Size Does Matter

(Alternate Title: I Like Big Butts and I Cannot Lie)

For anyone out there who may be wondering, my interest in Japan goes back waaaay longer than my interest in anime.  When I was in third or fourth grade, my gifted class did a study of Japan and visited the collection at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, which served as my gateway, and later this would become my art home.  This influenced me to choose Asian Art for my non-Western history course, even though African/Oceanc/etc was usually considered to be the easier way to go..  Even now that I have been infected with otaku fever, I have a lot more reasons to want to live in Japan than just access to all the merch (although that definitely figures into my list).  Just like I'd been wanting to see a proper geisha dance since my first visit, there was another spectacle that I've been trying to catch throughout my travels to Japan, and Thursday I finally got to experience it: sumo wrestling.

Five is the kind of adventurous person who likes to try everything, so when I told her I wanted to attend a sumo tournament she was like, "Alright, cool."  Apparently I gave her the impression that it was in Osaka.  Perhaps because when I told her all I could remember was that it was close by.  Sort of.  Himeji isn't technically in the same region - it's in Hyogo, whereas the rest of our trip was spent in Kansai - but it's not that far either.  A two hour train ride isn't terrible, especially since sumo tournaments typically take place during odd-numbered months, and I seem to always be on vacation in the evens.  However, there are a few special tournaments that take place in April.  When I went to Tokyo three years ago, I missed the special tournament at the Yasukuni shrine by a few days.  I wasn't going to let it happen again.

The tournament in Himeji actually started at 8, but after a long day at USJ we were in no hurry to get anywhere that early, except possibly the McDonald's up the road in Shinsaibashi.  We managed to pull into Himeji Station around 11 and after a bite of ramen, made our way to the gymnasium - about a half hour's walk.  When we got in we were given a program, a calendar (in case we wanted to catch some wrestling later this year), and a plastic bag for our shoes.  We got some help finding our seats (Japanese-size, just like on Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey) and figured we'd come in on some sort of opening ceremony.  There was a drummer playing some mad beats, and then all of the wrestlers paraded in, led by the referee, wearing these beautiful embroidered apron-like cloths called a keshomawashi (I had to look that one up, I'd never seen pictures of them before).  Some of them were carrying their babies with them, which Five thought was cute and I thought had the effect of making them seem even bigger than they already did.

Then before the actual wrestling, we got to see a wrestler have his hair done.  They all had their hair tied up in a topknot, which is part of the sumo lifestyle, it turns out.  It took at least 10 minutes (based on my file details...but it felt like it took longer).

Finally it was time for the main event.  My knowledge of sumo was almost non-existent, but I did realize there is a certain amount of ceremony to it.  Being Japanese, there is a fair amount of bowing.  Being a sport, there's some posturing thrown in as well.  Even ignorant gaijin like Five and I knew about the foot stamping part, where the wrestlers face each other in the center of the ring, lift their leg as they lean to the side, and then stomp it back down.  (Edit: Five knew about this because of Street Fighter, and was slightly offended at being grouped in with other ignorant gaijin.  See, this is the problem with sharing the spotlight!)

But apparently, as I've learned while reading up on it, there's a religious side to sumo as well.  I'd seen the salt-throwing before, and knew that it was about purification (have I ever mentioned that I've watched a lot of anime in the last three years?), but it turns out that religious tradition still has a lot to do with sumo.  The canopy overhead is even modeled after the roof of a shinto shrine.

The match doesn't actually start until both wrestlers put their hands on the ground at the same time.  In some of the matches we watched, it took longer to get to that point than the match actually lasted.  They'd come to the middle, bow, stomp, get some salt, toss it - occasionally one would do this with panache, really throw it into the air...rinse and repeat.  Most of the matches were over in a matter of seconds, after all that.  Since you win by getting your opponent out of the ring, it's sometimes just a matter of lifting them and carrying them over the line (easier said than done when your opponents are this size, but you get what I mean, right?)

