Sea of Crises
A writerâs journey to follow the most important tournament in the sumo calendar â with all its rituals and strict hierarchies â becomes a voyage into events buried in the past. Brian Phillips finds himself tracking a forgotten man, one who, in 1970, was involved in another ritual, a sensational case of seppuku, when he decapitated the writer Mishima Yukio following a failed coup dâĂ©tat.
BRIAN PHILLIPS
BRIAN PHILLIPS is an author and journalist with a passion for sport who works as a senior writer for MTV News. He has contributed to Grantland, The New York Times, The New Republic and Slate, as well as being included in the Best American Sports Writing and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. This article is taken from his debut book Impossible Owls, a collection of narrative essays first published by FSG Originals in 2018. He lives in Los Angeles.
When he comes into the ring, HakuhĆ, the greatest sumĆtori in the world, perhaps the greatest in the history of the world, dances like a tropical bird, like a bird of paradise. Flanked by two attendants â his tachimochi, who carries his sword, and his tsuyuharai, or dew sweeper, who keeps the way clear for him â and wearing his embroidered apron, the keshĆ-mawashi, with its braided cords and intricate loops of rope, HakuhĆ climbs on to the trapezoidal block of clay, sixty centimetres high and nearly seven metres across, where he will be fighting. Here, marked off by rice-straw bales, is the circle, the dohyĆ, which he has been trained to imagine as the top of a skyscraper: one step over the line and he is dead. A Shinto priest purified the dohyĆ before the tournament; above, a six-tonne canopy suspended from the arenaâs ceiling, a kind of floating temple roof, marks it as a sacred space. Coloured tassels hang from the canopyâs corners, representing the Four Divine Beasts of the Chinese constellations: the azure dragon of the east, the vermilion sparrow of the south, the white tiger of the west, the black tortoise of the north. Over the canopy, off-centre and lit with spotlights, flies the white-and-red flag of Japan.
HakuhĆ bends into a deep squat. He claps twice then rubs his hands together. He turns his palms slowly upwards. He is bare chested, 1.95 metres tall and weighs 158 kilograms. His hair is pulled up in a topknot. His smooth stomach strains against the coiled belt at his waist, the literal referent of his rank: yokozuna, horizontal rope. Rising, he lifts his right arm diagonally, palm down, to show he is unarmed. He repeats the gesture with his left. He lifts his right leg high into the air, tipping his torso to the left like a watering can, then slams his foot on to the clay. When it strikes, the crowd of thirteen thousand souls inside the RyĆgoku Kokugikan, Japanâs national sumo stadium, shouts in unison: âYoisho! â Come on! Do it!â He slams down his other foot: âYoisho!â Itâs as if the force of his weight is striking the crowd in the stomach. Then he squats again, arms held out wing-like at his sides, and bends forward at the waist until his back is near parallel with the floor. Imagine someone playing aeroplanes with a small child. With weird, sliding thrusts of his feet, he inches forward, gliding across the ringâs sand, raising and lowering his head in a way thatâs vaguely serpentine while slowly straightening his back. By the time heâs upright again, the crowd is roaring.
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Since 1749 sixty-nine men have been promoted to yokozuna. Only the holders of sumoâs highest rank are allowed to make entrances like this. Officially, the purpose of the elaborate dohyĆ-iri is to chase away demons. (And this is something you should register about sumo, a sport with TV contracts and millions in revenue and fan blogs and athletes in yogurt commercials â that itâs simultaneously a sport in which demon-frightening can be somethingâs official purpose.) But the ceremony is territorial on a human level, too. Itâs a message delivered to adversaries, a way of saying, This ring is mine; a way of saying, Be prepared for what happens if youâre crazy enough to enter it.
HakuhĆ is not HakuhĆâs real name. Sumo wrestlers fight under ring names called shikona, formal pseudonyms governed, like everything else in sumo, by elaborate traditions and rules. HakuhĆ was born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, in 1985; he is the fourth non-Japanese wrestler to attain yokozuna status. Until the last thirty years or so, foreigners were rare in the upper ranks of sumo in Japan. But some countries have their own sumo customs, brought over by immigrants, and others have sports that are very like sumo. Thomas Edison filmed sumo matches in Hawaii as early as 1903. Mongolian wrestling involves many of the same skills and concepts. In recent years wrestlers brought up in places such as these have found their way to Japan in greater numbers and have largely supplanted Japanese wrestlers at the top of the rankings. At the time of writing, six of the past eight yokozuna promotions have gone to foreigners, with no active Japanese yokozuna since the last retired in 2003. This is a source of intense anxiety to many in the tradition-minded world of sumo in Japan.
As a child, the story goes, Davaajargal was skinny. This was years before he became HakuhĆ, when he used to mooch around Ulaanbaatar, thumbing through sumo magazines and fantasising about growing as big as a house. His father had been a dominant force in Mongolian wrestling in the 1960s and 1970s, winning a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics and rising to the rank of undefeatable giant. It was sumo that captured Davaajargalâs imagination, but he was simply too small for it.
When he went to Tokyo, in October 2000, he was a 62-kilo fifteen-year-old. No trainer would touch him. Sumo apprentices start young, moving into training stables called heya where theyâre given room and board in return for a somewhat horrifying life of eating, chores, training, eating and serving as quasi-slaves to their senior stablemates (and eating). Everyone agreed that little Davaajargal had a stellar wrestling brain, but he was starting too late, and his reed-like body would make real wrestlers want to kick dohyĆ sand in his face. Finally, an expat Mongolian rikishi (another word for sumo wrestler) persuaded the master of the Miyagino heya to take Davaajargal in on the last day of the teenagerâs stay in Japan. The stablemasterâs gamble paid off. After a few years of training and a fortuitous late growth spurt, Davaajargal emerged as the most feared young rikishi in Japan. He was given the name HakuhĆ, which means White Peng (a Peng being a giant bird in Chinese mythology).
