," I said.

"You know, you're welcome to stay," he said. "You know that, right?"

The Oyakata had offered to put me up for as long as I wanted, but I never thought he really wanted me around any longer. I assumed he was just being nice, and that I was expected to decline the invitation. I'd already been there 13 nights and was afraid of wearing out my welcome. It wasn't just the Oyakata I was wary of imposing on; I'd also been cooked for and cleaned up after by all but the most highly ranked wrestlers and I figured they must be tired of having an extra, idle body around the house as well.

But even if he didn't mind me hanging around, it was too late for me to stay now. I'd already found a place to live for the next couple weeks, since I planned to stay in Tokyo for some of the January tournament. And I was looking forward to eating breakfast and having a ready supply of coffee again.

It took me so long to pack my bags that morning that I didn't get down to lunch until most of the wrestlers had already eaten. I filled my plate with the remaining scraps and munched as the wrestlers gradually left the table with their empty dishes, eventually leaving me alone. I finished and handed off my plate in the kitchen—they still wouldn't let me do my own dishes—then grabbed by bags, said my goodbyes, and left.

I stopped back over a couple days later, on New Year's Eve. Murayoshi had told me the wrestlers would be eating soba noodles together for the occasion—an auspicious way to start the year—and invited me to stop by.

"Do you eat them around midnight?" I asked him over the telephone.

"Yeah, midnight," he said. Or at least that's what I thought he said. Around 9:30 on New Year's Eve I was on my way to the stable, when my phone rang. It was Murayoshi.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"I'm at Shinjuku station," I told him. "I'm on my way."

"It's been time to eat," he said.

I was worried that the guys at the stable might be waiting for me to show up before eating their noodles. But when I arrived, everyone had long finished. They were lying on the common room floor, watching wrestling matches on television and playing video games. Iki was there too, dozing on the floor with his face resting on an open comic book.

Hiroki disappeared into the kitchen and came out about 10 minutes later with a bowl of course, dark buckwheat noodles in a salty broth of stewed daikon and carrots, with a piece of shrimp tempura resting on top. Haruki rolled out a table for by benefit and I ate my noodles, feeling bad for putting them to the trouble of preparing another round of noodles especially for me. Plus, I regretted missing the communal noodle eating.

While I ate, I watched the Pride wrestling matches on the television, which were being broadcast from Saitama, the next prefecture over from Tokyo. Pride, like the K-l matches being broadcast from Osaka that same evening, features no-holds-barred wrestling matches fought between combatants of various fighting disciplines. You might get a Thai kick-boxer fighting a Korean tae-kwon-do practitioner, or an American boxer fighting a Chinese martial artist.

These sorts of matches have their followings all over the world, but they're hugely popular in Japan, as is U.S. pro-wrestling. Japan also has its own pro-wrestling league, which some of the guys in the stable followed closely. One day while I was there, Murayoshi disappeared after practice and spent the afternoon mixing with professional wrestlers at an end-of-the-year party for the league's biggest fans. He came back star-struck.

I was surprised they were watching Pride instead of K-1, since K-1 was featuring a special New Year's match between a high-profile former sumo wrestler and a Brazilian jiu-jitsu-ist. The sumo wrestler was the Hawaiian former yokozuna Akebono, the first non-Japanese to reach sumo's highest rank. He joined K-1 a couple years after retiring from sumo; it was rumored that he had debts to pay off. But he had yet to win a match (and indeed did not redeem himself that night), which may have explained why the wrestlers weren't watching him fight.

I was almost done my noodles when Murayoshi, in his boxer shorts, poked his head into the common room and said, "You're late, Jacob."

I apologized and, when I finished my noodles, went up to visit him in the second-floor room. He was alone in the bedroom and was also watching Pride, which ended about 15 minutes before midnight. Then he switched between countdown programs, spending just a few seconds at each one.

"Which one should I be watching at midnight?" he muttered to himself.

He finally settled on a program featuring "99," the same comedy duo that exposed pop-star Nakai to the series of practical jokes on Christmas. For New Year's, the sillier half of the duo, a short guy whom many say resembles a monkey, was dressed in a traditional Japanese short coat with a bandana on his head. I'm not sure what Japanese archetype he was emulating; to me he looked like a waiter at a restaurant that affects a traditional ambience.

The comedian shook his shoulders doing some sort of macho dance as a row of percussionists beat on taiko drums and the counter in the corner of the screen marked off the seconds until midnight. When it hit zero, the comedian hit an enormous temple bell with a long pole that hung suspended horizontally in front of it, while fireworks exploded on the horizon. Murayoshi and I exchanged New Year's wishes and I left for my new temporary home, anxious to get there before the trains stopped running for the night.

The following Sunday, I got a call from Miki. I'd written him an email before New Year's to thank him for arranging my stay at the stable and to tell him that I'd left.

"The Oyakata said you could have stayed longer," he said.

I was about to respond that I thought the Oyakata was just being nice, but then stopped myself, thinking such an answer might sound ungrateful. "I stayed as long as I needed for my project," I said instead.

Miki invited me out for dinner in Ryogoku, where the sumo association has its headquarters in the National Sport Hall, the following Tuesday. He said he'd call me that day, then hung up.

Now that I knew for certain that the Oyakata genuinely would not have minded me staying longer, I deeply regretted leaving the stable. I was especially sorry that I wouldn't be there for any of the tournament that was soon to start. A wrestler's performance in the tournament determines his rank, which has a tangible bearing on the quality of his life. I wanted to know how the stable's atmosphere would be different with so much on the line, and now it seemed I never would.

Maybe I should try to go back, I started thinking.

NEXT: Morning in Ryogoku

Stablemates III

HARUKI, THE YOBIDASHI

When Haruki was four, his family moved to Tokyo from Beijing, where he was born. His father's father was Japanese and his parents thought they'd have a better chance of carving out a decent life for themselves in Japan. Within a couple years, they'd opened a Chinese restaurant on the northern fringe of the city, where a friend of the Kashira was a regular customer. Through the Kashira's friend, they met the Oyakata, who offered Haruki a spot in the stable when he got old enough.

Haruki never wanted to join the stable. "My parents decided," he said. "It had nothing to do with me." His parents loved sumo, he told me, and wanted him to be a wrestler. And while he didn't say so explicitly, they probably were also trying to figure out what to do with Haruki, whose disdain for schoolwork must have caused them some distress. "I hated school," he told me. "I never studied."

But as Haruki grew older, his chances of success as a wrestler appeared to be diminishing. He stopped growing and had a rot-rod metabolism that burned calories faster than he could consume them, keeping him rail thin. It seemed like he was even less cut out for sumo wrestling than for the academic life.

The Oyakata, however, was determined to hold up his end of the deal. He had agreed to let Haruki into the stable and apparently remained committed to doing so. "He said, 'If you can't be a wrestler, be a yobidashi,'" Haruki recalled. So last April, after graduating from middle school, the 16-year-old moved into the stable to begin his career as a sumo announcer.

Haruki said he hated sumo wrestling when he joined the stable, but he got to like the guys in the stable and is now merely indifferent to the sport. "I don't like it," he said. "But it beats studying."

Like wrestlers, yobidashi have ranks, determined mostly by their time on the job. As a new yobidashi, Haruki announces tournaments matches between the lowest-ranked wrestlers that fight early in the morning. Yobidashi also beat drums each morning of the tournament when wrestling starts, sweep the dohyo between fights, and hold up flags bearing the logos of companies offering prize money to the winners of particular matches.

"It’s not a hard job, but it's embarrassing," Haruki said. "I hate standing up in front of so many people."


Between tournaments, a yobidashi's responsibilities are minimal. He might have to help make a stable's practice dohyo here and there, but that's about it. So he wakes up, watches a bit of the morning practice, sweeps out the vestibule, waits until lunch, takes a nap, does some cleaning, eats dinner, then reads comics and plays video games until bed. It's more or less the same daily schedule that the wrestlers follow, minus the wrestling.

NEXT: Pride

The Bon-En-Kai

So there I was, alone in the upstairs bedroom, snooping through Iki's photos. I was about to put them down and move back to my little encampment on the floor when I noticed the laminated image taped to his metal briefcase. It seemed to an advertisement that featured him holding a bottle of MOET champagne while he did a variation of his "Japanese geisha boy" pose. I was trying to puzzle out the writing on it when I heard someone coming up the stairs. I rushed back to my rolled-up futon and leaned back, pretending to read a book.

In walked the Kashira. Ishikawa, still in a mawashi, followed the Kashira through the door with a pile of his clothes folded into a neat pile. Ishikawa gently placed the Kashira's clothing on a cushion on the floor, while the Kashira sat down on the tatami and lit a cigarette. He asked me what I was reading.

"It's about boxing," I said.

He replied with a Japanese phrase that literally means, "That stinks like a geezer." He meant my book sounded square; something only a grownup would read.

"It's pretty interesting," I told him.

The Kashira grunted, but Ishikawa outed him. "The Kashira has shelves full of serious books," he said.

Then the Kashira asked me if I'd ever seen a Japanese yakuza movie. I named some of the noirish Kurosawa movies I'd seen, but that wasn't what he was looking for. "Do you know Akira Kobayashi?" he asked.

I told him I didn't and he named a movie he thought I should see.

By this time, he had undressed for his bath and was wearing a towel around his waist. He disappeared through the sliding door and I went back to my book. Not long after that, Iki came back. He quickly undressed, wrapped a towel around his own waist, and went downstairs.

Now, there are few inviolable restrictions placed on me, as more or less a guest, at the stable. One is that I can't lie with my feet facing the dohyo. But another is that I'm not to bathe until the Oyakata, Sekitori and Kashira have done so. They each prefer to bathe alone—or, in the Sekitori's case, with a tsukebito—and no one would dare deny any of them this privilege. But now, it looked like Iki did exactly that. It appeared like he barged in on the Kashira during his bathtime. How could he possibly get away with that? I wondered. It wasn't hard to imagine that he was involved with organized crime; maybe he was some member of a yakuza elite whose position trumped that of anyone in the stable.

He came back in about ten minutes and changed into the clothes he was wearing earlier: plaid shorts and a red t-shirt with white characters sewn onto it that said "AI," which means "love." It used to say "DAVID," he told me, but he tore off the D, V and D.

When he sat down, I pointed to his briefcase with the strange advertisement on it and asked, "Is that you?"

"Yes," he said, then tapped the first two Chinese characters at the top of the page.

"I can't read that," I said.

"Baishu," he read for me. I told him I didn't know what that meant.

"Soap, you know?" he said. That I did know. "Soap" is short for "Soapland" which is also known as "The Turkish Baths." It's a form of prostitution available in Japan that involves having one's body vigorously scrubbed with that of a naked sudsy woman. I don't know exactly what else it involves, but can only assume the most unsavory.

But before he could tell me how he and the bottle of MOET figured into the arrangement, the Kashira walked in. Iki cut off his explanation and fell silent. The room was now tensely quiet, and I wanted to get out. Since the Kashira was now out of the bathroom, I knew I could bathe so I started looking for my towel, but couldn't find it.

I finally spotted it over by Iki: he'd apparently stolen it from my pile of things before he'd gone to the shower. I'd share a towel with just about anyone at the stable, but I could only imagine what sort of secret dermatological infirmities Iki suffered from. Fortunately, the Kashira asked me what I was looking for and, when I answered, commanded Ishikawa to fetch me a clean towel from somewhere.

After my bath, I went downstairs to eat some of the mochi that the wrestlers had made. It was easily the best mochi I'd ever had: fresh and hot, chewy without being rubbery. The Kashira's wife, daughter and little grandson worked together with a friend of the family, molding the mochi into oblong balls and cutting it into chunks. They served it under mounds of shredded daikan, sugary black beans, sweeted soybean powder, and natto. All, except the natto—which I skipped—were delicious. Stuffed, I went back upstairs to hang out until the bon-en-kai, while the wrestlers took their naps.

A bon-en-kai is sort of like a New Years' party, except it doesn't fall on New Year's. It literally means, "forget the year party," and considering the amount that is imbibed at a typical bon-en-kai, much of the year is indeed likely to be forgotten.

One of the reasons why I remained at the stable longer than intended was so I'd be around for the bon-en-kai. The Oyakata originally said he thought I'd get what I needed from living in the stable in a week to 10 days. He said I could stay around longer if I wanted, but I interpreted that as him just being nice. So I thought I would leave two days after Christmas, which would have had me at the stable for 10 nights.

Then, toward the end of my stay, wrestlers started asking me if I'd be there for the bon-en-kai. They told me it would be fun. I was flattered that they wanted me around and thought it would be cool to see the guys outside the stable, maybe with a little bit of liquor in them. Plus, I saw it as a way to bring some closure to the experience. When I asked the Oyakata if I could hang around for a few extra nights, he said, "Sure, no problem."

When the wrestlers woke from their naps, they began putting on layers of sumo clothing—their button-up undershirts, robes, sashes—in preparation for the party. Iki had changed too, into a vaguely shiny dark gray suit, with a gold necklace over his collar and under his tie. He'd been working his cell phones furiously for nearly an hour; I couldn't make out what he was talking about, but I heard him mention a string of women's names in the diminutive form: Tomoko-chan, Hiromi-chan, Etsuko-chan. Maybe he was procuring hostesses—or strippers!—for the bon-en-kai, I thought. Maybe now I'd witness why they let this guy hang around.

I followed the crowd out of the stable to the spot near the train station where they said the party would be held. It turned out to be a "snack bar" in the basement of a commercial building across from the station. Snack bars, in Japan, are not kiosks that sell soda, hot dogs and potato chips. They're little bars, most with a small but regular male clientele. They usually have karaoke machines with a generous selection of "enka," which are melodramatic synth-folk songs about lost love and broken dreams. One representative enka tune boasts the refrain, "Please let me have some money before you leave me."

Snack bars are generally run by a handsome, if aged, proprietress and sometimes an attentive younger staff. But now this basement snack bar was empty, rented out for the stable's party: the perfect site for the wild sumo bacchanalia I suspected Iki had planned.

We filed into the narrow bar. I took a spot on the long black vinyl sofa that ran the length of the room under a mirror. Hiroki sat next to me and Batto across the table. There was a karaoke stage at the front of the bar, done up in a Hawaiian motif.

No one said much. A guy in a white shirt and black bowtie came out of the kitchen and placed some trays of sushi on the tables. I sat back and waited for the madness to begin.

Then, suddenly everyone stood up. "Otsukarisandegozaimasu!" they belted out, as the Oyakata walked in. He was holding his grandson's hand and was trailed by his wife and daughter. The evening suddenly looked much tamer than I'd expected.

And indeed it was. Not only were there no hookers, the wrestlers barely even drank, most of them sipping iced oolong tea once they'd gotten past their obligatory beer toasts, during which the Sekitori shared his wish for everyone to advance up the banzuke in the coming year.

But the party did give me the sense of closure I was looking for. It was like a reunion of the characters I'd met over the past couple weeks. Everyone was there: the wrestlers, their hairdresser, the bald gyoji, the yobidashi who came to help make the dohyo.

I looked up at one point and saw the Kashira chatting with the Sekitori, who was absent-mindedly poking Kazuya between the neck and collarbone with a folded fan. I saw Murayoshi chastise Hiroki for singing too softly just like he had in the ring the previous morning for letting himself be thrown to the floor. "I'm sorry," Hiroki replied deferentially. I watched Iki flit from table to table, making smalltalk, pouring drinks, entertaining the Oyakata's grandson.

Eventually, it became my turn to sing a karaoke tune. I ordered up "Back in the U.S.S.R." and took the stage, hamming up the "Georgia's really on ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-mind" part. After I sang, Moriyasu called me over to the Kashira, who tried to give me a rectangle of 1000-yen bills folded together. I'd noticed that the wrestlers were getting something from the Kashira after they sang, but hadn't been able to tell what.

"What's that for?" I asked Moriyasu.

"For singing," he said. "Everyone who sings gets money. It's part of the bon-en-kai."

"I can't take any money," I said.

"Sure you can," he said. "You have to—you sang."

"I'm sorry, I can't," I said. Moriyasu looked hurt. He gave up on me, but the Kashira thrust the bills at me again.

"It's for singing," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "But I'm sorry, I can't take that."

"Why?" he asked, confused.

"I'm a journalist," I answered, sounding grander than I'd intended. The young gyoji Kichijiro, with whom he'd been drinking, managed somehow to explain what that implied, and I was off the hook.

"But I'll take some of this," I said, pointing to the bottle of sho-chu they'd been sharing. The Kashira poured me a cocktail of sho-chu, a vodka-like liquor, and water with a splash of canned black coffee. It was very good.

