On a hot day last June, near the shores of Lake Suwa, in the mountains of central Japan, hundreds of spectators gathered around an earthen stage roughly two feet high and two dozen feet wide. The spectacularly old among them sat in folding chairs beside the shaded stage, while the merely elderly stood just behind. A bit farther back, beneath a canopy that shielded them only partly from the blazing sun, those too young to retire stood shoulder to shoulder. Regardless of their vantage point, everyone present was fixated on the dohyo, the sand-covered ring atop the stage, where a pair of sumo wrestlers dressed in loincloths prepared to do battle.
The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size sprinters waiting to explode out of the starting block. They will often squat and then rise to stamp their feet or throw salt on the ground. When the referee signals the start of the match, they rush toward each other and collide with the same force that a person might absorb after falling from a height of two or three stories. From their fleshy collision, one man tends to emerge with the advantage of surer footing or a firmer grip on his opponent’s loincloth, known as a mawashi, which wrestlers can use to lift and toss each other around the ring. Whoever can force his adversary from the ring or get any part of his body other than the soles of his feet to touch the ground is the winner.
What I was watching near Lake Suwa was only a practice bout, but the wrestlers were nevertheless busy with their usual prematch rituals, pacing back and forth and tossing salt. Two apprentices accompanied the higher-ranked wrestler, tasked with holding his towel and fetching him water. Eventually, the fighting commenced with a flurry of slapping, pushing, and grasping; sumo can look like brawling or ballet, a display of brute force or a mastery of martial-arts techniques that share their origins with judo and aikido. In this case, the higher-ranked wrestler used his right hand to grab hold of the other man’s face, and his left hand to grasp his opponent’s right shoulder. He seemed to squeeze his rival, then whisked him from the ring like a dancer leading his partner across a ballroom. Like most sumo matches, it was over in a matter of seconds.
The winner of this practice bout was Hoshoryu, one of sumo’s two active yokozuna, or “grand champions,” of which there have been a mere seventy-five in recorded history. To reach sumo’s highest and only permanent rank, rikishi must fight their way into the top makuuchi division, then rise through its ranks as maegashira, komusubi, sekiwake, and finally ozeki. Even then, they still have to win two consecutive grand sumo tournaments or achieve an “equivalent” record before the Yokozuna Deliberation Council—a group of up to fifteen prominent sumo experts—will consider their candidacy on the basis of both their character and skill. All other rikishi are at constant risk of demotion for losing too many bouts, or for missing too many tournaments owing to illness or injury, but yokozuna carry on as grand champions for as long as they live up to the title. When they no longer can, they are expected to retire.
Hoshoryu had become sumo’s seventy-fourth yokozuna in January, but his promotion was not without an element of controversy. Some of the council members reportedly felt that he was not yet ready, that he had too often lost bouts to lesser fighters. Their objections were overruled, but these doubts were a problem not only for the pedants and purists, but for those invested in the bitter, long-standing rivalry between Japanese-born rikishi and Mongolian wrestlers like Hoshoryu. Since 1992, when the first of Hoshoryu’s countrymen began competing, there have been more than seventy Mongolian rikishi, many of whom have dominated sumo’s upper echelons. This was most gloriously personified by the yokozuna Hakuho, who became a grand champion in 2007, at just twenty-two years old, and went on to shatter records that had been held by Japanese-born yokozuna for centuries. Hakuho retired in 2021, but the relegation of Japanese rikishi to second-class status remains a statistical fact: of the eight yokozuna to have earned the title in the past quarter century, six have come from Mongolia.
In the town of Shimosuwa, where I’d gone to see Hoshoryu at a summer training camp, he looked a bit tired, and his right elbow was bandaged. Still, he put on a show for the locals. Before his first match, he warmed up at the edge of the ring by striking a debarked log with his palms as if slapping an imagined opponent; the crowd looked on with reverence. Hoshoryu, at six foot two and around 330 pounds, dispatched his first adversary handily, squeezing him like an accordion and dancing him out of the ring. He offered the man a rematch, and won again. This was followed by another rematch and yet another, until the lower-ranked wrestler was covered in sand from his repeated falls. Hoshoryu then proceeded to fight every other rikishi in turn. He won all but a few of these bouts, scarcely breaking a sweat.
The following month, Hoshoryu would be competing in the grand sumo tournament in Nagoya, where he would face one of the first serious threats to his supremacy. That challenge would come from a Japanese rikishi named Onosato, who had been made sumo’s seventy-fifth yokozuna that May, just three weeks before my trip to Shimosuwa. His promotion provided Hoshoryu with a worthy adversary, and it gave fans, for the first time in almost seven years, the chance to see Mongolian and Japanese yokozuna enact the defining cultural rivalry of twenty-first-century sumo. This is an itch that needs scratching every so often. Decades of Mongolian dominance have revealed a peculiar strain of ethnonationalism among sumo fans, one defined less by an explicitly nativist derision of foreign-born rikishi than by an enthusiasm for Japanese-born yokozuna that sometimes feels a bit too unbound.
The prospect of a showdown between a Japanese and a Mongolian yokozuna was particularly loaded with political significance. At the time of Onosato’s promotion, the discourse leading up to Japan’s summer parliamentary elections had been hijacked by Sanseito, a far-right political party intent on reversing immigration reforms that have alleviated crushing labor shortages by allowing record numbers of foreign residents into the country. Meanwhile, the unprecedented forty million tourists who visited Japan last year made the problems associated with overtourism a defining theme of the campaign, giving the nation’s far right yet another cudgel to wield against what it sees as malign foreign influence. The line between patriotism and racism in Japan had grown increasingly fuzzy.
I couldn’t help but think of America’s first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, and the racist yearning for a “great white hope” that might come along to dethrone him. But even this was a poor comparison for sumo’s place in the racial politics of Japan today; boxing, after all, was brought to America from England, while sumo, like Kabuki, is one of Japan’s few expressive institutions whose folklore betrays little trace of outside influence. The sumo fans in Shimosuwa confirmed my sense of the yokozuna as a uniquely Japanese symbol of excellence even when the wrestlers themselves are not Japanese. What remained to be seen, and what I hoped to discover in Nagoya, was whether this would hold true at a grand sumo tournament where, as with the upcoming parliamentary elections, the people would be presented with a choice—one between nativism and multiculturalism, but also between two competing ideas of what it really means to be Japanese.
The Kojiki, an eighth-century “record of ancient matters” and Japan’s oldest extant text, contains an account of what many consider to be the first sumo match. Two deities wrestle to determine ownership of the Japanese islands: Takemikazuchi, the god of thunder, prevails by crushing the arm of Takeminakata, a rival god, who retreats to Lake Suwa and vows never to leave. The legendary founder of mortal sumo was a man called Nomi no Sukune, who, according to the nation’s second-oldest text, the Nihon Shoki, won a fight to the death before Emperor Suinin in 23 bc. Today, Sukune is regarded as the sport’s patron deity; sumo has deep historic ties to Japan’s animistic Shinto religion, whose pantheon includes supernatural creators as well as people and places of significance. Its rituals are observed in the ring each time a rikishi throws salt on the ground or stamps his feet, traditions intended to drive away evil spirits.
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