Nagoya

Day 247 – Chubbie men wear nappies

General admission tickets to the Sumo tournament are only sold on the day and we’d heard that they could be difficult to get, so we were up early to walk across Nagoya to the stadium to get in line.  There was a line when we got there but it wasn’t huge, so we soon had our tickets.  Excited we headed inside to wait for the bouts to begin.  They start quite early in the morning, around 8:30am, with the junior divisions.  At this stage the stadium was still quite empty (the vast majority of the seat are reserved, so there is no need to turn up early to get a good spot).  We watched the juniors for about an hour before deciding that eight hours of sumo was going to be too much.  So we walked back to our hotel for a morning nap.

Empty stadium early in the day.

After our nap and a quick noodle lunch we were back in our seats watching the bigger boys battle it out.  We had a few surprises, the bouts only go for less than a minute in general, and they only fight one bout per day (the tournament goes for 12 days), so each fight is over much quicker than we thought.  This means that much of the time is taken up with rituals, feet stomping, salt slinging and false starts to put the other wrestler off his game.  The other surprise was that quite often the little guy (relatively speaking of course) would come out victorious, with the really big guys seeming to be more prone to lose their balance.

Waiting their turn by the side of the ring.

These moves are performed before each bout to symbolise that the wrestler has come to fight in good faith.

The ring is elevated which made for some spectacular falls.

I know whose shoes (or bare feet) I wouldn’t want to be in right now.

Mid-afternoon the Juryo division (2nd division) started and the crowd got a bit livelier, by the the time the Makuuchi division (1st) came on late in the afternoon the stadium was much fuller and the cheering more enthusiastic, especially for some obvious crowd favourites.

Before the beginning of the upper division matches a ‘dohyo-iri’ (entering the ring) ceremony is performed.  The wrestlers enter the stadium wearing ceremonial ‘kesho-mawashi’ embroidered silk aprons worth up to A$10,000.

Unsuccessfully trying to interpret the form guide, which is of course written in Japanese as Erin and I bet with each other on each match (she was 6 up in the end).

We can’t possibly imagine how somebody in McDonalds’ marketing department though this was a good idea!

When the sumo was over we headed for another sushi train, it’s fair to say we’re becoming addicted.  This restaurant belonged to same chain as the one in Kyoto with the ‘shinkansen’, so I once again amused myself ordering dishes off the touch-screen menu so that the special train would come and deliver them to our table.