I spent the rest of the party drinking sho-chu with the Kashira, Kichijiro and Ishikawa, listening to the wrestlers sing pop songs, while the old guys sang enka tunes of loneliness and despair. Then we all walked back to the stable.

NEXT: Stablemates III

Stablemates II

KAZUYA

When I dropped in on the Oyakata the other day, he told me that convincing potential wrestlers to join his stable was seldom an easy task. "You keep talking to them, not just once or twice, but over and over," he said. "It can take a year or two until they come around."

That seemed to have been the case with Kazuya. He first met the Oyakata when he graduated from junior high school, where he was a devoted badminton player. He accepted the Oyakata's invitation to drop by the stable for a couple nights, but wasn't convinced. He'd been offered a spot on the varsity badminton team at the high school he planned to attend and was eager to accept it. (That's right, I said "Varsity badminton." Don't laugh: it's an Olympic sport at which Japan's East Asian neighbors have excelled.)

He started high school. Like most of the school's athletes, he lived in its dormitory, so he'd be closer to his teammates and have more time to practice with them and work out on his own. But the Oyakata was persistent. He implored Kazuya to come by the stable one more time, which he did last winter during his New Year's vacation. And this time, while watching the wrestlers train in the morning, he decided to change course.

"When I was a kid, I thought sumo was cool," he said. "Then, when I came here and saw it, I started thinking, 'Wow, this really is cool.' It's not like pro-wrestling; it's real, authentic fighting. " With the blessing of his father, a mason, and his mother, he left his hometown of Fukuoka on the southern island of Japan's main archipelago, also leaving behind an older sister who worked as a bar hostess and a younger brother who was still in school.

Sumo life wasn't that difficult an adjustment for Kazuya. As a high school athlete, he was also up early each morning, conditioning his body, he said. And in high school, he ran errands and did laundry for his two senpai—one from each grade above his—so not even being the Sekitori's tsukebito, as he now was, was all that new.

He likes the camaraderie that sumo life offers, he said. He enjoys living with a group of people all working toward the same goal. But he does wish he had more time for himself. "I don't have time for fun," he said. "I don't have time for a girlfriend."

In addition to his training regimen and work responsibilities as a rookie wrestler and tsukebito to the Sekitori, he's finishing high school through a correspondence course. Without a high school degree, he said, he knows he'll have trouble finding work once he leaves sumo. He hopes to be a gym teacher when he retires from the sport.

NEXT: The Bon-En-Kai

Stablemates I

HIROKI AND TATSUYA, THE TAKEMURA BROTHERS

Aside from the few months he spent as a mediocre judo wrestler in middle school, Hiroki never really played sports, he said. But his grades were never great: he'd had to go to summer school for math and science in order to graduate from middle school and just a couple months into his first year of high school, he was already in danger of failing it. Not even the grades in his language, literature and history classes, the only ones he enjoyed, were enough to bump up his average. And he was a big guy, pushing 6 feet and weighing almost 240 pounds even before he started bulking up at the stable.

His gym teacher back in Hyogo prefecture, near Osaka, was a member of the Oyakata's network of friends and supporters, whom he draws on for news of potential new recruits. One day the teacher asked him if he'd like to become a sumo wrestler. He'd never thought about being a wrestler himself, but he liked the sport enough, he supposed. "Why not just give it a shot?" his teacher suggested, and he figured he might as well.

His father—a carpenter who worked on construction sites—and mother were against the idea. He was 16 and they didn’t want him dropping out of school and leaving home. But he joined with his grandfather, a die-hard sumo fan, to convince his parents to let him join the stable.

Now 23, he seems ambivalent about the course he took. Practicing each morning is rough on him and the tournaments take enormous levels of motivation. Winning feels great, he told me. "But losing is awful," he said. "You might be up against some huge guy and he'll just slam you onto the floor."

Sumo life hasn't treated him so kindly. After seven years in the stable, he's still stuck at jonidan rank, the second lowest. "I just want to advance," he said. He'd have to win five of the seven matches in which he'll compete this month in order to advance up to the next level, sandanme. At sandanme, he'd be allowed to wear soft sandals, keep his robe closed with a more colorful scarf, and put on a jacket when he goes outside in the winter. He'd also have a shot at moving upstairs to the smaller room I've been sharing with the highly ranked wrestlers. But he's doubtful that he can win enough matches.

His long-term plans are fuzzier than his short-term goal of mere advancement. He didn't think much about the implications of leaving school until he'd turned 20 or so, when he first started considering what he might do once he leaves sumo. He'd worked construction during school vacations while he was younger and figured he could always do that once he left the sport. "There's not much you can do in Japan without an education, but you can do carpentry or other work with your hands," he told me. "Although there's not a lot of that kind of work out there now, and even when you can get it, it doesn't pay all that well."

His dream is to open a pub; he told me he'd like to go to cooking school after he leaves the stable. He said the Oyakata's told him that cooking for his fellow wrestlers in the stable is the same thing as going to cooking school. But Hiroki doesn't seem entirely convinced. "Sure, you learn the techniques," he said. "But you don't learn much about food."

Tatsuya, meanwhile, disliked studying so much that he didn't even mess around with high school, following his brother instead to the stable. He started considering becoming a wrestler when he was in middle school, where he practiced judo for three years. He remembered seeing his brother come home during his first vacations from the stable, with his bruised face and permanently misshapen ear that another wrestlers' head collided into, and thinking, "This is nothing I'd ever want to do."

Then one weekend, Tatsuya visited his brother in Tokyo and stayed at the stable, where he watched the wrestlers practice each morning. "It was scary at first," he told me. "Then I started wanting to do it." He decided to join the stable once he graduated middle school, and immediately ceased to do any of his schoolwork. He entered in March of 2003, when he was 15.

At first he was perpetually exhausted from the training, cleaning and cooking he constantly had to do, and he suffered from homesickness. He missed the friends he used to play basketball and shoot pool with. He missed the girls he used to take out to the empty fields around his town to shoot off fireworks at night. "It makes for a nice atmosphere," he counseled me. "Girls like it."

But soon he started liking it at the stable. He liked being able to kick back in the evening with a comic book or a CD and relax, knowing he had nothing to worry about until practice the next morning. He liked having people around to talk to.

He had no personal expenses and was making a little bit of money. It wasn't enough to save anything: just the $700 and change someone at his rank, jonidan, gets every other month after a tournament. But it was enough for him to buy a minidisk player and a Gameboy, a few CDs and all the snacks he wanted from the convenience store. "I'm a sumo wrestler," he said. "I eat a lot."

Still, he often grew weary of the trash talking from his stablemates and the lack of privacy. And sometimes he feels like he just can't be bothered to join the daily cleaning brigade. "I'm not a team player," he confessed to me.

BATTUSHIG YAGAANBAATAR, AKA BATTO, AKA WAKATORA

A couple years ago, back in Mongolia, Batto, as he's known at the stable, saw a story on a television news broadcast about a sumo recruiter from Japan who was in his country seeking new wrestlers. The popularity of Japanese sumo was just hitting its peak in Mongolia: Asashoryu had just reached yokozuna rank and was a national hero in his home country.

Batto's father, an automobile importer who had done a type of Mongolian wrestling similar to sumo, suggested he go to Japan and take a crack at being a sumo wrestler. Batto already had one brother in Japan, who lived outside of Tokyo and sold cell phones, and two more older brothers going to college in England.

Batto and his family tracked down the recruiter who'd appeared on the news and went out to meet him. He was eventually chosen as one of the five main contenders for placement in the Oyakata's stable and after a series of medical checkups and physical fitness tests, he came out on top.

Batto, now 18, joined the stable in May of 2003, not knowing any Japanese at all. Byabhjav, the Mongolian wrestler from another stable, whom I saw fight the Sekitori, stopped by frequently to show him the ropes and give him some pointers on how to behave at the stable. He calls that wrestler his "senpai," a term Japanese use for their upperclassmen and seniors. It implies a level of respect and devotion.

At first, Batto hated living in a country where he couldn't speak the language. And he despised the food: fish was a rarity in his landlocked home country, much less raw fish. But with little opportunity to speak Mongolian, he soon picked up Japanese from the wrestlers in the stable and the food slowly grew on him. He still avoids sushi, but actually likes natto, the soybeans fermented into a sticky goo that some Japanese can't even stomach.

Everyone around the stable calls him Batto, a Japanized shortening of his full given name "Battushig." But when he competes, he—like all of the 61 foreigners in the sumo league—has to do so under an adopted Japanese name. His is "Wakatora."

I asked Batto how he felt about having to adopt a Japanese name and identity, affect Japanese mannerisms, and literally bow to Japanese gods. He didn't seem to mind.

"I just follow along and do what everyone else does," he said.

NEXT: Stablemates II

Iki Returns

But as uneventful and anticlimactic as it was, last Monday was not my last time in a mawashi. The next day—my second to last in the stable—I put one on again, only this time it was for mochi-tsuki. Mochi are the chewy rice cakes that are eaten year-round in Japan, but are especially popular during the New Year's holiday. Mochi-tsuki is the traditional way of making mochi, by hammering cooked glutinous rice with a giant mallet into a sticky paste. Temple congregants, school groups, residents in the same neighborhood and sometimes even the same condominium will take turns banging the hell out of piles and piles of rice to make mochi around New Year's. The Japanese, in fact, have never heard of the man in the moon, but they do think they can see a giant rabbit making mochi with a mallet in the lunar craters.

And since sumo wrestlers take everything that is traditionally Japanese and do it more intensely than the rest of the country, mochi-tsuki at the stable was a very big deal. On Monday night, the wrestlers laid a giant plastic tarp over the dohyo, on which it stood a huge stone bowl. They also set 130 pounds of rice soaking in a plastic garbage can and arranged a tower of old-fashioned bamboo rice steamers over a contraption that boiled water on a portable burner in the corner of the practice floor.

Early the next morning, they put on their mawashi and got to work. Two old guys—supporters of the stable and, apparently, mochi-making experts—came to oversee the operation. First the wrestlers cooked rice in the bamboo steamers, as well as in the more modern metal ones they used on the kitchen burners. Then they dumped the rice into the stone bowl, where four wrestlers mashed it up, each using a narrow wooden mallet like a pestle.



When the rice had been crushed, a single wrestler stepped in with a big, heavy wooden mallet and started hammering on the crushed rice, while someone else flipped around the rice mush between blows. Each time the hammer struck the rice, all the wrestlers would chant, "Yo-i-sho!"

The wrestlers were just getting started when I came downstairs.

"Are you going to help?" asked Ishikawa.

"Sure, I'd like to," he said.

"Then you should put on a mawashi," Hiroki said.

"Nah, he doesn't have to," disagreed Ishikawa. He pointed to me in my sweat clothes. "He's okay like that."

But I cut in, "It's okay. I'll put on a mawashi." I actually wanted to put one on, since I'd leave the stable soon and didn't yet have a picture of myself in one.

Tatsuya helped me into a mawashi back down the hall. I staged a couple photos of me shiko-ing and wrestling with Nakahara, the biggest guy around at the moment, then joined the wrestlers around the stone bowl. I hung back, silently waiting my turn to hammer at the rice, until Mitsui told me I had to say "Yo-i-sho!" when someone struck the inside of the bowl, so I started chanting along.

When it was finally my turn, I eschewed the lighter, narrow mallet that they suggested I use and took up the big one. I lowered it down on the glob of mashed-up rice. "Yo-i-sho!" everyone shouted. I lifted the mallet back up and lowered it again, then again. Between each blow, the Kashira lifted the congealing pile of rice and flipped it over, so it would be evenly beaten. My first couple dozen or so hammers were easily done, and I kept the wrestlers chanting at an even cadence.



But then my arm started hurting, and the hammer got heavy. It started taking me longer and longer to lift the mallet back over my shoulder. I'd lift it out of the stone bowl and the wrestlers would start saying, "Yo-i…" but then they'd have to draw it out until I had the mallet up in the air and finish with a "…sho!" as I dropped it. So I passed my mallet on to Kitamura and got out of the way.

Back away from the stone bowl, the Sekitori, who knew I was moving out the next day, said, "So, are you going to become a sumo wrestler?"

"Me?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said, "you're pretty strong," which, of course, was untrue, as my performance with the mallet demonstrated.

"But I'm too old," I replied. "And too short."

"He's short too," he said, pointing at Ishikawa, who is at least a few inches taller than me.

"Then maybe I will become a sumo wrestler," I said.

In fact, though, not only did I not want to be a sumo wrestler, I didn't even feel like being in a mawashi anymore. I got my photos and took a few cracks at the rice. That was enough. So I put on the robe they'd given me after my first time in the dohyo and slipped away to change. In the hall by the laundry room, I struggled out of the mawashi that clung to my legs like an octopus, and then went upstairs, holding onto to my robe to keep it shut.

But when I reached the top of the steps, I was surprised to see a pointy pair of women's zippered boots outside the room. When I slid open the door, there was Iki sitting on the floor sorting photographs next to a girl in a short skirt and thigh-high stockings.

I did a double take. I had never seen a woman in the stable's upper levels, and had only seen a small handful even in the common room. It never even occurred to me that a woman could exist in the wrestlers' bedroom: it was such a boys' room. But there she was. She was hot too, and in her early twenties if that.

I tottered at the door, unsure if I was seeing a mirage. Then, finally, I said, "Konnichi wa," and walked in.

"Harry Potter!" Iki greeted me. Then to the girl, he said, "You speak English, talk to him."

But instead, she told a story—in Japanese—about a Chinese "client" who told her—in English—that he was 99 years old. She clearly came from Iki's demimonde.

And there I was, naked under my goofy Japanese robe, wondering how I was going to get into the jeans I'd come upstairs to put on. I'd lost most modesty over the past couple weeks, bathing and changing in groups, and would have dropped my robe without thinking if the dudes were the only ones in the room. But I couldn't do that now, so I collected my clothes into a bundle to bring downstairs.

I came back up dressed normal and the girl said, "You changed your clothes."

"Yes, I did," I answered and settled down against my rolled up bedding to type up some notes. Iki snagged a pair of enormous pants from one of the wrestlers' laundry piles and put them on over the plaid shorts he'd been lounging in. Then he left with the girl, leaving behind his metal briefcase, Louie Vuitton handbag and photo albums.

This actually wasn't the first time I'd seen Iki since my first day at the stable, when he barged in during the wrestlers' naptime. Now and then he'd just appear. Sometimes he sat on the floor taking calls on one of his two cell phones; sometimes he slept for a few hours, then left.

One night he came in wearing the same orange velour jogging suit I met him in—which looked dirtier each time I saw it—and, singing a few bars of Let It Be, he rolled out Saita's bedding and got comfortable

"Harry Potter," he said, putting more photos into a cardboard album. "You look like Harry Potter."

"No I don't," I said.

"It's good to look like Harry Potter," he said. "Harry Potter's handsome."

"Harry Potter's a little kid," I said.

"Not in the last movie," he said. "Did you see the last movie?"

I had to admit that I hadn't.

Later he complimented me on my nose.

"That's a handsome nose," he said.

"No it's not," I said. "It's a big nose."

"It's a nice nose," he said. "It's nice because it's big."

"In America, people with big noses get operations to make them smaller," I told him.

"People here get operations to make their noses bigger," he said. He was considering an operation to make his own nostrils narrower, he added.

Soon after that he asked, "Is Japanese food tasty?"

"Yes, it is," I said.

"Are Japanese girls sexy?" he continued.

"Sure, they're nice," I answered.

"Nice?" he said. "Have you done one?"

"Shut up," shouted Murayoshi from his futon, where he was watching television, before I could tell Iki I wasn't going to answer him.

Iki also made an appearance the morning of the dohyo-tsukuri, while everyone was outside stuffing the tawara. He showed up on a bicycle, wearing dark-blue bell-bottom dungarees and a matching jean jacket. I was taking photos and asked if I could take his picture. He posed doing something that looked like a cross between vogueing and firing six-shooters into the air.

"Japanese geisha boy," he crooned about himself in English.

What the hell was up with this guy? I often wondered. What was his business at the stable? How does he fit into the dynamic, the hierarchy? What purpose does he serve?

I found myself wondering this again after he left the stable with the little prostitute or hostess or whatever she was. My curiosity got the better of me: I decided to rifle through the photo albums he left on the floor.

One just had pictures of women drinking together, women drinking with him in a suit, women drinking with other glammed-out Japanese guys. I assumed that, like the photos he showed me himself the day I met him, they were taken at the club where he works as a host.

But the other album was more intriguing. It had pictures of the wrestlers, mostly the older ones, singing karaoke and drinking with attractive women wearing revealing dresses and significant sums of makeup.

Suddenly it dawned on me: Was Iki the stable's pimp?

