Sumo Tournament

On Saturday, Brett, Kelsey and I took the Shinkansen south to the island of Kyushu. From Tokyo, the distance was around 1200km and we covered the distance, including stops and changing trains once, in about 6 hours. I asked the guy wheeling the food cart down the aisles and he said the train travelled at 270km/h. There was a faster service called the Nozumi, but our rail passes didn't allow us to use it. The slower trains stop more often and at a station stop the faster ones whiz by at top speed. It was quite shocking the first time when that happened as you don't expect it.

We went to the city of Fukuoka to watch a sumo tournament. We were lucky to find a sumo tournament because there are only 6 tournaments in Japan every year. We decided to spend most of the day at the sumo stadium. The early matches have the lower ranked players and it builds up to the top sumo guy at the end of the day at 6 o'clock. There was a match every few minutes so the action was pretty much non-stop. Sumo isn't as popular in Japan as it used to be, so the stadium was never full and most people didn't come until the end of the day. That did give us the opportunity to sneak down to the front to see it close-up. The one bad part of the sitting area is that there are no seats, only pillows for you to sit cross-legged in the defined square sitting areas demarcated by metal bars.

Before every match the fighters go through rituals of drinking a cup of water, stamping their feet, slapping themselves in an effort to intimidate their opponent. They also throw salt into the ring to purify the fighting area. The match itself starts with the ref chanting some things and then they plow into each other. The first one to step outside the ring or touch his arm or leg on the mat loses. Matches rarely last for more than a minute, and then the cycle starts again. At the end of the day after the last match, everyone throws their seat cushions into the air to celebrate. It's kind of an odd sport but actually quite exciting to watch. The only thing that would improve the experience would be real chairs!