They were among the first events to be shown live on TV. NHK began covering sumo on radio in , and covering it live on television beginning in It had broadcast ever basho since then until one basho was not shown in because of a gambling scandal. The bashos are shown on television at between pm and pm, a time when most people are at work or are commuting home.
Even without the scandal Japanese sumo is in decline. After Takanohana retired Japan has not produced a yokozuna and most of the new ozeki have been foreigners. Foreign wrestlers are becoming increasingly dominant, The few young Japanese that enter the sport are any good. In the past most sumo matches completely sold out.
Now there are often empty seats and people don't wait in line as long for tickets like they used. In , baseball surpassed sumo as Japan's number one sport.
By sumo was fifth behind pro baseball, marathon running, high school baseball and pro soccer and stables were closing because the were unable to attract new talent.
Many television viewers prefer K-1 kick boxing to sumo. The wrestler Baruto told the Yomiuri Shimbun that he hadn't noticed much of a change in the number of fans late in the day when he took the dohyo but admitted that attendances have been declining over the past few years. He said ticket prices may have had an effect in the current economic climate but felt it wasn't just sumo that was suffering. Many companies are in a bad situation [and] with earthquakes and the tsunami, people are finding it very tough.
Occasionally walking into crises caused by irreconcilable contradictions A professional sport that has public responsibilities, a profit-making organization with tax-free status, a secretive and byzantine body that is completely at the mercy of the media, sumo suffers scandals more often than Japan changes prime ministers Setting yourself up as a semi-ascetic, morally unimpeachable, quasi-religious cultural asset is always going to cause trouble when the reality is a lot more prosaic.
Things got worse after the sport was rocked by drug-use, hazing and bout-fixing scandals in , and John Gunning wrote in the Daily Yomiuri in September , after a string of scandals the Japan Sumo Association has been struggling to combat dwindling crowds. The JSA did not release attendance figures for Days 3 and 4. The association also concerned enough to set up a special committee to deal with falling attendance. There has been a call for an outsider to be named on the board for the Japan Sumo Association.
The famous Buddhist nun and novelist Sakucho Setouchi has been suggested as a possible board member. Young Japanese boys are not interested in trying out for the sport. At one tryout on the mid s only two boys showed up, the lowest number since records started being kept in In none came.
Those that joining quickly quit. Youngsters today take time to fit in to such a place. But I was shocked they left as quickly a they did.
Some blame the trend on video games and junk food and reluctance to work hard. Few young people want to dedicate themselves to the sumo lifestyle. Baseball and soccer are much more popular. Page Top. This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been authorized by the copyright owner.
Such material is made available in an effort to advance understanding of country or topic discussed in the article. Sumo is said to have its roots in a Shinto ritual dance where the most powerful men displayed their strength in front of the kami gods or spirits as a sign of respect and gratitude to bring in a good harvest.
Later it was used as a way to compare strength and determine those fighters most adept in hand-to-hand combat. There are around rikishi in the six divisions of sumo:. The maku-uchi the 42 best rikishi naturally receive the most media attention.
At the top of this pile sits the yokozuna , the grand champion. This position is typically achieved by winning two honbasho major tournaments that determine rankings in a row. There are six honbasho annually, one on each odd month of the year, and they last for 15 days. As of , there have only been 71 yokozuna in the history of the sport, which should give you an idea of the difficulty of achieving this rank.
Rikishi from the top two divisions known collectively as sekitori will wrestle every day of the major tournaments. Sumo must be unique in that the pre-match ceremony and pageantry can be just as fascinating as the bout itself.
The day before each major tournament the dohy o—the 4. This involves placing salt, cleansed rice, dried chestnut, dried kelp, dried cuttlefish, and nutmeg berry in a small hole made in the middle of the ring as offerings to the gods.
They enter the ring and perform a ritual called shiko —the leg raising and stomping that is probably the act most commonly associated with the sport outside of Japan. In the Nara period and Heian period , sumo became an event conducted at the imperial court, and bouts were performed in front of the emperor.
During the age of the samurai, physical strength was an important skill for warriors, and samurai families began to employ sumo wrestlers. It has been written that the warlord Oda Nobunaga was such a devotee of the sport that he gathered wrestlers together to hold tournaments every year.
Sumo basically took its present form in the Edo period. Matches were held to raise money to construct shrines and temples or to replace bridges, and the professional sumo wrestler was born. A sport that was once enjoyed only by the rich and powerful became popular among the masses.
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