NEXT: Stablemates I

Mawashi Redux

On Saturday, the eve of Christmas day, I was watching television with some younger wrestlers in the common room. On the television, a comedy duo called "99" was taking Nakai, a member of the pop group SMAP, on a tour of Japan, setting him up for a practical joke or placing him in an absurd situation at each stop along the way.

At one point, they brought him to a hot spring, where he sat in an indoor bath as four beautiful women served him hot sake. Then the comedians slipped outside, where you could see that the bathhouse was actually on stilts, with a rubber slide coming out from underneath and ending in a curl. When the counter that had been ticking away at the corner of the screen reached zero, the bottom of Nakai's bath collapsed, washing the pop star down the slide in a torrent of hot water. The curl at the end of the slide tossed him into the air. Once back on the ground, he scuttled to his feet, bewildered.

The wrestlers and I were still laughing at this, and its string of slow-motion replays from different angles, when the Oyakata walked in through the sliding front door that he and a few other distinguished members of the stable's community use. (The wrestlers and I enter and exit through a more modest hinged door set off to the side.)

Everyone in the room stood and greeted the Oyakata, "Otsukarisandegozaimasu," and I followed their lead. He asked the wrestlers to fetch something from his car; Tatsuya and Ishikawa obliged.

Then the Oyakata noticed the plastic bag that Mitsui had just brought back from the convenience store, and which now rested on his futon. "What's this," the Oyakata asked.

"Snacks," Mitsui responded deferentially, and the other wrestlers chuckled under their breaths. The bag was indeed overflowing with goodies: cans of apple juice and grapefruit soda, rice crackers, chocolate bars, yogurt-dipped pretzels.

The Oyakata wrinkled his face with disapproval. "And what's that?" he asked, noticing Mitsui's DVD player, which he stores in its box.

"It's an appliance," responded Mitsui, eliciting giggles all around.

"What kind of appliance?" the Oyakata asked impatiently.

"It's a DVD player," Mitsui answered, and the wrestlers laughed again, this time out loud.

The Oyakata grimaced.

"Did you eat that instant ramen too?" the Oyakata asked, pointing to the Styrofoam bowl next to Mitsui's futon.

"No, it was oden," naming a sort of Japanese stew that convenience stores serve in bowls identical to the ones that hold servings of instant ramen. This time the wrestlers burst out into hysterical laughter.

The Oyakata was grinning now too, but only barely. He kneeled down by Mitsui's bag and fondled the items inside suspiciously. Then he stood and headed for his apartment.

I caught him at the bottom of the steps.

"Oyakata," I said. "I've been meaning to ask you. There are a lot of wrestlers coming to practice each morning now, and there's not much extra space. But would I be in the way if I joined in?"

"Of course not," he answered, which is what I wanted to hear. I'd started to feel like a failure for having spent so little time in a mawashi, and was glad I'd have a chance to train along again. I wasn't exactly sure what purpose it would serve at that point, since I'd probably collected all the sensory data that standing next to the dohyo in a mawashi was going to provide, but I felt obliged to do it, if only one more time. After all, when I checked into the stable, I thought I'd be wearing a mawashi every day.

I assumed the next day, Sunday, would be the wrestlers' vacation and that I'd be able to participate on Monday. But when I woke up on Sunday, I was shocked when the wrestler cutting his toenails next to Murayoshi's rolled up bedding looked up at me, and wasn't Murayoshi. It was Akiyama, a wrestler from one of the other stables, who has a lump on his shoulder that looks like a partially buried bocce ball from years being collided into by opponents' heads. It was odd that he'd be there on the wrestlers' day off.

"Are you training today?" I asked, and he said that they were.

"Oh," I said, "I thought you guys have Sundays off." But I was wrong. With the distractions of the New Year's holiday approaching and the January tournament on the horizon, the wrestlers apparently could no longer afford their rest day.

I was a little disappointed, because I'd hoped to use the day to get to know some of the wrestlers a little better. I haven't been formally interviewing wrestlers; instead, I've been engaging them in conversations that I rush to recreate in my notebook as soon as they're finished. I don't feel sneaky about this because I do it openly. The wrestlers, I think, are used to having their chats with me punctuated by me taking out my notebook and scribbling away.

Yet, since my exchanges with the wrestlers have been friendly, rather than reportorial, I've been reluctant to push them too hard for information about themselves. But I thought that if I could catch them relaxing with time on their hands, I'd be able to get more out of them. Now I clearly wasn't going to.

Also, after getting the okay from the Oyakata to join practice, I'd hoped to do so on the first possible occasion. But I'd slept past the time when it would be acceptable for me to start, so I blew that chance too.

So I was absolutely determined to practice on Monday. Before I went to bed Sunday night, I told Murayoshi that I'd be joining practice the next day and asked him what time they'd be starting.

"5 a.m., but you can start around 6:30," he answered, which was fine with me. "When you wake up, find someone to help you into a mawashi."

In the morning, I started getting woken up by the wrestlers' stirring around 4:30, when I checked my watch and was glad to see that I could sleep for another couple hours. I woke up a few more times before finally staying awake when I heard Moriyasu and Saita on their way out the door and saw that my watch read "6:20." As highly ranked wrestlers, they were permitted to start practicing at that late hour. As someone who had no business there in the first place, I was too.

Downstairs, Fuchita helped me into a mawashi. While he was twirling it around my waist, Ishikawa walked by and muttered to him, "He shouldn't practice today."

The atmosphere in the practice room was palpably different than the first time I trained along. With the January tournament a week closer, the practice sessions had gotten longer and more brutal. Once during practice, Hiroki lost his balance at the edge of the ring and was tossed out by a wrestler from another stable that he was just about to defeat. Murayoshi, shouting insults, marched over to him and slapped him with his full open hand on the right cheek. Then, still shouting, he slapped him again on the right cheek, then even harder of the left, with the sound of the blows echoing through the room. Hiroki just stood there, taking the whacks and apologizing for losing the match.

With the practice session having reached this level of violence and intensity, no one seemed interested in humoring me this time around. Nobody was keeping an eye on me to make sure I was doing my shikos, and doing them right. Last time, Murayoshi had fussed over me, pivoting my back forward to make sure I got a got in a good forward-leaning split, and asking me if I was cold. The most concern I got from him this time is when the Sekitori sent the other stable's Mongolian hurtling out of the ring at me, pinning me briefly against the wall and covering me with the sweaty dirt that coated his body. Murayoshi pulled me aside sternly, as though I were a child who'd been playing in the street, and stood me in a less vulnerable spot on the practice floor.

I never got a chance to wrestle that morning, or even to try to Zamboni someone across the ring. I didn't get to count off fifty squats at the end of the practice session, like I had last time—there wasn't even room for me to join the circle around the dohyo, so I did my squats outside the ring. In fact, all I did all morning was shiko to stay warm while feeling foolish for being on the practice floor at all.

I did, however, compose a little song in my head:

If you're feeling kind of chilly,
and are afraid of getting sick-o.
Then it's time to bend your knees,
and sink into a shiko.

It's just a kick to the left,
then you squat on the floor,
then a kick to the right,
when you're ready for more.

From Maine to Puerto Rico,
everybody's doing the shiko.

NEXT: Iki Returns

French?

I didn't practice on Saturday morning either. After the discouragement I'd been getting from the wrestlers, I wanted to check with the Oyakata, and hadn't had a chance to. So, again, I came downstairs to watch from the common room when I woke up.

It was a busy day for spectators in the stable. Not long after I'd taken a seat in my customary spot near the heater behind the Kashira, two middle-aged men and a woman came in and sat down right in front of me. I assumed they were patrons of the stable. Stables get much of their financial—and, when the wrestlers go on the road, logistical—support from individual fans like these.

I moved down the ledge, to the other side of where the Oyakata sits. About an hour before practice ended, a family of Caucasians joined me there. A woman, whom I assume was the mother of the family, sat down next to me, while a younger woman, two very young boys, and a middle-aged man sat behind me.

It was the first time I'd seen any white people in the stable, and my initial reaction was to consider them intruders. I felt possessive: "These are my sumo wrestlers," I thought. "Go get your own sumo wrestlers." But that passed quickly. When I saw the woman beside me craning her neck to see past the Oyakata in front of her, I obligingly shifted over.

"Merci," she said to me.

By the time the family settled in, the Sekitori had started practicing, facing off repeatedly against a Mongolian wrestler from one of the other stables. The Sekitori finally seemed to have met his match. The Mongolian was tall and broad and fleshy, built like a toned Michelin man, and he was quick on his feet.

The Sekitori, I'd come to recognize, has an impeccable ability to make wrestlers fling themselves out of the ring by skipping to the side as they are applying the most force on him. It's his chief defense. But for it to work, he has to be able to get his opponents into a grip from which he can manipulate them. The Mongolian hardly let him to that, keeping him at a distance by rapidly slapping his chest and throwing him off balance by darting in unexpected directions within the ring. The Mongolian only rarely floored the Sekitori, but he was pretty consistently able to get him out of the ring. At each loss, the Sekitori twisted his mouth into an angry grin and sighed loudly.

Of course, the Sekitori wasn't losing all the matches. When he did get the Mongolian where he wanted him, he could maneuver him out of the ring at a velocity I hadn't yet seen a wrestler fly from the dohyo. Sometimes, unable to stop himself, he'd collide into a wall, and once even stumbled up onto the common room floor, compelling Fuchita to race over with a towel to swab his sweat off the tatami.

When the matches between the Mongolian and the Sekitori were over and the wrestlers finished their closing exercises, the family stood up and bowed deeply to the wrestlers, who ducked their heads with some embarrassment at being bowed to. Then, for some reason, they bowed to me. I said, "Bye," and the younger woman responded, "Adieu."

Having seen me sitting with a family of white people, the Kashira caught my attention and mouthed the question, in English, "Friends?" Except I thought he asked, "French?" so I nodded affirmatively, which left us both confused.

It turned out that the Kashira wasn't the only one who assumed that the French family members were my guests. For the rest of the day, wrestlers kept asking me, "Who were your friends?" and "Was that your family?"

Kazuya even asked me, "Was that woman next to you your girlfriend?"

"Kazuya," I replied, "First of all, I'd never met any of those people before in my life. And second, that woman must have been at least 50."

"That's why I was wondering: she looked like an obasan," he said, using a word that literally means "aunt" and is commonly used to refer to older women.

Since I've moved in, the wrestlers have often used me as a foil to ridicule each other's supposed sexual predilections. One wrestler might say about another, "He likes young girls," intentionally speaking loud enough for the subject of the claim to hear. Another wrestler, I'd be told, "likes American woman." Another one might prefer men. And Kazuya, I've heard, digs obasans, so maybe he envied me the middle-aged French woman I was watching practice with.

The wrestlers probably invent these stories about each other to compensate for their lack of a real love life. The Sekitori, the Kashira had told me, goes out with "a call girl," and I often hear Moriyasu on the phone in his futon, sweet-talking his girl, a wedding consultant. But aside from them, no one in the stable seems to be in any sort of relationship. Hiroki, who joined the stable when he was 16, said he's never had a girlfriend.

It's not surprising. If they had girlfriends, it's not like they could take them back to the stable. Relationships are actively discouraged among all but the highest-ranked wrestlers. And even if they were permitted to date, I don't think the low-ranking guys have the time or money to sustain a relationship. It made me wonder how these wrestlers—who spend their late teens and much of their 20's isolated from women—could ever have successful marriages, though I haven't come across anything implying that they don't.

NEXT: Mawashi Redux

Chanko Nabe

Last Tuesday, I didn't practice with the sumo wrestlers because my legs hurt from my workout with them the day before. On Wednesday, the wrestlers remade the dohyo instead of practicing, and on Thursday they had the day off to process the banzuke. So by Thursday night, with most of the pain having left my legs, I was eager to get back in the ring when practice resumed the following morning. I told Tatsuya so.

"I don't think you can," he said, which surprised me. He, like everyone else, had been so indulgent toward me up until then, letting me participate in nearly all the stable's activities.

But it turned out that the banzuke's arrival that day had marked the beginning of a new phase of stable life. Now that everyone knew where he stood, it was time for practice for the January tournament to begin in earnest. Wrestlers from other stables were going to be joining practice. I'd just be in the way, Tatsuya said.

In all truth, I recognized by this point that my stated mission going into the project of "training for a week or so to be a sumo wrestler" wasn't really going to be accomplished. Lots of guys join the stable not knowing how to do sumo; but everyone who enters the stable, I found out, spends the first six months of his residency going to sumo school at the headquarters in Ryogoku, which is where he learns the fundamentals. Practice at the stable consisted entirely of fast and furious one-on-one matches, with some instruction shouted into the ring by senior wrestlers, the Kashira and the Oyakata. I could never hope to meaningfully participate in that.

But I still hoped that the rest of the group didn't share Tatsuya's reluctance to have me train along with them, and that they'd let me tie on a mawashi in the morning and join them. I'd come to participate in sumo life, which revolves around these practice sessions. So I was determined to join in again, even if it just meant spending another long morning shiko-ing my way to warmth on the dohyo's earthen floor.

On Friday morning, I woke up when I heard the wrestlers moving around the room. Murayoshi was rolling up his futon in the dark.

"Can I train with you guys today?" I asked him.

"I'm not sure," he said. "But it's early," he added, intimating that I ought to go back to sleep. I dug out my watch from the heap of clothing, books and wires next to my futon and saw that it was only 4:30. So I crawled back into bed.

The next thing I knew, Moriyasu was talking to me. "Jacob," he said, "It's 7 o'clock." I popped out of bed, just as Murayoshi was walking in wearing a mawashi.

Seeing me, he said, "That's right, you wanted to put on a mawashi."

"Can I?" I asked.

"I guess you could," he hedged. "But there are a lot of people down there. There's really no space for you.

"The Kashira's down there now," he continued. "Why don't you go down and greet him."—the Oyakata, Kashira, Sekitori, and Tokoyama all must be greeted respectfully the first time one meets them each day—"Sit down and watch the practice and then we'll see."

I went downstairs and, greeting the Kashira, saw that there were, it seemed, twice as many wrestlers on the practice floor as usual. So I resigned myself to watching—rather than participating in—practice that morning. Soon the other two stables' oyakata arrived, entering within 15 minutes of each other through the door that leads from outside directly onto the practice floor. They each took a seat on the cushions that waited for them on the opposite side of the ledge from the Kashira.

One was a heavy man with short hair fading to stubble over his ears and neck. He looked like he belonged to the same organized crime syndicate as the Kashira. The other was tall and thin with gray-flecked hair, stylish in black Adidas track pants and a black warm-up jacket. He could have passed for a European soccer coach.

I later found out that these oyakata had once wrestled here under the Oyakata. They and their wrestlers come here to practice—instead of the wrestlers here going to them—out of deference to the Oyakata. One of the stables was way across town and its wrestlers had to wake up at 3 a.m. and take an hour-long bike ride to get here for practice.

The other stables' wrestlers were, on average, smaller and skinnier than our guys. One was really lean; barely anything distinguished him as a sumo wrestler at all, other than his substantial thighs and hips that let one know he'd been doing his shikos. By his hair—not yet long enough to remain in a neat topknot—it was clear that he hadn't been at the sport for long. Yet he beat a string of our wrestlers in quick succession. Even Torii, one of our very biggest wrestlers, had to struggle against this little guy to stay in the ring, and even lost to him a couple times.

After watching for a little while, though, my crossed legs started feeling stiff and I was having trouble focusing on the wrestling that I'd seen so much of lately, so I decided to see what was going on in the kitchen. I'd been wanting to see how sumo wrestlers' famous chanko nabe gets made.

I knew Takasaki would be in the kitchen by that point. Takasaki leaves the practice floor after warming up and getting in a few light tussles to start preparing lunch. He hasn't participated in a full workout for about a year and a half because of a shoulder injury that consigned him to being the stable's head chef. He's a squat, broad wrestler with a pinkish complexion, whose upper breast looked permanently bruised from absorbing head-on charges in the ring.

When I walked into the kitchen, Takasaki was cutting a chicken to pieces with a long, flat knife, with dirt from the practice floor still covering his back. Raw chicken slime splashed onto his mawashi—the only thing he wore—as he scraped everything even remotely edible off the carcass: fat, cartilage, tiny scraps of meat sticking to the bones. He piled it all into a colander he had in the sink.

Torifumi, the wrestler whom the Sekitori calls "Gu-Rauns," was in the kitchen too, grilling whole hokke—a kind of mackerel—that had been splayed out into enjoining halves. He left the grill for a moment to pour some sake into the two huge pots of water boiling over massive standalone burners that sat on a stainless steel table. Takasaki came over with the colander of chicken pieces and used a ladle to divide them between the two pots. One clumsy ladleful splashed boiling water onto Torifumi's bare thigh. "Och," he yelped.

