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