A customer to Japan who wanders right into a sumo match may well be forgiven for pondering they’d intruded upon a non secular rite.
Tournaments start with a line of burly males dressed in little greater than elaborately adorned aprons strolling in a line onto a raised earthen level. Their names are referred to as as they circle round a hoop made from in part buried bales of rice straw. Turning towards the middle, they clap, raise their aprons, lift their palms upward, after which go out with out a phrase.
Then two of the ones males face every different, crouching, clapping their fingers in combination and stomping at the floor. They pause time and again to rinse their mouths with water and toss salt into the hoop.
Overseeing their actions is a person equipped in a colourful kimono and a black hat reminiscent of that of a Shinto priest and conserving a tasseled fan. After a delicate gesture along with his fan, they in the end grapple – and most effective then would the uninformed observer understand that the efficiency was once an athletic tournament.
Each game has its rituals, from the All Blacks rugby workforce’s pregame haka to the well mannered handshake between victor and vanquished over the tennis court docket web. Some, like many sumo rituals, have roots in non secular practices. A couple of hundred years in the past, competitions had been steadily held at temples and shrines as a part of fairs.
Sumo referees carry out the Shinto ritual to purify and bless the hoop forward of a match on the Royal Albert Corridor in London on Oct. 15, 2025.
AP Picture/Frank Augstein
Lately, sumo is a contemporary game with information, regulations and a governing establishment that celebrated its one centesimal anniversary in October 2025. However the ones non secular roots are nonetheless visual. The salt the wrestlers throw, as an example, is a purifying part. The clapping is some way of drawing the eye of the gods.
As a historian of recent Japan and a pupil of sports activities and international relations, I’ve noticed some ways by which sports activities are a lot more than “just a game.” Game rituals are a very powerful a part of the ones wider meanings. In reality, sumo and its rituals have contributed to shaping overseas perceptions of Japan for a minimum of 170 years.
First impressions
The primary sumo match identified to were noticed via American spectators was once held in March 1854, in honor of a treaty setting up diplomatic members of the family between america and Japan. Described within the non-public magazine stored via Commodore Matthew Perry, the chief of the project to Japan, the exhibition earlier than gawking American sailors gave the impression designed to provoke.
Earlier than the suits started, the athletes placed on a efficiency of power, loading the American ships with a present of a few 200 bales of rice from the Eastern govt. Perry describes how two dozen large males, “naked with the exception of a narrow girdle around the loins,” paraded earlier than the American team earlier than attending to paintings, every shouldering two 135-pound bales.
If the real sumo festival was once meant to encourage appreciation of Eastern tradition, it backfired. Perry’s descriptions of the wrestlers had been stuffed with unflattering animal metaphors. He wrote that they resembled “stall-fed bulls” greater than human beings and made noises like “dogs in combat.”
On the time, sports activities as we all know them as of late had been simply rising in England and america. One of the crucial earliest regulations of football had been recorded within the 1840s, and baseball’s rising recognition ended in the advance {of professional} leagues after the U.S. Civil Battle.
With this American thought of sports activities in Perry’s thoughts, the sumo match didn’t galvanize him. He referred to as the bouts a “farce” and judged the wrestlers’ body as person who “to our ideas of athletic qualities would seem to incapacitate him from any violent exercise.”
An indication of an 1846 sumo match via Utagawa Kunisada.
Chunichi.co.jp/Wikimedia Commons
Within the mid-Nineteenth century, Japan was once moderately remoted from the Western international. Maximum American citizens knew virtually not anything in regards to the nation and thought to be it backward, even barbaric. The 2 cultures’ differing concepts of sports activities supposed that sumo most effective added to American perspectives of Japan as abnormal and uncivilized.
A competing game
Sports activities international relations had a extra sure have an effect on on American perspectives of Japan within the early twentieth century, thank you to another sport: baseball.
After the autumn of the shogunate in 1868, the brand new Eastern govt – made up of oligarchs ruling within the title of the Meiji Emperor – hired American citizens to assist enforce reforms. A few of them introduced alongside The united states’s passion, which was highly regarded inside of a couple of many years.
The Osaka Mairuchi baseball workforce from Japan visits the U.S. White Area in 1925.
Nationwide Picture Corporate Assortment/Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons
One of the crucial rituals in a Eastern 3-hitter, like a ceremonial first pitch, had been acquainted to American observers. Others, like a workforce bow towards the umpire, had been moderately a distinction, however struck them as awesome to the rowdiness of American avid gamers and lovers.
On the time, Japan’s Westernizing reforms and up to date army victories over China and Russia had already stepped forward American citizens’ impressions of the rustic. Former baseball participant Harry Kingman, writing a few sport he watched all the way through a 1927 stint training a Tokyo school workforce, defined the Eastern flip towards baseball as a part of the country’s modernization.
Sumo, on the other hand, persevered to be the preferred game in Japan till the Nineteen Nineties, when baseball took that name. However the preliminary acclaim for this American import led to some anxiousness inside the sumo international: A overseas sport gave the look to be taking up and stealing sumo’s lovers.
Amid those adjustments, skilled sumo’s governing establishments, which have been divided into competing associations primarily based in Tokyo and Osaka, joined forces. They formally unified in 1925 because the group that might change into as of late’s Japan Sumo Affiliation.
Can sumo be cool?
Eastern pop culture now captivates folks around the globe. In 2002, journalist Douglas McGray wrote in regards to the cushy energy conferred via what he referred to as the country’s “gross national cool.” However he famous sumo as an exception, blaming its management’s insular attitudes.
In all probability sumo’s greatest hurdle to construction a global fan base is its perspective towards foreigners. Immigration is debatable in Japan. The inhabitants is moderately homogeneous, and boundaries to naturalization are top.
Thomas Foley, then the U.S. ambassador to Japan, gifts sumo grand champion Akebono with a letter of appreciation from Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2001.
AP Picture/Tsugufumi Matsumoto
Against this to sports activities like baseball, football and rugby, the place “imported” avid gamers abound, there are few overseas sumo wrestlers, and their good fortune turns out to rankle. In 1993, a Hawaiian named Akebono was the primary foreigner to achieve the highest rank of “yokozuna,” sparking a short lived dangle on recruiting sumo wrestlers from outdoor Japan.
Constraints had been steadily softened, and the choice of non-Eastern skilled wrestlers has been emerging. They nonetheless constitute a small minority, however their good fortune frequently sparks discussions in regards to the position of foreigners within the game.
Even though sumo has won some traction outdoor of Japan, its rituals nonetheless every now and then create unfavorable impressions of Eastern tradition. At a match in 2018, as an example, an area legit collapsed whilst giving a speech. Feminine medics who rushed to assist him had been advised to go away the sumo ring, thought to be a sacred house polluted via a lady’s presence. The chairman of the Japan Sumo Affiliation later apologized, however the incident introduced grievance that the sumo international was once clinging to anachronistic traditions.
Sumo continues to switch. A 1926 Tokyo govt ban on girls’s sumo is now not in drive, and there at the moment are some feminine wrestlers in newbie golf equipment. However girls are nonetheless barred from skilled festival.
Tournaments are without a doubt well liked by vacationers, however they in most cases opt for a one-time revel in. One may ask if sumo can exchange sufficient to play an efficient function in Japan’s sports activities international relations. The solution will depend on whether or not sumo leaders are extra considering keeping up the game’s Eastern id or construction world connections.