The two had clearly been hard at work for a while. On the table opposite the burners, there was a colanders filled with chopped vegetables: carrots, a kind of long radish called daikon, onions. There was an enormous colander of cut cabbage, and another with spinach and mushrooms—brownish shitakes and long, thin bunches of enokis. Another bowl was filled with leaks cut into two-inch segments.

Side dishes had been prepared and set aside too. There were two bowls of natto—slimy fermented soybeans that smell like feet and have the texture of snot—mixed with cut scallions. And there were four small plates of raw squid cut into strips and sitting in its own pink goop.

Takasaki remained by the pots, skimming off chicken fat as it rose to the surface, with the mighty burners' wild flames dangerously close, I thought, to the wisps of pubic hair peaking out from his mawashi.

"Are you copying down the recipe?" he asked, seeing me scribbling in my notebook.

"Sure," I answered. "It's chanko nabe."

By this time a few other wrestlers had piled into the kitchen, presumably to seek shelter from the cold practice room. Torii sat on the step leading up to the common room. A flabby, balding wrestler from another stable sat on a towel on the dirty floor, looking in his topknot like an obese version of the buffoonish villager who enlists the Seven Samurai's help in the Kurosawa movie. Batto and Saita gathered near the warmth of boiling pots, covered in ring dirt. Even the Tokoyama—the sumo hair dresser—was there: he'd asked me if I minded if he smoked, then lit a Seven Stars and started blowing smoke rings across the kitchen.

They all laughed at me when I said, "It's chanko nabe."

"There is no dish called 'chanko nabe,'" Takasaki informed me, authoritatively contradicting countless Japanese friends who described the dish as a kind of carnivore's delight: a rich stew of beef, pork, fish and chicken, with a few chunks of tofu and some vegetables thrown in for good measure. I'd even read about the dish in books about sumo, and seen recipes for it. I'd seen—though had never eaten at—chanko nabe restaurants in Tokyo, which I'd heard were run by retired sumo wrestlers.

Yet, in the week I'd already been living at the stable, I never encountered this dish. Sure, the centerpiece of every afternoon's lunch was a nabe (pronounced nah-bay)—a kind of Japanese stew, usually kept simmering at the table, where fresh ingredients are continuously added. But there was rarely more than one kind of meat in it, and every day's base was different. Sometimes it was miso, sometimes soy sauce, sometimes it just tasted like chicken broth.

Still, I assumed that there was something about these nabe that made them "chanko," some special preparation or particular ingredient. But I was wrong.

"'Chanko nabe' is a nabe that's made by sumo wrestlers," Takasaki explained, as he continued skimming the chicken fat. "Anything that sumo wrestlers cook is called 'chanko'"

Next he shoveled a few little plastic scoops of salt into each of the pots, then a few scoops of black pepper. He poured in some mirin—a kind of sweetened cooking wine—and some spicy kim-chi soup base. Then he sprinkled in what I thought was sugar, but was again mistaken.

"No, it's Ajinomoto," said Takasaki, using the brand name by which MSG is known in Japan.

"Magic powder," added Saita.

Takasaki kept working on the nabe, little by little adding more salt, pepper, mirin and kim-chi base, before tasting the broth and sprinkling in another round of seasoning. When he had the broth where he wanted it, he dumped in the colanders of daikon, carrots, and leaks, dividing each between the two pots.

Waiting for them to boil, he gave Torifumi—who was still grilling hokke—an affectionate pat on his bare, round belly.

Then he added the shitake mushrooms. The rest of the ingredients—the enoki mushrooms and spinach—would be added once the nabe was set up on a burner in the common room, he said.

By this time practice had ended and the wrestlers crowded into the kitchen, picking at whatever little morsels they could lay their hands on. Murayoshi tried a tablespoon of the nabe broth and exclaimed, "This has no flavor," and poured in a few more hits of kim-chi base. Kitamura undid his topknot and stuck his head under the sink to rinse out his hair. I saw Moriyasu filch a loaf of unsliced white bread that I knew he'd take up to his room to toast; after 13 years in the stable, he couldn't stomach the chanko fare anymore, so he ate bread after practice to tide himself over until he could make it out to a restaurant.

Takasaki was still stirring the nabe. Saita lodged a finger into his armpit.

"Here's the secret ingredient of chanko nabe," Saita said. "Sumo sweat."

NEXT: French?

High and Low

Japan is known for its social stratification, but I think the importance of status in contemporary Japanese life can sometimes be overestimated. Sure, people use different honorifics when addressing different people, and they show noticeable deference when talking to their bosses and other superiors. But these, I think, are largely remnants of an older Japan. Indeed, elder Japanese often lament that the country's youth don't know how to use the complex system of honorifics, variable verb forms and alternate personal pronouns that alter the language drastically depending on who's being addressed.

This move to a more egalitarian Japan, less bound to its inflexible hierarchies, is generally seen as a good thing. Just about the only good news you read about the Japanese economy these days are success stories about companies who shed their ossified leadership structures and patronage systems so they can listen to their young innovators and let in outsiders.

But in the sumo world, the stratification that is fading from contemporary Japanese life is explicit. It doesn't just determine the honorific with which one is addressed; it determines the very quality of one's life. Where you stand in the pecking order determines whether you'll have to bathe another, or will be bathed; whether you'll have to cook for another or will be cooked for; whether you'll be subjected to arbitrary beatings, or will administer those beatings yourself.

The stratification serves a practical function, I guess. It provides a tangible incentive to the lowly to get bigger, stronger and meaner so they can progress through the ranks and escape having to wait on the Sekitori. And the more high-ranking wrestlers a stable has, the more money and prestige it earns

I'll bet that, once you get to know him, the Sekitori probably isn't even such a bad guy. He probably spends so much time holed up alone in his room because he gets tired of being a creep. Being responsible for the torture and humiliation of a sprawling house full of overweight jocks is hard work. But it's part of his job description and the prerogative of his rank.

I assume the Sekitori is nice to me because he can be. I'm not included in the hierarchy that organizes the stable's social life. Going into this project, I wanted to be treated like a new recruit. But I now realize that that was an impossible request. Demeaning an outsider like me would compromise the symbolic power of the humiliation that's regularly meted out.

I also now realize that, for my purposes, the position I hold outside the hierarchy is preferable to being a rookie. Outside of the pecking order, I have access to its levels that none of the actual residents here enjoy. I can walk into any situation: I get to hang out with my high-ranking roommates, get treated to dinner by the Kashira, shoot the breeze with the Sekitori, watch variety shows in the common room with the young, low-ranking guys.

But the low-ranked guys, say, couldn't pop into the bedroom where I sleep for a chat with my roommates. And the Sekitori couldn't hang out in the common room with the low-ranked guys watching television, not without abusing them at least. They have to remain within their castes.

It's actually odd that such a stiff hierarchy exists in the sumo world. The sport emerged from an explicitly status-resistant milieu, the "floating world" demimonde of 17th and 18th century Japan. This world existed in codependency with its mirror image, the official Japan of the Edo-era shogunate.

The shogun's Japan, with its neo-Confucian underpinnings, was nothing if not stratified. A strict pecking order divided up Japan's rulers, its nobility and its farmers, with its townspeople and merchants at the bottom of the heap. Strict sumptuary laws reserved the finest fabrics and brightest colors for those with the most prestige, while travel restrictions limited geographical movement.

But in addition to enforcing this strict social organization, the shogun also kept its feudal nobility—the samurai—from regaining power by forcing its members to spend much of their time in the city of Edo, now Tokyo, where he could keep an eye on them. He also made feudal lords keep their families in residence in Edo as his virtual hostages. Their presence in the city generated an increasingly affluent merchant class to provide for their extravagant needs. By the mid-18th century, this conglomeration of samurai and city dwellers had made Edo the world's most populous city.

So, what do you get when you pack a city to the gills with bored samurai and nouveau riche urbanites? In Edo's case, it was a high demand for brothels, to which the shogunate responded by licensing a red-light district on the edge of the city, where it would least harm the established social order. A massive entertainment district soon sprung up around the brothel quarters, with areas of competing grandeur coming to life around the licensed brothels on the peripheries of Japan's other large cities. They were glittery, rough-and-tumble place, full of hoaring and gambling, flamboyant entertainment and audacious behavior. They were probably a lot like Las Vegas, just with people going to see kabuki performances instead of David Copperfield.

In the "floating world," as these pleasure quarters were known, official status didn't matter. What counted was how much money you had and how cool you were. There was a word for the Edo ideal of refined coolness: tsuu. If you had tsuu, you knew which whorehouses and drinking holes were the classiest and understood exactly how to behave in them. You could show up at a bar, scribble out a sophisticated haiku, drain a few bottles of the best sake without getting drunk, then walk out with the prettiest girl (or bed down with the most sought-after prostitute). If Dean Martin had been an "Edokko"—a child of Edo—he'd have had tsuu, which counted more than official status in the pleasure quarters of the time.

And it was exactly into this milieu that sumo was born. One of the floating world's entertainments was street-corner prizefighting, whose combatants included disenfranchised samurai and migrants from the countryside. True, wrestling has a long history in Japan and is even mentioned in the country's genesis mythology. And temples and shrines often hired these strongmen to perform on their grounds, as a way to raise money, giving them an association with religion. But make no mistake about it: these were rough, raw, brutal competitions, and were sometimes fought to the death.

But toward the end of the 18th century, sumo underwent a stunning transformation. At the time, the bloody street-side matches were in danger of being banned by the ruling shogun's moral-values crusade. Led by the scion of an established Edo family, who claimed to have inherited the secrets of sumo linking it to 12th century court wrestling, a contingent of fight promoters petitioned the shogun to let the show go on. The shogun relented, and soon sumo matches were even being held in his castle. Sumo, now dressed up in the trappings of Japan's semi-official religion, Shinto, had been fully rehabilitated into a representation of the Japanese spirit. Wrestlers were even summoned to greet—or intimidate—Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of Black Ships that ended Japan's centuries of shogun-enforced isolation.

When sumo was taken out of the floating world and established as part of the official culture, it must have absorbed the stratification of the shogun's Japan, which has fossilized into the hierarchy that exists in sumo today. And, considering that this Edo-style stratification exists in the sumo world while it rapidly disappears from contemporary Japanese life, sumo may really have become the vessel of traditional Japanese values that its 18th century rehabilitators imagined it to be.

Granted, the sumo hierarchy is less static than that of Edo Japan: it's a meritocracy, if a brutish one. But let's not forget that the warlords who began the project of national consolidation, which the shogun completed, weren't great nobles themselves. They were brutes from humble families who dominated the country through violence and cunning, much like the wrestlers win their matches.

NEXT: Chanko Nabe

Status

When Tatsuya said he wanted to get to the top of the banzuke, I'm sure he had in mind the fame and glory that would come from being a luminary of the sumo world. Wrestlers may no longer enjoy the esteem they once did in Japan, with Japan's increasingly international perspective favoring its soccer and baseball players. But sumo wrestlers still have their fans, including generous patrons who offer great material rewards. Sumo wrestlers have magazines and fan clubs devoted to them; they get love letters and marriage proposals from female admirers.

But I don't think Tatsuya was speaking exclusively from a universal desire for recognition as an athlete. From his perspective, advancement is the only escape—other than leaving sumo altogether—from what looks to me like a pretty miserable existence.

The wrestlers in the room where I sleep are all ranked highly enough so that they don't have it that bad. They have a fair amount of space for themselves. They each of their own little television. Most have their own video game console. Muriyasu has a little hi-fi system that he listens to hip-hop and reggae on while he eats huge chunks of white bread that he toasts in the red National-brand toaster oven he keeps on his shelf. The room is often a noisy cacophony, with Murayoshi's Play Station noise competing with dialogue on Saita's television, and Moriyasu's stereo playing in the background.

Most of the guys in the room are pushing 30, and a television, game console and shelf full of books and CD's may seem like minimal possessions for someone of that age. But it's a relative life of riches compared to what Tatsuya and the other seven guys who sleep downstairs have.

For one, their bedroom isn't even really a bedroom. They sleep in the same common room where meals are eaten, television is watched and banzuke are sorted. It's the same room where I sit with crossed legs most mornings watching practice. When they go to sleep at night, and again during their naptime, they have to lug their bedding out of the closet and lay it out on the floor. Then they have to stow it again when they wake up.

Since they don't have any space of their own, they don't really get to own anything. Everyone has a plastic drawer in the closet for his clothes. And most seem to own a cell phone and Gameboy, which has resulted in a wild nest of wires and chargers by the electrical outlet where they juice up their devices. But having a status that allows them virtually no space of their own, that's about all they get.

Mitsui, a somewhat older wrestler who never advanced that far and has remained on the first floor—and who now has a neck injury that keeps him from competing—tried to better his material lot. One evenening, he came home with a cheap, Chinese-made DVD player to hook up to his boxy, old portable television, so he could choose his own movies, and when to watch them, instead of relying on whatever the group happens to play on the common room television. His setup is small enough for him to stash in the closet during the day. But it's strangely heartbreaking to see him at night with electrical cords slinking under his covers, leading to his little entertainment center. He watches with a towel draped over it and his head so he can watch his movies without bothering the other wrestlers with whom he shares the floor.

A wrestler's status also shapes his day. The wrestlers downstairs are up before the guys I bunk with. They clear the common room, suit up in their mawashi, come upstairs to gently wake up their superiors—who usually go right back to sleep for a while—and then hit the practice floor. They're usually a good hour—sometimes longer—into their workout before my roommates tread onto the practice floor.

During practice, many of the low-ranked wrestlers disappear from practice floor now and then to fill the bathtub, help prepare lunch and perform tasks for the Sekitori, Kashira and Oyakata. They're also subject to the rare but blistering hostility that the more highly ranked wrestlers mete out. I haven't seen authentic violence erupt out of these generally mild-mannered guys too often, but when I do, it's truly frightening. I think its rarity and unpredictability make the violence even more threatening.

After practice, all the wrestlers follow the same basic afternoon sequence: they get their hair done, bathe, eat, then sleep. The hairdressing is done by the tokoyama, the sumo hairdresser, who arrives each morning and sets up his work area as the practice is drawing to a close. Sumo wrestlers only shampoo their hair once a week or so, an arduous process since it involves washing out the fragrant oil that the tokoyama works into their hair each day. I once saw Nakahara, probably the stable's most massive wrestler, washing his hair: he was lying naked on his side on the bathroom floor—taking up most of its area—with his head dipped in a basin of hot water to dissolve the oil.

So instead of washing their hair, the most a wrestler will do on a typical day is rinse out his hair in the kitchen sink while lunch is being prepared, then sit down on the tokoyama's mat to have his hair done. The tokoyama combs out of his hair, rubs in a palmful of oil and then uses a comb to shape his hair into a thin, oily slab, sticking straight up. He clips a bit off the end to make it even, then ties it up in the middle with a length of thick white thread. Then he uses another piece of thread to tie the topknot down to the top of the wrestler's head, with the end of his hair pointing forward.

This topknot hairstyle—the chonmage—was once worn by all samurai and urban Japanese, before the modernizing regime that came to power at the end of the nineteenth century prohibited it. These new rulers, under the Meiji emperor, thought topknots made Japan look backwards to the rest of the world. But because of the esteemed place in Japanese culture sumo already had by this time, the wrestlers were permitted to keep their chonmage.

The Sekitori gets his hair done first, followed by those who rank immediately below him. The lowest-ranked often won't get their hair done until hours after practice.

Bathing is also done in order of seniority, with the Oyakata getting his bath first, then the Sekitori, then the Kashira, then my roommates and others of their rank. The low-ranked guys, of course, go last. While waiting for their own baths, though, they help bathe, dress and serve food to the Oyakata, Kashira and Sekitori.

I actually don't think the Oyakata and Kashira have anyone sponging them down in the bathroom, but they do have someone standing by to hand them their towels on the way out and lay out their clothes for them. One afternoon, the Kashira dressed after his bath in the room where I sleep and I watched the young wrestler Ishikawa hand him each article of clothing as he needed it.

I also don't think all the young wrestlers have to bathe the Sekitori. Because of his rank, the Sekitori has tsukebito, attendants, that the Oyakata chooses for him from among the wrestlers. The Sekitori's tsukebito often change with the publication of a new banzuke. Before Thursday's banzuke, the Sekitori had three tsukebito: Nakahara and Kitamura, who are both just one rank below him, and Batto, the low-ranking Mongolian. Since then, Batto was rotated out of service, with Kazuya and Matsunaga taking his place.

The Sekitori used to call on Batto, and now calls on Kazuya, for most everyday tasks, including giving him his baths. So most of the wrestlers are off the hook on for that assignment, but one never knows when he'll be asked to fill in. The Sekitori's lowest-ranking tsukebito also stand by the ring holding a towel for him while he practices, but at actual tournaments, I've heard, this task goes to the makushita-ranked Nakahara or Kitamura. It's apparently unbecoming to have a mere jonidan hand you your towel in public.

