The Stablemates and I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Brutality

The Photo Hall

Visit The Photo Hall of the Mountain Kings.

NEXT: The Stablemates and I

A Chat With the Oyakata

THE OYAKATA, AT THE STABLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

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

"What?" he said, looking confused.

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

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

NEXT: The Photo Hall

Afternoon in Ryogoku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: A Chat With the Oyakata

Morning in Ryogoku

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I needed to figure out who these guys were.

NEXT: Afternoon in Ryogoku

Pride

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

"You're leaving today?" he asked.

"That's right," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where are you?" he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Morning in Ryogoku

Stablemates III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

NEXT: Pride

The Bon-En-Kai

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

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

"It's about boxing," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's for singing," he said.

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

"Why?" he asked, confused.

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

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

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

NEXT: Stablemates III

Stablemates II

KAZUYA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: The Bon-En-Kai

Stablemates I

HIROKI AND TATSUYA, THE TAKEMURA BROTHERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BATTUSHIG YAGAANBAATAR, AKA BATTO, AKA WAKATORA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Stablemates II

Iki Returns

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

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

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



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

The wrestlers were just getting started when I came downstairs.

"Are you going to help?" asked Ishikawa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Me?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No I don't," I said.

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

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

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

I had to admit that I hadn't.

Later he complimented me on my nose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, it is," I said.

"Are Japanese girls sexy?" he continued.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Stablemates I

Mawashi Redux

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Oyakata grimaced.

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

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

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

I caught him at the bottom of the steps.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Iki Returns

French?

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

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

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

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

"Merci," she said to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Mawashi Redux

Chanko Nabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Can I?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Magic powder," added Saita.

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: French?