Sumo Sunday! Meep's First Sumo Thoughts and CHANKO CHANKO CHANKO!
Also, the very little I had to say about the OJ Simpson news back in 1994
What a week, huh?
Let me give you some light stuff.
Time Travel to 1994: A Meep in Japan
I will let the younger (in 2000) me set this up:
So I went to Hakodate, Hokkaido for two months in the summer of 1994 to ostensibly study Japanese. You see, I got a $4000 scholarship from the Japan Center at N.C. State for the purpose. Mertz-sensee recommended I use the money to go to Middlebury College in Vermont because it's the best place to learn language -- language boot camp if you will.
Dammit, someone gives me money to study Japanese, I'm going to Japan.
So I did.
Here's the journal I kept.
It’s not a great journal, and the entries on the website are captured in text files (it was originally handwritten, and I typed it up later. I still have the physical journal somewhere.)
Here’s an excerpt from the June 22, 1994 entry:
Interesting Thing(s) In The News this morning --
--> Because of so many people leaving bikes in certain places (in Tokyo, I
assume) a person made bike lockers for people to put their bikes into --
it would open from a card and something would push the bike out.
--> in a commercial, a little disk w/ incense in it that one lights and
put on the shoulder -- the disk heats up and supposedly relaxes the
shoulders. In a similar commercial, one places the product on the
shoulders and it pulses to massage.
....
--> North Korea. Who knows what is going on w/ them? Clinton, etc. had
been prepared for sanctions and all sorts of things, but Carter made them
back down some.
--> O.J. Simpson
--> the premier of WOLF w/ Jack Nicholson
....So you can see how important the whole O.J. Simpson thing was to me. I never mention it again.
I did mention sumo twice, as this was the first time I saw sumo, and I watched some of the July 1994 tournament on TV (my host mother, Mrs. Terai, was watching it every day, and I got hooked.)
My two entries with my comments:
Right now I'm watching sumo wrestling and I think it's really cool - it's
so different from boxing and regular wrestling and each match is over
quickly. And there's lots of ritual involved. The ref is dressed up in
formal dress and has a fan in his hand to signal with. The fighters have
to throw rice or chalk or something [to the side: it's salt actually] into
the ring before entering then enter the ring and face off at the opponent
and do a particular squat (depending on which time it is - for they've got
to enter & leave the ring about 7 times before starting). You can see
that as they're doing the squatting they're evaluating their opponent and
are looking for holds or some such.
I've seen a variety of strategies so far. In any case, the purpose is to
push your opponent out of the ring or knock them down to the floor.
That;s why the larger guys usually win 00 they're harder to move (more
mass = more inertia...remember?) There's a line for each person behind
which the guys crouch and (after the ritual sizing up) the match begins
after both wrestlers have touched their knuckles on the ground. And then
they spring (I saw a couple of false starts, just like in many other
sports)
There's a couple of techniques I picked up -- one I see alot is that of
pushing/slapping - trying to push the person out of the ring. Somewhat
luckily the border of the ring is heaped up a little so one can try to
stop at the edge a little easier. But this is particularly effective if
one is heavier & stronger than the opponent - sometimes the guys are
pushed out pretty hard and fall into the spectators - luckily the first
row around the ring is that of the other wrestlers - so they can take the
impact a little better thank the average spectator. Another one that is
seen is of trying to make the other person lose his balance or footing,
usu. by holding one's leg under the other and trying to sweep it. I saw a
comparatively small wrestler do this successively against a larger one. I
was so surprised for usually the larger guy wins - esp. when there's that
great a disparity of weights. I saw two guys go over the edge of the ring
together while one was trying to do this, but that guy was the first to
touch the dirt (w/ his arm) and so he lost. One technique I really liked
was that one guy just got out of the way when the other one charged him
(he must have known this wrestler likes to charge people) and the other
slid and lost his balance for he had expected some barrier that he would
push against so he wouldn't lose his balance. Another commons sight is of
the wrestlers grabbing on each other's belts - sometimes they get locked
this way (esp. if they like the same hold) - sometimes trying to throw the
other down, sometimes to be able to push more easily. (sometimes in order
to pick the other guy off the ground)
I wrote what I could see on the TV in the few days I had watched, so you could see some of what captured my interest. Some of what I wrote was a misimpression, in terms of how common certain strategies were.
With Sumo Stats, I’m getting an even better idea of how common certain moves are.
July 19, 1994, after the tournament was over:
Did I mention that a Hawaiian guy won the sumo tournament (interesting
because sumo is considered so essentially Japanese they don't like
non-Japanese participating.)Musashimaru won the Nagoya basho held in July 1994. Akebono was not in the tournament, sitting it out due to injury.
Musashimaru eventually became a Yokozuna as well. He was an ozeki in July 1994.
CHANKONABE!
Here are a few videos on the central sumo food: chankonabe, or sumo stew!
First, Sumo Prime Time, with a panoply of sumo wrestling favorites!
You may not know the Onami brothers (that is: Wakatakamoto, Wakamotoharu, and Wakatakakage), but they are all pro sumo wrestlers and pretty popular. They’re at the Arashio stable together.
A non-sumo Youtuber I like to watch is Tasting History with Max Miller. I’ve watched loads of his videos, so when I saw he had a video about chanko, I had to check it out:
It’s pretty good in providing context if you don’t have a lot of sumo background.
But now I’m going to go the other extreme, and share one of my favorite Youtube channels: Sumo Food.
This is a channel from Futagoyama stable. It shows the wrestlers cooking (and eating) their food, and also some slice-of-life bits of the guys talking. The man with the camera is a documentarian, I believe, and tries to elicit interesting responses from the wrestlers, but also other people around the sumo stable.
Be sure to turn on the English captions. They’re very well-translated. I think they’re using someone who is a professional translator, or is fluent in both English and Japanese. It doesn’t come across as machine-translated.
HAKKEYOI!
And have some chanko with chicken for extra power!