At any rate, after offering each varying degrees of help with their baths, the low-ranked wrestlers serve the Sekitori and the Kashira their meals (the Oyakata eats with his family in his apartment). While they're doing this, the higher-ranked wrestlers, who'd been laying low while their superiors bathe, take their own baths. Then they eat while the lowest-ranked finally get a chance to bathe.

When the high-ranked wrestlers and I are finishing lunch and on our way upstairs for our afternoon snooze, usually a little before two o'clock, the lowest-ranked are just starting lunch. So they have to eat, clear out the common room and wash the dishes before they can lay out their bedding and go to sleep themselves.

They also finish their naps earlier than my high-ranked roommates and I. We usually wake up shortly after 4 p.m., when one of the wrestlers from downstairs comes up to empty our trashcans and sweep our floor. Then the guys up here kill time—watching television, fooling with cell phones, catching a few more winks—while the guys downstairs are cooking dinner, sweeping the common-room floor, washing the mawashi and towels used during practice, and scrubbing the hallway and toilets.

When dinner's ready, a low-ranking guy comes upstairs to call us down to eat. The low-ranked aren't permitted to serve themselves until their superiors have either taken their portions, or passed on the opportunity. The Sekitori eats alone in his room, where he's served by his tsukebito.

Immediately following dinner, the low-ranked are on dish duty again. But their responsibilities don't necessarily end there. Their superiors are constantly sending individual wrestlers out on snack runs to convenience stores or fast-food restaurants and other errands.

Wrestlers ranks even determine what they can wear. The lowest-ranked wrestlers—the jonokuchi and jonidan—are only aloud out in geta, which are big, awkward wooden sandals. Those with higher ranks—sandanme and up—can wear soft sandals with bamboo soles. High-ranked wrestlers can wear colorful belts over their kimono, while low-ranked ones are stuck with black sashes. Low-ranked wrestlers, unlike their high-ranked counterparts, aren't even allowed to wear a coat over their kimono.

These sumptuary regulations are, however, largely irrelevant in practice, since low ranked wrestlers are generally too busy with their responsibilities around the stable to go too far away, and their sweat clothes and flip-flops are sufficient for the errands they run around the neighborhood.

NEXT: High and Low

The Banzuke

On Thursday, the same day that the gyoji with the bad combover came to sanctify the dohyo, the banzuke arrived. Banzuke—sumo ranking sheets—list everyone in the sumo universe, from wrestlers to yobidashi, each arranged according to his rank. A new banzuke usually comes out two weeks before the start of the next bimonthly sumo tournament—the exception is the banzuke whose publication precedes the January tournament, which comes out another week or so earlier to allow for the new year's holiday that virtually shuts the country down for the first week of the year.

The sheets re-rank all the wrestlers in the country based on their performance in the most recent tournament. The sumo association produces them, but the stables themselves are responsible for their distribution. Early Thursday morning, the Oyakata had driven out to the sumo association headquarters, and come back with a few big boxes of the sheets. By the time I woke up, the wrestlers—who had off from practice for the day so they could process the banzuke for distribution—were already hard at work.

They'd formed themselves into a sort of assembly line on the common room floor. It began with Kitamura, who was counting out the banzuke. He handed stacks of the sheets down the line, where other wrestlers stamped them with the stable's seal. They worked in pairs, with one wrestler flipping the pages, while another stamped. Then the sheets went to another pair of wrestlers, who stamped them with the seal for the January tournament.

The sheets' final stop was with the wrestlers who packed them up to be mailed off to the stable's patrons and supporters and anyone else who had ordered a ranking sheet. A few wrestlers were folding banzuke into neat rectangles to slide into letter-sized envelopes for those who ordered individual sheets at 50 yen—about 50 cents—each. Murayoshi was folding stacks of five, 10 and 25 into larger envelopes, while other wrestlers rolled up hundreds at a time into cylindrical packages for mass orders at 2,500 yen—25 bucks or so—for 100 sheets. Before lunch, the wrestlers had processed some 3,000 banzuke. But they would continue with them into the evening, stamping and mailing banzuke that they bought themselves to send to their own friends, families and supporters.

I sat down next to Tatsuya, who was folding up individual banzuke, to look over his shoulder at the broad, cream-colored sheets dense with black calligraphic type. It was separated into five rows that provided an almost cosmological map to the sumo universe. The most highly ranked wrestlers were listed in the largest type on the top row, with the print getting progressively finer as one's eyes moved down the banzuke. The bottom row listed the names of oyakata, kashira, yobidashi and other sumo-world associates, each group arranged according to its own ranking scheme. These rows were divided in half by narrow column that ran unbroken from top to bottom, which featured information about the upcoming tournament and listed the names of the gyoji. Those on the right side of the banzuke were designated as belonging to the western division; those on the left were marked as belonging to the eastern division. But those separations are arbitrary, with no relation to the actual location of the wrestlers or their stables.

Tatsuya pointed to the name printed horizontally on the top row in the largest type of all. "He's the yokozuna," he said. "Asashoryu."

Asashoryu is currently sumo's lone yokozuna, or grand champion. A poll of Japanese recently named him as the country's favorite non-Japanese athlete. He comes from Mongolia, a country well represented in the recent wave of high-profile foreign wrestlers, which also includes a Russian, a Bulgarian and a Georgian. There've always been a smattering of foreign wrestlers in sumo, but they were never all that successful until the string of Hawaiian wrestlers that began in the 1970's with Takamiyama, sumo's first foreign tournament champion, and ended a few years ago with the enormous Akebono, the sport's first foreign yokozuna.

The wrestlers on the top row of the banzuke are all in the makuuchi division, Tatsuya said, which includes its top ranks of yokozuna, ozeki, sekiwake and komosubi. He showed me which wrestlers on the top level of the banzuke were ozeki, one rank down from yokozuna, which included the wrestler Kaio. Kaio is often characterized as Japan's great hope for a homegrown yokozuna, but every time the title's come within his grasp, he's fumbled it.

On the second-to-the-highest row, where the lower-ranking wrestlers began to be listed, Tatsuya showed me the Sekitori's name, Ishide. It was printed in characters barely one-fourth the size of those on the row above. Finally, Tatsuya showed me his own name on the lowest level of wrestlers, which included those of jonidan rank, like himself. His name was printed in characters so fine that he had to squint and search for it among all the others.

"I want to get up here," said Tatsuya, pointing to the top row.

NEXT: Status

Dohyo-Tsukuri

Three times each year, Hanaregomabeya, the stable where I'm staying, tears up and then remakes its practice floor. Japan's sumo association requires all of Tokyo's stables to do this and it probably has some mystical purpose, but when I asked Murayoshi why they do it, he just said, "I don't know. I guess the center of the ring gets worn out?"

The whole process, called dohyo-tsukuri, takes three days: one to wreck the floor, one to redo it, and a third for the dohyo matsuri, a sanctification ritual. The wrestlers began the process on Tuesday as soon as they finished their breathing exercise. They reached into a closet in the practice room and took out shovels, trowels and rakes. They started digging into the dirt floor, working without shoes and pushing their shovels into the ground with bare heels. Most still just wore mawashi, but some had tied towels around their waists that they wore like miniskirts, hiked up high so their mawashi-bisected asses flashed perversely out the back.

With all but the most highly ranked wrestlers cooperating, it didn't take them very long. Pretty soon they had reached the border that Kazuya had etched into the floor a few feet in from each wall. (Note: Kazuya is the young wrestler I've been inconsistently calling by his given name, Hayeshida, in these posts.)

There was no sumo practice the next day. Instead, the wrestlers woke up at the relatively indulgent hour of 7 a.m. to start remaking the practice floor. They were joined by three yobidashi—sumo announcers— who came from outside the stable to help out. Yobidashi, apparently, are the engineers of the sumo world. It's their job to oversee dohyo making and to themselves execute the finer points of the job. The yobidashi who came for the dohyo-tsukuri wore tabi, thin-rubber-soled shoes whose cotton uppers separate one's big toe from one's other toes, like a mitten. They're the traditional footwear of Japan's building trades.

Katsuyuki, the senior yobidashi of the bunch, was in his forties. He was also attached to the stable where I'm staying, but doesn't live here. He took charge of the operation, directing Haruki, the 16-year-old yobidashi who does live in our stable, and two yobidashi from other stables, who both looked like they were in their 20's.

By 8 a.m., when I and the higher-ranking wrestlers with whom I bunk awoke, the reconstruction had already started. Katsuyuki was changing into his work clothes in the common room and seemed dismayed to see a little white guy with sleepy eyes enter through the sliding door wearing rumpled sweat clothes.

The two yobidashi from other stables, meanwhile, were outside preparing the tawara, the sleeve-shaped bags of dirt that are sunken end-to-end into the practice floor in a circle to form the dohyo. Wrestlers were shoveling soil into the slits down the sides the already-prepared tawara. When they were packed tight, the yobidashi bound them shut and beat the lumps out of them with large beer bottles made of thick glass.

While they did this, the wrestlers started pounding down the earth on the practice room floor. They took turns, using a thick two-foot-high segment of tree trunk with two 2 x 4's jutting up from either side. Working two at a time, they lifted the trunk up with the boards and slammed it down onto the floor. They moved around the floor, packing it down one tree-trunk-sized footprint at a time.

Once the tawara were all prepared and the floor completely flattened, Katsuyuki directed the wrestlers as they ran a rope from the center of one wall to the center of the opposite wall, then stomped on the rope to make a long indentation near the middle of the room. They did the same thing from the other two walls, forming a cross in the center of the practice floor, into which Katsuyuki hammered a stake.

A younger yobidashi then tied the rope to the stake and used a tape measure to determine the spot on the rope six shaku, an indigenous Japanese unit of measurement that equals about eight feet, from the stake. He stuck a large nail into that spot on the rope, then walked it around the stake in the middle like a giant compass, etching a large circle into the ground.

Then Katsuyuki and one of his subordinates scraped up a layer of dirt inside the circle, starting in the middle and pushing the dirt outwards, so it formed a rough perimeter where the circle had been drawn. The junior yobidashi spread that dirt back over the circle. Wrestlers then took turns again packing that dirt back down, first with the tree trunk, then with thick boards fastened to the end of poles that they lifted up over their shoulders and slammed forcefully onto the ground.

After that, they used the rope to relocate the midpoint and redraw the circle, the inside of which Katsuyuki and two wrestlers slammed down again with the boards on poles. Other wrestlers, meanwhile used trowels and shovels to dig a gulley around the outside of the circle. While they were doing this, a yobidashi used a trowel to cut straight down along the giant circle. When he was done, the circle was a perfectly round cylinder of tightly packed earth, rising out of the gulley in the still rough practice floor.

Following lunch, a younger yobidashi started putting the new tawara in place in the gulley around the circle. He beat them in the middle with a big empty beer bottle so they'd sit flush against the convex side of the raised circle. As he worked around the circle, the wrestlers packed down the earth on the remainder of the practice floor. Once finished, the practice floor looked spotlessly clean, in spite of the fact that it was made out of dirt, with fresh-straw-colored tawara replacing the old muddy ones that had been there before.

While this construction was going on, three guys looking like typical handymen in quilted jackets, fingerless gloves and work boots had arrived and set up a ladder by the shrine near the ceiling of the practice floor's back right corner. One guy took down the broad rope that hung over the shrine and the purple curtain bearing the Oyakata's family seal—a leafy pattern—that partially obscured it. He moved aside the white ceramic jars of offerings and vases of freshly cut leaves, and pulled down the doll-house-sized shrine itself, which they took outside to dust. An older guy, meanwhile, hung a straw rope around the practice room ceiling with bits of twine and white paper cutouts in the shape of lightning bolts hanging off it. Before they left, the workmen replaced the shrine and its accoutrements, complete with a new broad rope hanging over it and a fresh purple curtain in front.

The wrestlers didn't practice the next day, Thursday, either. They spent the morning sorting through banzuke—sumo ranking sheets: I'll write more about them later. In the afternoon, Nobutaka, the stable's senior gyoji, or sumo referee, arrived to lead the dohyo matsuri, the ring-purification ritual.

If yobidashi are the engineers of the sumo world, then gyoji are clearly its priests. The stable where I'm staying has two gyoji: Kichijiro, the 27-year-old who lives in-house, and the older, more established Nobutaka, who has his own place.

Kichijiro spent much of Thursday afternoon preparing for Nobutaka's arrival, setting out his robes, paddles and other paraphernalia. Kichijiro had Ishikawa, one of the wrestlers, dump dry, silty soil into the middle of the dohyo and sweep it into a mound, on which he placed a freshly cut paper idol. In front of the paper idol, he laid a straw mat, on which he placed a small wooden alter with dishes of dehydrated seaweed, dry fish, uncooked rice and salt, and a leafy branch. Next to this alter, he stood a tall bottle of sake. Finally, he poured three small mounds of salt in each corner of the room.

Nobutaka showed up after lunch. He was a short old guy in a blue suit with broad pinstripes. He had a bad combover. When I later asked one of the wrestlers what his name was, he replied, "Hage-san"—Mr. Baldie—before telling me his real name.

As soon as Nobutaka arrived, he started undressing himself in the middle of the common room, while Kichijiro helped him into his black under-robe, over which he wore a blue kimono with wide, low-hanging sleeves, kept closed with a sash. The kimono was printed with another leaf-seal design and had little puffy orange-and-white ornaments that resembled fly-fishing lures fastened to its sleeves and collar, and near its hem. Finally, he put on a low, pointy black hat with a band that ran under his chin and slid into his sash the narrow wooden paddle that Kichijiro had laid out for him in a satin-lined box.

As the wrestlers lined up on either side of the practice floor, with the Oyakata, the Kashira and the Sekitori standing side-by-side along its back wall, Nobutaka kneeled down on the straw mat and clapped twice, the same way people here clap when they approach a shrine and want to get god's attention. He spoke a Japanese prayer I didn't understand a word of, leaned forward with his paddle sticking out of his fists, stuck the paddle back into his sash and clapped again, twice.

He picked up the leafy branch and swung it over his shoulder. He took it to the Oyakata, Kashira and Sekitori, who bowed to it, then brought it to the rows of wrestlers, who also bowed, before returning it to the alter. He clapped again, then leaned forward again with his wooden paddle.

Then he picked up the bottle of sake and carried it to each corner of the room, pouring a few drops on each of the salt mounds Kichijiro had left there. After that, he walked around the dohyo, pouring sake all along the tawara dug into the ground.

Finally, he returned to the straw mat and handed the alter and wine off to Kichijiro, who placed them aside on the ledge to the common room. Kichijiro handed him a much broader, gold-colored paddle with stylized green writing on it from the satin-lined box. He kneeled with the paddle, and recited another prayer I couldn't understand, this time shouting it. After that, he filled up two glasses of wine, which he gave to the wrestlers who each took a sip before passing them on.

The wrestlers also started eating off the tray of rice and dried fish, which surprised me, since I thought that stuff was for god. I was even more surprised when Matsunaga motioned for me to eat some myself. I looked over the spread and thought the strips of dried fish looked best, so I popped one in my mouth.

"No," said Matsunaga. "You're supposed to do it like this…" He mimed taking a pinch from each plate—fish, rice, seaweed and salt—and popping the whole handful into his mouth in one shot.

"Ooops, sorry," I said, and did what he told me.

NEXT: The Banzuke

The Day After Shiko

I woke up on Tuesday morning sandwiched between the blankets of my warm futon feeling snug and content. It didn't take me long, though, to remember where I was and that I had to get out of that warm cocoon to stand in the cold for a couple hours wearing nothing but heavy canvas underpants. So I procrastinated until my roommates started waking up and going downstairs themselves. Then I finally threw off my covers and stood to roll up my bedding.

But once on my legs, I nearly collapsed. I'd clearly overdone it on the shikos the day before. No leg workout had ever left me feeling like this the next day: not my first uphill runs, not skiing, not my first time snowboarding. From my knees to my pelvis, from my calves to my ass, inner thigh, outer thigh, everywhere, all I felt was pain. It hurt to walk. It hurt to stand. It hurt to sit.

Laying down, however, wasn't so bad, so I crawled back into bed and wondered whether to bail on sumo practice this morning. On the one hand, I didn't want the guys to think I was a wuss. The sumo world, from what I could tell, doesn't really stand for that sort of thing. And I was worried that the Oyakata, who'd extended so much hospitality already, would think I was insincere, ready to drop my eagerness to wake up early, skip breakfast and put on a mawashi at the first little ache.