âSumo apprentices start young, moving into training stables where theyâre given room and board in return for a life of eating, chores, training, eating and serving as quasi-slaves to their senior stablemates (and eating).â
HakuhĆâs early career was marked by a sometimes bad-tempered rivalry with an older wrestler, a fellow Mongolian called AsashĆryĆ« (Morning Blue Dragon), who became a yokozuna in 2003. AsashĆryĆ« embodied everything the Japanese fear about the wave of foreign rikishi who now dominate the sport. He was hot headed, unpredictable and indifferent to the ancient traditions of a sport thatâs been part of the Japanese national consciousness for as long as thereâs been a Japan.
This is something else you should register about sumo: it is very, very old. Not old like black-and-white movies; old like the mists of time. Sumo was already ancient when the current ranking system came into being in the mid-1700s. The artistry of the banzuke, the traditional ranking sheet, has given rise to an entire school of calligraphy.
AsashĆryĆ« brawled with other wrestlers in the communal baths. He barked at referees â an almost unthinkable offence. He pulled another wrestlerâs hair, a breach that made him the first yokozuna ever to be disqualified from a match. Rikishi are expected to wear kimonos and sandals in public; AsashĆryĆ« would show up in a business suit. He would show up drunk. He would accept his prize money with the wrong hand.
The 287-kilo Hawaiian sumĆtori Konishiki launched a rap career after retiring from the sport; another Hawaiian, Akebono, the first foreign yokozuna, became a professional wrestler. This was bad enough. But AsashĆryĆ« flouted the dignity of the sumo association while still an active rikishi. He withdrew from a summer tour claiming an injury, then showed up on Mongolian TV playing in a charity soccer match. When sumo was rocked by a massive match-fixing scandal in the mid-2000s, a tabloid magazine reported that AsashĆryĆ« had paid his opponents US$10,000 per match to let him win one tournament. Along with several other wrestlers, AsashĆryĆ« won a settlement against the magazine, but even that victory carried a faint whiff of scandal: the Mongolian became the first yokozuna ever to appear in court. âEveryone talks about dignity,â AsashĆryĆ« complained when he retired, âbut when I went into the ring I felt fierce like a devil.â Once, after an especially contentious bout, he reportedly went into the car park and attacked his adversaryâs car.
The problem, from the perspective of the traditionalists who control Japanese sumo, was that AsashĆryĆ« also won. He won relentlessly. He laid waste to the sport. Until HakuhĆ came along he was, by an enormous margin, the best wrestler in the world. The sumo calendar revolves around six grand tournaments â honbasho â held every two months throughout the year. In 2004 AsashĆryĆ« won five of them, two with perfect 15-0 records, a mark that no one had achieved since the mid-1990s. In 2005 he became the first wrestler to win all six honbasho in a single year. He would lift 180-kilogram wrestlers off their feet and hurl them, writhing, to the clay. He would bludgeon them with hands toughened by countless hours of striking the teppĆ, a wooden shaft as thick as a telephone pole. He won his twenty-fifth tournament, then good for third on the all-time list, before his thirtieth birthday.
HakuhĆ began to make waves around the peak of AsashĆryĆ«âs invulnerable reign. Five years younger than his rival, HakuhĆ was temperamentally his opposite: solemn, silent, difficult to read. âMore Japanese than the Japaneseâ â this is what people say about him. AsashĆryĆ« made sumo look wild and furious; HakuhĆ was fathomlessly calm. He seemed to have an innate sense of angles and counterweights, how to shift his hips almost imperceptibly to annihilate his enemyâs balance. In concept, winning a sumo bout is simple: either make your opponent step outside the ring or make him touch the ground with any part of his body besides the soles of his feet. When HakuhĆ won, how heâd done it was sometimes a mystery. The other wrestler would go staggering out of what looked like an even grapple. When HakuhĆ needed to, he could be overpowering. He didnât often need to.
The flaming circus of AsashĆryĆ«âs career was good for TV ratings. But HakuhĆ was a way forward for a scandal-torn sport â a foreign rikishi with deep feelings for Japanese tradition, a figure who could unite the past and future. At first he lost to AsashĆryĆ« more than he won, but the rivalry always ran hot. In 2008, almost exactly a year after the Yokozuna Deliberation Council promoted HakuhĆ to the top rank, AsashĆryĆ« gave him an extra shove after hurling him down in a tournament. The two momentarily squared off. In the video of the bout you can see the older man grinning and shaking his head while HakuhĆ glares at him with an air of outraged grace. Over time HakuhĆâs fearsome technique and AsashĆryĆ«âs endless seesawing between injury and controversy turned the tide in the younger wrestlerâs favour. When AsashĆryĆ« retired unexpectedly in 2010 after allegedly breaking a manâs nose outside a nightclub, HakuhĆ had taken their last seven regulation matches and notched a 14-13 lifetime record against his formerly invincible adversary.
With no AsashĆryĆ« to contend with, HakuhĆ proceeded to go 15-0 in his next four tournaments. He began a spell of dominance that not even AsashĆryĆ« could have matched. In 2010 he compiled the second-longest winning streak in sumo history, sixty-three straight wins, which tied a record set in the 1780s. By 2014 he had won a record ten tournaments without dropping a single match.
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Watching HakuhĆâs ring entrance, that harrowing bird dance, it is hard to imagine what his life is like. To have doubled in size, more than doubled, in the years since his fifteenth birthday; to have jumped cultures and languages; to have unlocked this arcane ...