The much anticipated day for the Tokyo Grand Sumo Tournament finally arrived! We had a relaxing morning with another soak in the natural hot spring onsen in our hotel and then walked through the Sensoji Temple area (photos are in our “Visiting Tokyo” post). We got to Ryōgoku Kokugikan, the dedicated sumo venue, in time to have lunch in the area; a delicious (and huge) meal of Japanese pancakes called okonomiyaki. As we exited the restaurant we had to contend with a throng of people lining the sidewalk, but quite far away from the main entrance. Turns out that it was the entrance to the sumo equivalent of the stage door and the sumo wrestlers were arriving by taxi and limo to huge cheers from fans.
We had bought our tickets through an agency that provided a guide for the event, and we quickly met him and went into the Ryōgoku Sumo Hall. First stop was the small museum with an explanation of the ~1,500 year history of sumo, along with some background on famous champions right up to the current day. Then we headed up to the second floor to our balcony level seats. As we previously posted, we were afraid that we might be in the very last row because we grabbed some of the last few tickets, but we were not; we were in the second-last row! Still a pretty good view though.
We came in at the 3rd of the day’s 30 bouts and were extremely surprised when the actual wrestling part of that match lasted only about 3 seconds. And then we were surprised again when we discovered that although the wrestling rarely lasted more than 30 seconds or so, the ritual confrontations and salt purifications extended each bout to at least 10 minutes.
The first video below shows most of the ritual preparations before the wrestling action:
In a hurry? Watch a 15-second clip in which a Grand Champion just barely holds off a challenger with a slick side-step move!
The athleticism and power of these huge men was amazing and the bouts got better as the higher ranked wrestlers took their turns at the end of the day. The final bout of the day was great as two 150 kg sumo wrestlers both came flying out of the ring and crashed into the audience. We guess that the guy would ended up on the bottom did technically leave the ring first so he was the loser!
We left the tournament well satisfied (though still somewhat mystified by) Japan’s national sport of sumo.
See our images from the Grand Sumo Tournament on Flickr:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/100countries/albums/72177720329303678/