On the other hand, I worried that, even if I could make it into a mawashi and onto the practice floor, I probably wouldn't make it through the first round of shikos. I'd put someone through the trouble of getting me into the mawashi, only to slink off the practice floor before the fighting even started.

So I decided to do a few test shikos right there in my room. At the foot of my futon, I squatted, kicked up my right leg, squatted again, then kicked up my left. Each movement was as awkward as it was painful, my legs having the dexterity of cooked noodles. Murayoshi, still in his futon, saw me painfully shiko-ing alone in the dark and asked, "What are you doing?"

"My legs hurt," I answered, through clenched teeth.

"If your legs hurt, don't bother even putting on a mawashi," he said, which is exactly what I wanted to hear. I crawled back into bed to kill some time and steel myself for the next couple hours in the common room being forced to keep my aching legs crossed.

When I finally went downstairs, I passed Murayoshi in the hall, who said, "Make sure to thank the Kashira for dinner." The Kashira was seated in his customary position on the ledge by the practice floor and when I thanked him for the previous night's Korean barbecue, he said, "So your legs hurt, huh?"

"They do," I answered, and he smirked. A few of the other wrestlers, hearing that I wasn't joining them because my legs ached, also chuckled. When the Oyakata came down from his apartment a while into the practice, he saw me sitting in the common room, wearing sweats.

"His legs hurt," explained the smiling Kashira, and the Oyakata laughed too.

NEXT: Dohyo-Tsukuri

The Mawashi

Early morning in the sumo stable has an enchanted air. Nobody speaks, though they mumble to themselves and breath heavily, drifting through the hallways in their light robes and silently binding their wounds from the previous day with white bandages. It was a mood I was reluctant to break Monday morning, but didn't know how else to get myself ready for the ring. Finally, Hiroki saw me looking lost in the hallway by the bathroom and asked me what was up.

"The Oyakata said I could give it a shot today," I said.

"So you're putting on a mawashi?" he asked.

"Yeah, if that's alright," I said.

He pulled a mawashi—a long, broad strip of thick gray canvas, folded lengthwise—from the pile atop the nearby shelf and told me to get undressed, which I did. To put on the mawashi, I had to straddle it, holding one end under my chin and forming the section between my legs into a sort of athletic cup. Then I spun around as Hiroki wound the remaining length of canvas around my waist like a belt. Right before one of the final twirls, Hiroki showed me how to tuck the part of the mawashi I still held under my chin into the belt, so it could be unfastened for bathroom visits. Finally, when all of the mawashi had been wound around my waist, he tucked it into itself behind me. The mawashi only has to orbit the waists of most of the wrestlers here a few times before it's expended itself. I, though, had to keep twirling around until the mawashi had almost layered itself into a course canvas tutu.

In the mawashi, I followed Hiroki onto the earthen practice floor, which was chilly under my bare feet. Hiroki told me to hang out off to the side until someone had time to instruct me, but Murayoshi, the roommate whom I'd seen sleeping with an inhaler, had me jump into the line of wrestlers doing the squat-sideways kick exercise, the shiko.

It was harder than it looked. I had to keep my hands on my knees with my thumbs facing forward and elbows back during the squat; I had to keep my feet placed under my shoulders; my kicks had go straight out, with unbent knees. And before each squat-kick combo, I had to slap myself noisily on the thigh.

Each wrestler counted out ten repetitions, making for about 150 in total: a solid leg workout. Then we kneeled on our right legs while we stretched out our left legs, switched to the reverse position, and repeated the whole exercise a few times. I looked around and saw that all the wrestlers, even the heaviest ones, were sweating less than I was.

Then, following the other wrestlers' leads, I sat my nearly bare ass on the dirt floor and spread my legs as wide as they'd go. We touched our toes, which was especially tough because of all the layers of heavy mawashi digging into my stomach.

Then all the wrestlers leaned forward, bringing their stomachs close to the ground. I couldn't come close to doing that. Murayoshi, seeing my weak performance, pushed my legs farther apart with the ball of his foot and gently pushed on my back, bringing my chest closer to the ground. Suddenly, something in my upper-left inner thigh snapped. I could tell it wasn't anything too serious—no ripped tendon or anything like that—but it was clearly a snap and it hurt. Murayoshi heard it too. He stopped pushing and said something I'm not sure I understood, but sounded like, "You won!"

Then the fighting started, with the lowest-ranked wrestlers taking the ring first as they had on Saturday. Murayoshi told me to keep shiko-ing, like many of the other wrestlers were doing. The motion kept me reasonably warm, despite the fact that I was standing on a dirt floor in an unheated room wearing next to nothing. But once the other wrestlers stopped, I did to, feeling like a schmuck for shiko-ing once the real wrestlers quit.

I didn't stop for long though. Soon the Kashira arrived and motioned for Mitsui, who stood next to me, to tell me to start up again, maybe because he wanted me to stay warm, maybe because that's just what a guy's supposed to do his first time on the practice floor. Either way, I shiko-ed and didn't stop for an hour or more, as terrified that the Kashira would see me standing still as I was on Saturday that he would catch me uncrossing my legs. Mitsui was shiko-ing too, pausing a few times to correct my form.

I must have shiko-ed for an hour or more, until my hips ached and I could barely support myself on one leg while kicking out with the other. When Mitsui stopped, I stopped too, too tired to go on and again feeling foolish for being the only one on the floor doing the exercise.

Standing there in my mawashi, I soon got very, very cold. I suddenly couldn't see the point of point of putting on a loincloth to do a few calisthenics, then wait there in the freezing cold for practice to end. Was this really going to grant me any better an understanding than watching practice from the warmth and comfort of the practice room floor? But, if not, didn't that contradict the whole point of my project?

In the midst of this wave of self-doubt, I managed to watch a little bit of the practice going on in front of me. This day's wrestling was far more brutal than the wrestling I saw on Saturday. The most shocking part was how gentle these guys had been outside of the ring, virtually doting on me to make sure I didn't go hungry or unbathed.

Only moments ago, Murayoshi was asking me whether I needed a bathroom break, afraid I might neglect to take one because I didn’t know how to unfasten my mawashi. Now he was in the ring with Hiroki, tearing the poor guy to pieces. Hiroki was already in pretty bad shape: his left knee and right thigh were bleeding. But he kept jumping back into the ring with Murayoshi, who was far surpassing the simple cruelty it took to win the matches. On more than one occasion, he'd toss Hiroki out of the ring, then reach out to land a gratuitous slap on his cheek on his way out. Once he even dropped Hiroki on the ground, then kicked him in the back.

Muriyasu was even more brutal. During a Zamboni session, which are really called butsukarigeiko matches, he was challenging Batto to push him out of the ring, but Batto wasn't able to move him more than a few feet at a time. Muriyasu shouted at him cruelly, "Faster! You're slow!"

All the Zamboni session's I'd seen up the this point were followed by a play-acted match, where the always lower-ranked pusher lets the higher ranked pushed lead him around the ring by the neck. Then the pusher lets himself be thrown to the ground where he theatrically tumbles back up to his feet.

But these weren't play acted. Muriyasu was genuinely pulling Batto around by his neck and his hair, and throwing him down with violence. And instead of cheerfully tumbling to his feet, Batto would roll over on the ground with his dwindling strength and, wheezing and moaning with tears in his eyes, try and fail to push Muriyasu out of the ring once again. He was covered from head to toe in dirt from the ground sticking to his sweaty body, with thick droplets of blood showing through on his knee.

When most of the matches were finished, the Sekitori, having fought two of his immediate inferiors and left them to fight among themselves, walked by me and asked if I was ready to fight. I lifted my arms and waved toward myself in the international signal that means, "Bring it on."

"You'll fight him," he said, pointing to Hayeshida, who was walking right behind him.

"But he's gay," added the Sekitori.

"Okay, I'll keep that in mind," I said.

But I wound up facing off against Hiroki instead. First they tried to have me Zamboni him. He stood himself in the center of the ring and waited for me to charge him from its edge. As instructed, I started from a squat at the edge of the ring with my fists on the ground before me and thrust myself at him, meeting his chest with my open palms.

He didn't budge.

The Sekitori told me I had to collide into his chest with my head and Hiroki pointed to the spot below his right shoulder where the impact should occur. I charged again, and this time he slid an inch or two. But the Sekitori told me I'd charged incorrectly again. I was supposed to approach him without lifting my feet off the ground.

For my final charge, I shuffled my way toward Hirkoki, never stepping off the ground, and met his chest with my palms and head. Again, he moved about an inch.

Next we really wrestled. We faced off from across the center of the ring, squatting with our wrists on the ground, and he met my charge gently and grabbed onto my mawashi. I scrambled to get him into some sort of hold, but the Sekitori called out, "Grab his mawashi."

Pulling him by his mawashi, I somehow got him near the edge of the ring and the Sekitori shouted, "Push!" But it was no use. I couldn't move Hiroki, who towered over me and weighed almost 290 pounds. He pushed me instead and soon we were on the opposite side of the ring, with me about to be pushed out. Somehow, though, I managed to stay in the ring my getting a toehold between the ring and the buried bales of straw that marked its border. Before he could lift me up and toss me out, though, the Sekitori ended the match.

The training session ended with us all standing in a circle, doing a few hundred squats, all painful after my hours of shiko-ing. Then we did pushups and a quiet breathing exercise and the session was over.

Someone brought me a robe. The Sekitori told me to sit in front of the heater. I clearly wasn't being treated like a normal new recruit.

After practice, I bathed and ate and went up to my encampment, again planning to type up some notes and again sleeping soundly for several hours instead. When I woke up, Murayoshi told me that the Kashira was taking us out for Korean barbecue. When it was time to go, Murayoshi, Ishikawa and I took off on bicycles, riding through quiet residential streets and train-station-side shopping districts until we reached the restaurant. My legs were already sore from all the shiko-ing I'd done.

The Kashira arrived with his quiet, but good-humored 13-year-old daughter, who read a C.S. Lewis book translated into Japanese at the table when she wasn't eating. The Kashira wanted her to speak English, and was trying to communicate with me by using her as a translator, but her English wasn't really up to the task and she wasn't into the idea anyway.

The Kashira ordered a mess of food, including an order of boiled pigs feet, a bowl of rice soup and a salad, which he ate all by himself. For the table he ordered several large plates of marinated beef slices that we broiled on little charcoal grills set into the table. We also barbecued ourselves a few orders of beef tongue, which were very good swished in fresh lemon juice, and an enormous tray of stomach and intestine pieces, which were chewy and tasted like halitosis. We had a few little plates of beef liver sashimi, eaten raw dipped in sesame oil too, which were surprisingly palatable.

When we got back to the stable, Hiroki, who'd seen me scribbling in my notebook before, joked, "Now he's going to write in his diary, 'Today, the Kashira took me out for Korean barbecue. It was very good.'" Which is exactly what I did.

NEXT: The Day After Shiko

Man-Faced Dog

Sunday was the stable's day off; no morning training. None of my roommates were around when I went to bed the previous night, and when I awoke, all but Moriyasu—who still hadn't come home—were fast asleep.

Downstairs, a handful of wrestlers were lounging around the common room in front of the television. Mitsui, a quiet, serious guy who wore glasses, sat against the wall, reading a comic book. Two other wrestlers lay side-by-side against each other—almost snuggling—each fiddling with a cell phone. The Takemura brothers, Tatsuya and Hiroki, were polishing off a stack of Egg McMuffins and a few cartons of McNuggets while they waited for lunch. Batto was setting up a clothesline in the practice area, where he hung up the Sekitori's kesho-mawashi to air out.

Kesho-mawashi are ceremonial mawashi with aprons that highly ranked wrestlers wear at tournaments. They're handmade silk creations that cost thousands of dollars and are provided by a wrestler's patrons or support group. The one kesho-mawashi that Batto had hung facing the common room where I could see it had an image embroidered into it that looked like the Bob's Big Boy mascot holding a hammer. The Sekitori's wrestling name, Ishide, was embroidered on the right side.

I asked Hiroki what wrestlers get up to on their day off. "We sleep, clean, relax…stuff like that," he said.

Since I had slept plenty over the past couple days, aided no doubt by the apparent absence of coffee in the stable, and knew that no one here would let me clean, even if I insisted on it, I decided to get lost for the afternoon. I could use some fresh air, having barely left the stable since I got there. So after lunch, I took the train across town to Shibuya, where I had a much-needed cup of coffee and caught up on some emails at a café with wireless Internet service.

I would have liked to grab dinner out—maybe Indian food or pizza, something that would never show up on the stable's menu. But I didn't know when the wrestlers were expecting me back and worried that staying away for too long might be perceived as a slight. So I made my way back, boarding the train this time at Harajuku station, where I waded through the Sunday afternoon crowd of rockers and Goths and slutty Bo-Peeps and foreigners lining up to take their pictures.

Dinner at the stable, it turned out, was a pleasant surprise: scallops broiled in their shells, with a few side dishes. After eating and once again having my offers to help out with dishes rebuffed, I went up to my room to type up some notes.

Soon after I started working, Tatsuya came in and said it was teatime. I followed him downstairs, where we passed the Sekitori in the hall entering the bathroom with Batto, who presumably was going to bathe him.

I assumed that teatime was a vacation-day tradition and expected to see a roomful of wrestlers enjoying cups of tea in the common room. Instead I was handed a cup of coffee and a doughnut and told to sit on the floor. Apparently it was only teatime for me. One paranoid explanation for my teatime is that they were hoping I'd drink a cup of coffee, stay up all night and sleep through practice the next morning, thereby saving themselves the trouble and embarrassment of dressing me up in a mawashi and having me in the dohyo with them. But in all actuality, they probably just thought giving me a cup of coffee and a doughnut would be a nice gesture, which it was.

I sat with my coffee and my doughnut, watching a television program about special agents who investigate the truth of urban legends. In this episode, they were checking the veracity of the story about the lady who microwaved her cat and finding out whether burnt food really causes cancer. Suddenly, the Sekitori came in with a yellow towel around his waist, followed by Batto who had his own boxers hiked up into something resembling a g-string.

Everyone stood up when the Sekitori walked in. I looked up at Ishikawa, the wrestler Batto had called an Iraqi. Ishikawa shook his head slightly, signaling that I didn't have to get up. The Sekitori handed Mitsui a stack of coupons, then stood in front of the heater, changing from his towel into a pair of boxer shorts. Another wrestler, a tall, almost square-jawed guy with a bald spot near the front of his head named Matsunaga, wandered between me and the television. The Sekitori noticed this. "Get out of his way," the Sekitori barked.

Later, the Sekitori was sitting next to Mitsui, and I thought I heard them discussing how much of the television program they thought I could understand. It turned out I was right.

"About how much of this show are you getting?" the Sekitori asked me.

"About 60 percent," I answered.

He punched Mitsui. "I told you he doesn't understand it all," he said. Then he pointed to Mitsui and said to me, "He only understands 40 percent," and everyone in the room laughed. Next he pointed to Kitamura, who was drying the Sekitori's towel in front of the heater. "He only understands 15 percent," he said.

After the laughter died down, he remained next to Mitsui for a few moments before standing up to put Fuchita in a headlock until Fuchita started coughing and gagging, his face red. When he let go, Fuchita continued to wheeze.

By now the television program had moved to a segment about the man-faced dog, apparently a well-known urban legend in Japan. The camera zoomed in on the face of a mummified man-faced dog, which was revealed to be a hoax. The Sekitori pointed at Kitamura's face, indicating a perceived resemblance to the man-faced dog's long mien. Kitamura wasn't paying attention, so everyone chuckled quietly until Kitamura looked up to find himself the butt of another of the Sekitori's jokes.

Then the room burst once again into raucous laughter.

NEXT: The Mawashi

Training

I woke up on Saturday around six in the morning, as the wrestlers in the room were slowly getting themselves out of bed and preparing for practice. The hulk in the futon across the room from my own, Saita, had rolled up his bedding and was sitting on the floor in the dark, bandaging his wrists and ankles.

After he left, I got up and went downstairs. I ran into Batto in the hallway. He was wearing a mawashi and motioned for me to go into the common room. Adjacent to the common room, was a dirt -floored practice area of almost the same size. It was situated below the common room, so the edge of the common room's floor that faced it formed a ledge. At the center of the ledge sat an empty cushion with a clean ashtray on one side and a sports news daily on the other, awaiting, I correctly guessed, the Oyakata.

There was a circular ring, the dohyo, in the center of the practice area, demarcated with half-sunken narrow bales of hay.

So far, I hadn't seen anyone in the practice area, just a big mound of dirt with a design cut from white paper—which I later learned was a religious icon—stuck into the top.

