Eko-in

THE "POWER MOUND"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



NEXT: Morning at the Tournament

The Big Dohyo-Matsuri

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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



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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: Eko-in

Brutality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT: The Big Dohyo-Matsuri