Now the mound was gone and the wrestlers stood there in rows. One took a turn counting to ten and, as each number was called, the wrestlers slapped one of their thighs, lifted a leg sideways, stamped it down, and squatted. The leg lifts didn't occur in unison, but in a sort of lazy syncopation.

They all wore matching gray mawashi, and about half had their feet or hands or shoulders bandaged. They were all big, of course, but not uniformly so. Some had enormous, round fatty stomachs, giant droopy breasts and grotesque folds of fat pouring out from the legs of their mawashi. But the musculature on even the fattest was readily apparent. When they stamped down, their loose flesh was pressed against their bodies and their rippled muscles showed through.

After their leg stretches, they formed what looked like a congo line and marched around the perimeter of the dohyo. Then one wrestler grabbed a broom and swept out the ring, while another drizzled water over it with a sky-blue plastic flowerpot.

Two wrestlers took their places facing each other in the ring, then charged at each other and, after a brief scuffle, one was thrown from the ring. These bouts continued in rapid succession, a new challenger jumping into the ring as soon as the last was tossed out or, less frequently, thrown to the ground.

The initial charges resulted in brutal collisions. A few knocked heads in the ring, and you could hear their skulls hitting. Another wrestler, after absorbing a number of charges on his shoulder, started bleeding at the point of repeated contact. And judging by the welts and bruises and cuts and bandages on the practice floor, this was apparently a gentle morning.

Soon after the actual wrestling began, the Kashira walked in through a door that led directly from outside onto the practice floor. He took off his shoes and the light jacket he wore over a pink oxford shirt, which Kitamura collected from him and brought into the stable. Shortly after that, the Yobidashi walked into the common room, in his Scorpion Boy shirt and checkered track pants, and sat down close behind me. The Kashira waved him over and whispered something into his ear, apparently an instruction to tell me not to sit with my legs outstretched like I'd been doing. I had to sit with my legs crossed, the Yobodashi told me. A day and a half after sitting with crossed legs for the entire four hour practice, my knees and thighs still ached.

About an hour after the wrestling started, the Sekitori entered wearing a white mawashi. All the wrestlers greeted him deferentially and nodded slightly as he made his way to the faucet in the opposite corner of the training floor, where he stood gargling mouthfuls of water. Although the most accomplished wrestler in the room, he was hardly the biggest. His arms and legs were lean and knotty with muscles and his stomach was round and solid, like a polished stone. He remained in the corner of the practice floor, doing squats and leg lifts.

Finally, about two hours after the practice had begun, the Oyakata came down the steps leading from the main entranceway to his apartment. He sat on the cushion that waited for him and lit a Mild Seven. After a bit, he leaned into me and whispered, "Do you need breakfast?" I motioned that I was alright, although I was hungry and my aching need for coffee was growing by the moment.

The Oyakata and Kashira remained in their places on the ledge, sometimes shouting criticisms at wrestlers who lost matches. The matches continued one after another, with wrestlers of close rank racing to get in the ring with the latest victor, staring him down for a heartbeat, then colliding in the middle of the ring. After every few dozen matches, a wrestler would stand inside the ring near its edge and let another wrestler charge him. He'd allow himself to be pushed across the ring without lifting his feet, scraping away the dirt on the ring's surface like a human Zamboni. Then these two wrestlers would play act a quick match, with the one who had served as the Zamboni letting himself be thrown to the ground, where he'd do a summersault and jump up onto his feet.

After several rounds of this, with most of the wrestlers who'd fought in the last set of matches having had a chance to push or be pushed, the dohyo would be swept and watered again, then a new set of matches would start back up with more highly ranked wrestlers competing.

In the last set of matches, Kitamura and an absolute giant named Nakahara took turns going up against the Sekitori. As soon as the Sekitori entered the ring, three younger wrestlers—Batto, the Mongolian; a big guy named Fuchita; and relatively small, young-looking guy named Hayeshida—lined up at the rear of the dohyo, holding, respectively a towel, a bowl of salt, and a broom. The Sekitori took a few handfuls of salt and rubbed them into his arms, legs, and mouth, then sprinkled some onto the dohyo. Then he faced off against Kitamura.

Kitamura was easily the skinniest wrestler, speaking, of course, in relative terms. He had a broad chiseled chest and, a real rarity here, clearly defined stomach muscles. His full bulk was enough so that he didn't quite look out of place amid the other wrestlers, but nearly all of the bulk was muscle.

Yet, he was no match for the bigger but flabbier Sekitori, who forced him out of the ring with ease match after match. It was rare that the Sekitori came close to being pushed from the ring himself, but when he was, he could usually spin his opponent around, tossing him out instead.

One of the few times he was thrust from the ring was when the much taller and fatter Nakahara trapped him in a bear hug on the edge of the ring and, using his massive stomach as a lever, picked the Sekitori up off his feet and deposited him outside boundaries.

Much more often, though, the Sekitori won. He was a master at letting his opponent use his own force to thrust himself from the ring. When charged, he'd often step out of the way at the last moment, grab his opponent by the mawashi, and guide him from the ring under his own inertia.

Once, grappling with Nakahara, he started trash talking into his hear. "What are you going to do?" he was saying, "What are you going to do?" as, nearly enveloped in the giant's flesh, he danced him around the ring before stepping to the side and letting him simply collapse.

When this round of matches was over, the dohyo descended into a Zamboni free-for-all, with wrestlers pushing each other across the ring one after another. Kitamura and Nakahara each in turn ceremoniously offered the Sekitori a ladle of water from a bucket by the faucet, which he refused. The wrestlers were covered in sweat, their hair falling out of their top-knots. Many had their backs entirely covered with dirt from the dohyo floor, which had stuck to them when they were tossed on the ground.

Meanwhile, I was starting to worry. I suddenly couldn't figure out what was going on in my head when I thought I'd be able to train along with these guys. Maybe I assumed they'd do a few rounds of calisthenics, drill some moves like in judo school, and go at each other in a couple refined, low-impact matches.

But I was way off. Here's how they really train: They collide into each other with the force of two locomotives, then push, shove, trip and nipple-twist each other into submission. There was nothing incremental about it: you just jump in the ring and go at it. And I realized that getting into the ring with any of these guys would be like me riding me scooter into a head-on collision with an SUV. I'd be crushed, literally.

Maybe that was alright, though, I started rationalizing. I could still hang out, watch what's going on, talk to people as much as I could. I didn’t have to get in the dohyo to wring a masters' project out of this experience.

Then, as the wrestlers toweled themselves off and started giving the dohyo a final sweeping, the Oyakata leaned into me again. "So, you want to give it a try?" he asked.

I got the idea that his preferred answer, and now mine too, was a "No." So I tried to back out as gracefully as I could.

"Well, you know, I would like to," I said. "But I really don't know how it's done?"

Surprisingly, though, he didn't mean to let it go at that. "Of course not," he said. "But someone can teach you, a little at a time. And if there's something you don't want to do, you don't have to."

And just like that, I was back in the game. On Monday (the next day, Sunday, was their day off) I would begin my sumo training.

In the meantime, Batto had started sweeping the dirt in the dohyo back into a mound in the center of the ring, like I'd seen it before, while a few wrestlers stood around talking to the Sekitori. In the common room, the sumo hairdresser, the "tokoyama," who'd arrived and started setting up during the final matches, was working fragrant oil into a wrestler's hair and tying it into a topknot. The tokoyama—his name is Tokokado—used to live in the stable, but left when he got married and now comes by at the end of the practice sessions.

I was on my way out of the room, when the Sekitori called out to me, pointing to Hayeshida. "Hey, he's gay," he said. Everyone laughed. I got the idea that when the Sekitori told a joke or tossed an insult, everyone always laughed.

"Really?" I asked innocently. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want it to be complicit in the Sekitori's bullying by laughing myself, but couldn't just ignore him.

But the Sekitori laughed at my reply, and so, consequently, did everyone else. It emboldened the Sekitori to keep the joke going. "He's gay too," he said, pointing to Kitamura, eliciting further laughter. "He's bisexual."

"Oh," I said, leaving the room.

I went up to the room where I'm staying, where Moriyasu, who's encampment was next to mine, was playing with his cell phone and listening to Missy Elliot. Moriyasu joined the stable 13 years ago when he was 15. His current rank is makushita, the highest rank in the lower wakaishu division and one just step under the Sekitori, who, as a juryo, is in the lowest rank of the sekitori division.

After waiting for the Sekitori to finish his own bath, Moriyasu went to bathe himself and suggested I join him. I was beginning to think that the wrestlers here seemed overly eager to bathe with me, but finally settled on the explanation that they wanted to make sure I knew how to take a Japanese style bath, where you scrub yourself clean before soaking in the tub. Two more wrestlers—enormous ones—joined us in the shower room.

I wish I could say something clever about the experience of bathing alongside three sudsy sumo, but it was surprisingly mundane.

Anyway, once we'd bathed Moriyasu said I should greet the Oyakata. I didn't understand why, since I'd just spoken to the Oyakata during the practice, but he shuffled me up the steps and instructed me to say "Otsukarisan degozaimasu," a sumo-inflected version of another common greeting that signifies an appreciation for ones hard work. We filed up the steps to the Oyakata's apartment, past his wife sitting at the kitchen table and through to the office at the end of the hall, where the Oyakata sat at his desk.

"Otsukarisan degozaimasu," I said, as Moriyasu pulled my hands from my pockets, where I had absent-mindedly and rudely shoved them while addressing the Oyakata. When the Oyakata dismissed me, Moriyasu pulled me from his office and hustled me down the hall, reprimanding me with a motherly, "Keep your hands out of your pockets when you're talking to the Oyakata."

Back down in the common room, the Sekitori was eating lunch, seated alone on the floor. Hayeshida, Fuchita and Batto stood before him on the other side of the table, ladling him his chanko nabe and pouring him chilled oolong tea in their loincloths like ancient Grecian boy-slaves.

In a further expression of my ambiguous status within this highly stratified world, Moriyasu told me I should start eating, right there with the Sekitori, who I thought always ate first and always ate alone. I sat down beside him, and Fuchita ladled me a bowl of chanko nabe. Then the Sekitori barked at him to pour me a class of iced tea: this was the first and only time that I've been served a beverage with a meal here.

As we ate wrestlers filed by on their way upstairs to greet the Oyakata themselves. I realized that this was something everyone does everyday once they've bathed after the morning practice session. One wrestler was on his way through the room, when the Sekitori said to me, "His name is 'Gu-Rauns."

I believed him, although everyone was laughing again, including the wrestler he was talking about. "Okay," I answered.

"He's from Yamaguchi," continued the Sekitori, accounting for the laughter. "'Gu-Rauns' means 'asshole' in the Yamaguchi dialect. That's why his name is 'Gu-Rauns."

"Oh, really?" I said, searching again for an answer that wouldn't make me complicit. "It sounds French." Then I said "Gu-Rauns" a couple times with an exaggerated French accent.

"French, huh?" said the Sekitori, as the wrestler from Yamaguchi continued upstairs. "That makes it sound kind of cool."

This nabe was much better than the previous day's: it consisted of chicken pieces in a clear broth with cabbage, mushrooms and carrots. The side dishes—slabs of fish cake in a mild chili sauce and little grilled yellowtail steaks—were also more palatable. But I was having trouble enjoying it in the presence of the Sekitori and his boy-slaves, so I was glad when he announced, "I'm stuffed," and left for his own quarters.

I finished my own meal and went upstairs to my own encampment, intending to kill time until everyone had eaten and gone to sleep, so I could sneak out without explanation and plug my computer into a pay phone to check my email. But, not surprisingly for a day without caffeine, I fell asleep myself and dozed for a good couple hours until around dinnertime. After dinner, I watched a Korean soap opera with some of the wrestlers, before going to sleep yet again.

This routine of eating lunch, going to sleep, eating dinner and then sleeping again, is exactly how sumo wrestlers put on weight.

NEXT: Man-Faced Dog

The Sekitori

It would be nice to think that sumo wrestlers get fat on fine sashimi and Kobe beef, maybe with a little bit of foie gras thrown in on international night. But it wouldn't be anything close to the truth. The sumo diet is nothing to envy.

I had my first taste of sumo fare Friday evening, a few hours after I got to the stable. As the late afternoon naptime wrapped itself up, the wrestlers trickled downstairs into the main common room. Three round tables were spaced out on the floor. I was told to sit at one, so I sat down at the same table as who I later found out was the Gyoji.

Gyoji are sumo referees. They dress like Heian-era aristocracy in colorful robes and black gauze hats and signal wrestlers' performance in the ring by motioning with the paddles they carry. I expected gyoji to be older men, established members of the sumo establishment. But the Gyoji at the table was a kid; he couldn't have been older than 25 or so (I haven't gotten around to asking him his age yet). He had a short, conservative haircut and wore a long-sleeve pullover and jeans—basically like a normal youngish Japanese guy, except that he, like many Gyoji, lived with wrestlers in the stable he's associated with.

We were joined at the table by the Yobidashi, who, looking even younger, was even more of a surprise. Yobodashi are sumo announcers, who shout out the names of the competitors. This one, who also lived in the stable, looked like a skinny adolescent. He wore dark jeans and a black t-shirt printed with the words "Scorpion Boy."

Both the Gyoji and the Yobidashi ate quickly, and soon left the table. It took me, however a little longer to get through the meal. It consisted of leftover chanko nabe from the afternoon: a sour, murky miso base with bits of bony fish floating in it. Chanko nabe, it turned out, wasn't necessarily the multi-meat soup I had heard about. It's actually made from whatever meat is available, usually just one kind. We also ate salty little cured fish that the bones had to be pulled out of, slabs of dry, fatty cold pork, and potatoes floating in an oily ground beef sauce. At least I think they were potatoes: they might have been chunks of long radish. It was hard to tell, as they had no taste and any recognizable texture had been boiled out of them.

The wrestlers ate heartily, but not as gluttonously as one would expect. They each did polish of a soup bowl of rice, and at least one helping of each of the items on the table. But that really didn't seem like much, considering their bulk.

Once we finished eating, the tables were cleared off and again stacked up against the wall, leaving everyone lounging on the floor, watching television. One of the wrestlers came up to me and said, "Come on. There's one more person for you to meet. He's a sekitori."

The sekitori category includes sumo's highest ranks, from yokozuna grand champion down to the juryo ranking. This stable's lone sekitori, a juryo, lived in a private room up a separate set of stairs from the one leading to the shared room where I'm staying. On our way up the steps, the wrestler accompanying me kept stressing: "Just say, 'My name is Jacob, yoroshiku onegaishimasu," standard words of greeting. One is apparently loathe to go off script when addressing a sekitori.

When we reached the top of the steps, a few wrestlers were standing around near the sekitori's doorway. I walked in and saw the sekitori sitting on the floor of his tiny room in a loosely sashed white robe, a video game control pad at his knees. He had squinty eyes and his hair was falling out of his topknot.

"My name is Jacob, yoroshiku onegaishimasu," I said.

He asked me how old I was and I told him I was 30.

"That's old," he said.

Then he asked me how long I'd be staying. "About a week," I said.

"And are you going to be putting on a mawashi and really fighting?" he asked.

"Maybe," I said. With that he waved me off and the wrestlers standing around shuffled me out of the room. Downstairs, I started chatting with a few of the younger wrestlers. The one non-Japanese wrestler in the stable, a Mongolian named Batto, kept saying that another wrestler, a dark-complexioned Japanese guy, was Iraqi.

"Look, he's Iraqi, and Arab," Batto kept repeating. "His father's brother is Osama bin Laden."

"Your Mongolian jokes aren't funny," shot back the target of Batto's humor.

After a while, another wrestler, Takemura Hiroki (not to be confused with his younger brother Takemura Tatsuya, who also wrestled at the stable), invited me to go to the local sento, the public bath, with him. I went, only a little worried that he might ask me to scrub his back, or worse, as I've been told lowly wrestlers are forced to do for more established ones. But by the other wrestlers' refusal to let me help out with kitchen duties that evening, it was already clear to me that I really wasn't going to be treated like an apprentice wrestler, as the Oyakata said I would. And, besides, coming home with cauliflower ears had long surpassed having to bathe a wrestler as my primary fear.

Tatsuya and I scrubbed our own respective bodies, and tried to chat, but, like lots of the wrestlers here, he had an accent that made him hard to understand. He said he was from a factory town in central Japan with lots of crime (though not as much as in an American city, he pointed out). When he was 16, a teacher in his high school knew the Oyakata and recommended him for the stable, although he'd never wrestled before. So he left school and came to Tokyo.

Back in the stable, I lounged a little longer with the wrestlers in the common room. They watched television, fooled around with their cell phones, played handheld video games. It felt normal and mellow, but I was still acutely aware of the brutality just below the surface—these guys did, after all, fight for a living. Their bruised faces, black eyes and cauliflower ears didn't seem to be bothering them: pain, when all your days are spent training for bouts in the ring, is a fact of life. But the way these guys lived, inflicting pain on each other all morning, then relaxing contentedly in each other's company in the evening, made them seem like members of a weird priesthood of violence, a highly structured street fighters' cooperative.

Soon I saw that some were pulling futons out of the closets in the walls and I understood that the room—which I'd already seen serve as a living room and dining room—was about to become a bedroom too. I went up to the smaller room where I was staying, figuring out by now that I was bunking up with the stable's most highly ranked wrestlers (aside from the sekitori), who, while having little privacy, had far fewer roommates and, more importantly, the ability to accumulate stuff. The less established guys couldn't really own much because they don't have any place to put it. These guys up here have their turf marked off with piles of their things.

No one was in the room when I got there, and the heater was off, so I unfolded my own futon and crawled inside under the blanket to stay warm. I fell asleep right away without intending to and slept soundly all night.

NEXT: Training

The Oyakata, the Kashira and Iki

Miki-san, the Yomiuri sports writer who arranged for me to stay in the stable, was going to be out of town yesterday, when the sumo stable expected me to move in, so he had one of his colleagues, Usaoa-san, deliver me. Usaoa met me at Ryogoku station, near the Kokugikan, Tokyo's sumo stadium and headquarters, from which a junior wrestler was supposed to accompany me to the stable.

Usaoa walked me into a cluttered office in the Kokugikan. It looked like any Japanese office, six desks facing each other in a block, paper everywhere, metal shelves and cabinets in '50s hues.

Toward the rear of the office, a man with slicked-back gray hair sat behind a desk wearing a tie that peaked out from his blue monogrammed zippered waist-length jacket. He looked like a company executive, dressed for a photo op on the factory floor. There was a table in front of his desk, where a bulky guy in a crew cut was seated. He looked like a bouncer at a mob-run nightclub in the navy blue, gold-buttoned blazer that hung on his massive frame.

Usaoa had me sit down before the guy at the desk and took a seat behind me, near the goon.

"So, Miki-san says you want to experience life as a rikishi," he said, using the Japanese word for sumo wrestler. "That's fine with me, but I just want to make sure…"

I actually, at that point, didn't know who this guy was. He was sitting at a desk in the Kokugikan, so I assumed he must be some sumo establishment functionary. In fact, he was the Oyakata, the head coach or master, of the sumo stable where I was headed. Maybe Usaoa thought I'd recognize him. Or maybe he told me that's who we were going to see on our way from the train station and I just missed his explanation. I miss a lot in Japanese.

The Oyakata continued: "You know, rikishi wake up very early. Can you wake up that early, before it's even light out?"

"Sure," I answered. That one was easy. I'd only arrived in Japan a couple days earlier and jet lag had me up before dawn as it was.

Next, the Oyakata asked: "You know, rikishi sleep on a futon on the floor, sharing a big room. Can you sleep like that?"

"Okay," I replied. That just sounded like staying at a youth hostel.

"Rikishi only eat twice a day, lunch and dinner," said the Oyakata, "No breakfast. You're probably used to eating three meals. Can you get by on just two?"

This one was tougher than the previous questions, but still, I answered, "Yes, that would be okay." I could go hungry in the morning for a week if I had to. And I did, after all, genuinely want to experience first-hand what life is like for the wrestlers.

"Do you know what rikishi eat?" said the Oyakata, launching into his next challenge. "They eat chanko nabe. Can you eat chanko nabe?"

I'd never tried chanko nabe, but I'd heard plenty about it. It was the hearty, protein-rich staple of any sumo wrestler's diet, a stew thick with beef, pork, fish, chicken, tofu and who knows what all else, boiling away in a dense meaty broth. There are
supposedly few clear career paths open to former sumo wrestlers, who leave the sport with an unwieldy body to contend with. One is to become an Oyakata and start one's own stable, an expensive proposition since one has to pay for a special license to operate a stable. Another is to become a sumo hairdresser. A third is to open a chanko nabe restaurant.

I'd never eaten chanko nabe, and I told the Oyakata so when he asked me if I could stomach it. "But it sounds good," I said, getting him to crack a grin for the first time since I started talking to him.

He continued his litany of things I would have to do if I wanted to live like a sumo wrestler. "Rikishi wear mawashi," he said, referring to the diaper-like loincloths that the wrestlers fight and train in. "Will you wear a mawashi?"

In truth, I didn't really want to wear a mawashi and was pretty sure it wouldn't be very flattering on me. But I wanted the Oyakata the know I was keeping it real, so I answered, in highly imperfect Japanese, "If that's what the wrestlers do, than I will too."

"Okay," he said and told me that the goon would accompany me to the stable. After a final brief exchange with the Oyakata where we discussed how long I'd be staying (it's still up in the air; probably for a week or so) Usaoa and I followed the goon out the door. Walking to the station, the goon introduced himself to me as Kashira. That wasn't his name, it was his title. It's kind of a second-in-command to the Oyakata, it turned out. He later told me that he had been a wrestler until a decade ago. His ring name was Hananokuni.

At the station, Usaoa parted from us, the Kashira bought me a ticket, and we passed through the ticket gate. A sumo wrestler fell behind us, which I figured was probably a pretty normal thing to happen in Ryogoku, traditionally the city's sumo district. But it turned out that he was with our stable; I think he'd come out to accompany us. The Kashira introduced him to me as Kitamura.

Kitamura was a handsome guy with the beginnings of a 5 o'clock shadow and a forward pointing top-knot slicked down on his head. He wore a purple robe and a blue sash with a cell phone tucked into it. He wasn't all that tall, and the robe covered belly that protruded over his sash was not grotesque. It was a healthy, solid gut.

But his ears were disgusting. They were scared and bulbous, swollen into sickly nuggets. I was pretty sure he'd acquired them over the course of his training. In preparation for this project, I'd just read a book about the Hawaiian wrestler Takamiyama, the first non-Japanese rikishi to win a sumo tournament. It explained how Takamiyama got his own cauliflower ears: at the hands of the senior wrestlers in his stable when they thought he was behaving arrogantly. If the Oyakata had said to me, "Rikishi get their ears beaten to a bloody pulp. Are you ready to have your ears beaten to a bloody pulp?" that's where I would have had to draw the line.

But it was too late for thoughts like that. I was already on the train, sandwiched between Kitamura and the Kashira. The Kashira and I made small talk, him quizzing me on what Japanese foods I was capable of eating, until we reached Ogikubo station, the closest stop to the heya.

It was about a ten-minute walk to the stable. Kitamura, who'd gotten off at the previous station for some reason, was already there. Inside a dozen or so wrestlers stood around on the tatami floor. Most were wearing sweat clothes; one, for some reason, stood there in white boxer shorts and nothing else. They all had topknots slicked down onto their heads and they were all huge. It was like I had suddenly entered a world of inflated human beings.

The Kashira withdrew me from that world briefly to take me up the stairs leading directly up from the entry alcove, which in Japanese homes is where visitors shed their shoes. Upstairs was a separate little apartment where the Oyakata and his wife lived. The Kashira introduced me to the Oyakata's wife. A bandage covered an ominous lumpy bruise on her left cheekbone.

Then the Kashira brought be back down to the straw mat room, where each of the wrestlers introduced themselves to me in turn. I didn't remember any of their names but I'll never forget the sensation of standing around so many people so blatantly different in every way from myself. They all towered over me, weighed something like twice as much as me, were all Asian (one of them, it turned out, was Mongolian) and all had the same hair style, one that most people probably know only from the John Belushi sketch.

In Paper Lion, where George Plimpton trains as a rookie with the Detroit Lions and then writes about that experience, he concealed the fact that he was a writer and was able to keep his identity a secret for a little while, until his teammates started wondering why he always walked around with a notebook. But there was no way I was going to pass myself off as belonging here.

After they'd introduced themselves, a couple of the guys led me through a door, down a concrete-floored hall with filthy walls and flanked by pissy smelling bathrooms, and up a flight of steps into one of the shared bedrooms. They showed me the bedding, folded up on the floor that I'd be using and all crawled into their own beds, surrounded by all their stuff. Each had a little encampment, with his own small television, a shelf with toiletries and various odds and ends, compact disks, a statue of a hand giving the finger, girly pictures, booze bottles. Pretty much everything you'd expect to find in the bedroom of a male teen- to twentysomething, just here it all jammed into the space they were allotted in this one big room.

It was now clearly naptime at the stable. Two if the guys in the room fell right to sleep. One played video games on his flatscreen television before dozing off himself. I heard another chatting on the phone under his blankets, then his cell phone beeping as he apparently sent text messages. I started typing up some notes, when the door slid open and a skinny dude in an orange velour jogging suit, blonde highlights and gold jewelry charged in carrying a silver metal briefcase and a cardboard box. He looked at me and said:

"Harry Potter? Are you Harry Potter?"

He asked me if I like sushi, his voice at full volume despite the sleeping wrestlers around me. One rolled over and asked him what time it was. I notice for the first time that he was sleeping with an athsma inhaler.

The orange guy sidled up next to me on top of the futon where I was laying and typing. Then his phone rang. He had a long conversation that I didn't really follow, asking me questions during pauses in his chat.

"You know?" he asked me in English, then pointed to the logo on the box he walked in with. I didn't know.

During another pause he opened up his briefcase and handed me a little photo album, the kind that come free when you get your film developped. There were pictures of him in a bar, drinking with lots of different women, most of them young and very good looking.

"My work," he said. When I paged to a photo of a display case filled with photos of glammed-out Japanese dudes, I thought I understood what he did for a living. He was a bar host. Women paid him to drink with them.

It turns out I was only partially right. When he finished his phone call, I asked him about his job, but this time he pulled out a binder full of product illustrations that he apparently sold as part of some sort of network marketing scam. He started giving me his pitch: one illustration he pointed to demonstrated a chain of sale from makers through distributors and wholesalers to consumers. The next showed an arrow with all the intermediaries cut out.

"Direct to the consumer," he said. He paged through his product guide, slipping in and out of his pitch. I'm not sure what he was selling. It seemed to be some kind of patent medicine for intestinal problems.

In a mixture of English and Japanese, he explained to me that he works as a host at night as a sideline, but his main hustle is his marketing gig.

"I'm very busy," he said. "But I'm rich." Then he tried to crawl under the covers with one of the wrestlers, got up, went outside the bedroom and smoked, came back, pulled bedding out of the closet, and went to sleep.

Somewhere over the course of our conversation, he told me that he had been a wrestler himself 10 years ago. By the look of his cauliflower ears, I could believe it. Now he lives nearby, he said, and drops by the stable to hang out.

Pretty soon, the wrestlers started stirring. Someone came in and started sweeping the floor, so I folded up my bedding to get out of his way and went downstairs, where one guy swept while a couple others ravaged the boxes of chocolates that I'd brought as a souvenir. In the kitchen, huge pots of stew were boiling and three wrestlers were cutting down giant hunks of meat. A foam cooler with two whole fish, each as long as my arm, sat on the floor. I asked if I could help out with anything, but was waved off, so I came back upstairs to write some more. That's where I am now, about to go downstairs to eat.

NEXT: The Sekitori

Airports

Years ago I sat in Philadelphia's airport about to board a plane to Japan, not knowing what to expect of the place. I knew I was going to live in a dormitory for foreigners, mostly teachers, but didn't know what it would look like. I didn't know how hard it would be to find food that I could eat, clothes that I could wear, or people I could relate to. I knew that coffee was supposed to be expensive and the streets were supposed to me immaculate, and that was about it.

Since that first flight into Tokyo, I've taken many more, returning from short vacations during my first long stint there, and coming back to study, work or visit friends after extended stays away from Japan. Naturally, on these return trips, I never felt the same sense of unsureness. The more time I spent there, the more it lost its mystery and capacity to surprise. It became a normal place to me. I knew that the coffee wasn't all that expensive; the streets weren't all that clean. That the clothes fit little me better than most stuff I can find in my own country. And I know what kinds of food are available here, which is one of the things that keeps me coming back. I know what it's like here; I know what to expect.

But the other day, sitting in the airport in San Francisco, waiting for the plane to take me here again, I felt much like I did the first time around when I hadn't a clue what to expect. I didn't know what my living arrangements would look like, what I'd be eating, what I'd be wearing. For the first time in all these years, I was going to Japan to do something completely unlike anything I've ever done here before—indeed unlike anything most people have done here before.

I was coming to Japan to be a sumo wrestler.

Not a real sumo wrestler, of course: I'd only be at it for a couple weeks and I wouldn't fight publicly. But I also wasn't going to be putting on a goofball padded sumo suit for a college athletic fair. I was actually going to live and train with sumo wrestlers for a week—and perhaps even longer—so I could write about the experience.

The idea for this project, like many things in my life, was born out of laziness. The two masters' degree programs I'm in—journalism and Asian studies—each require me to write a thesis. When I started considering thesis topics, I tried to think of something that I could count for journalism and Asian studies, thereby saving myself the trouble of writing a second thesis. Everyone I ran the idea past was intrigued by it, though no one thought I might actually get a sumo "stable," as the training houses are called, to let me in.

I took baby steps toward really doing this thing. I wrote a paper on sumo for a history course on Japanese pop culture. I talked to advisors about whether I really could get it to count for both of my degrees. I started asking people how I might go about getting into a stable.

It was the last thing that looked like it was going to hold me back. A guy who graduated from Berkeley with a doctorate in anthropology that he got after writing his dissertation about sumo wrestling told me that the kind of access I was looking for came after years of relationship building. No one else I asked seemed to have any idea where to begin looking for a stable that might let me in. But I kept asking.

I don't want to make it sound like I was approaching this thing with the dogged enthusiasm of someone who had a story to tell, and sure as hell wasn't going to let anyone stop him. In fact, I was just making casual inquiries, never really believing myself that a stable would let me in, and poking around for alternate topics.

Then one of my casual inquiries paid off. I talked about my idea with Mariko, the reporter who came from the Yomiuri Shinbun, Japan's leading newspaper paper, to teach at Berkeley's journalism school last spring. She seemed doubtful about the idea at first, but a couple weeks after I mentioned my idea, she surprised me: "So, when do you want to go?" she asked. It turned out that the Yomiuri's sports writers had suggested that this was something that could be arranged.

Now that it looked like it really might happen, I started talking to my journalism teachers about the idea, who were as enthusiastic about the idea as others I'd spoken to. "It's a slam dunk," said one. Just because the idea came out of me being lazy, it seemed, didn't necessarily make it a bad one.

A couple months ago, Mariko sent me an email to let me know that the head coach at Hanaregoma stable offered to put me up for a week to 10 days, longer if I make a good enough impression. Now that it all looked sorted out, I put together a reading list for myself and started getting together names of people I wanted to interview: academics, sportswriters, ex-wrestlers and members of the sumo establishment. I also started weightlifting regularly so I wouldn't be crushed too badly during the workouts in the stable.

The exercise program was fairly successful. By the time I finished, I could bench an almost respectable amount of weight and a few people even remarked that I was looking more toned.

The reportorial preparations, however, were unfortunately not quite as successful. Right after I learned that Hanaregoma was going to let me hang around, I was hit with a tidal wave of schoolwork and teaching responsibilities that kept me away from the sumo project. I managed to read a couple books and a few articles, but that's about it. I'll be catching up in the stable, and hope that the wrestlers, whom I'll move in with tomorrow, don't think I'm a dork for spending all my free time reading.

This is all to say that I'm woefully underprepared for what I'm about to do: report an intelligent first-person account of life among sumo wrestlers that doesn't read like a "what I did during my winter vacation" essay and truly sheds light not just on the sumo world, but on Japan itself as well.

I'm not saying that I'm embedding with sumo wrestlers in order to come out with an account of "the true Japan." The perceived close association between sumo wrestling and traditional Japanese-ness notwithstanding, I don't think that sumo represents any "true Japan," far from it, in fact. According to the most convincing scholarship I've read on the subject, what we know as sumo today is a late 17th-century confection, created when fight promoters dressed prize-fighting up with religious trappings in order to make it palatable to Japan's martial government at the time. Sure, 300 years is a pretty long time, but its nothing compared to the millennia-long history given to sumo by those who see it as an embodiment of the Japanese spirit.

On the other hand, though, this centuries-long project of legitimizing sumo has been so successful that now, people really do consider the sport to be an embodiment of Japanese culture. And looking out at Japan from an institution with which it has entrusted its national spirit is bound to be enlightening.

These are issues I hope to return to, and definitely want to address in my final piece. For now, though, stay tuned for reports on what life is like among sumo wrestlers. And please, everyone, email me with questions, comments, criticisms, whatever: adelmanj@berkeley.edu.

NEXT: The Oyakata, the Kashira and Iki