I don't think Five was expecting to enjoy it as much as she did, but I think she actually got more into it than me.  The matches are so fast paced that it never got boring.  After the first one or two, we decided to bet our small change on each match.  One of us would set the wager and the other would pick the wrestler they thought would win.  I was not doing well - I'm a terrible gambler - and eventually we had to stop because I didn't have any more small change.  Instead, we refined our strategy for picking the winner.  Five based it on the color they wore, picking the color she liked better, and going for the smaller wrestler if their loincloths were the same color.  I didn't really have a strategy, merely watching the way they moved and looking at their overall muscle tone (no, that's not a joke - these guys were seriously strong).  The exception to her strategy was if one was a foreigner.  There were several - one from Georgia and another from Brazil, as well as a few that we were sure were foreign without being sure where they came from - and I pointed out that for them to be this successful in a Japanese sport, they must be really good.

At one point the matches ended - this was the lower-ranked part of the tournament, I think - and one wrestler came out with a posse of other wrestlers to have a special rope thing (called a tsuna) tied around him.  Apparently this means that he's a grand champion.  There was more pageantry with two different yokozuna posturing for the crowd (this might be a religious thing, as well...one of the articles I read said that grand champions have a god-like status).  But eventually we decided that it was time to head out, and left the gymnasium to find out that it had started raining.

Rain or not, I was still hoping to take a look at Himeji's castle.  It's a UNESCO world heritage site, and Five hadn't been to any castles yet, although we at least walked past Nijo on our way to Fire Ramen (that post is still coming, FYI).  By the time we got to the park surrounding it, though, the legs of my pants were wet and my shoes were soggy, so since Five didn't actually care, we just looked from the outside.  At least we finally got our fill of cherry blossoms - they were just beginning to get interesting before we left Kyoto, and our last night there the Kawaii Kingpin showed me the bar street, which was gorgeous with its blooms and small creek, as long as you didn't think too hard about the vomit and urine that had been deposited in the creek the previous night.  However, I'm an artist and at least a little bit of a weeb, so a trip to Japan in the spring just wouldn't be quite right without a legit amount of sakura.  Even if we couldn't sit under the trees thanks to the rain, I felt like we'd finally found that.

Throw Down

For Mongolians, the most wonderful time of the year is NOT Christmas, it's actually Tsagaan Sar - Mongolian New Year.  It's the time when you...well, you're going to find out more in the coming week, but you can read what I wrote about it last year to tide you over, if you like.  What you need to know for now is that there are wrestling tournaments as part of the celebration, and on a whim, Engrish and I decided we needed to go today.  We planned to meet at the Wrestling Palace after I finished church, and since I got there a few minutes before she did, I went ahead and bought the tickets.  This was a bit of a maneuver, because when I went to the KACC office on the side of the building, where tickets are sold, the guy didn't understand me, and sent me to the entrance, where they promptly sent me back to the side.  Eventually I got things sorted out, and ended up with one of the security guys, who was so eager to show me where to sit that he almost missed the fact that I had two tickets and was waiting for minii nites (my friend).

She had mentioned our desire to see some wrestling to our fearless driver, Enkhaa, at some point in the past, and he was bemused.  Why would a couple of white girls want to go watch wrestling?  To which I must say why WOULDN'T we???  To quote my recent Expats Blog contest entry:  "Beautiful strong men in tiny underpants...need I say more?  (See more at: http://www.expatsblog.com/contests/746/n-is-for-nomads)  Apparently it's something men are more into ogli....er, spectating...than women, but that's never been something to stop me.  Of course, I don't think we really realized what a treat we were in for.  I should have - I've recently been fighting with one of my seventh grade girls about changing in the hallway, because she doesn't see anything wrong with changing her clothes in front of God and the whole world.  Well, neither did the wrestlers.  There were strapping young lads in nearly every stage of undress scattered around the palace, and it did my poor, very single heart a WORLD of good!

We wanted to go to the wrestling palace last year, but the opportunity never presented itself.  I actually got to see some wrestling at Naadam, but it was hot and sunny and I'd just had my back messed up by a bunch of Mongolian women forcing themselves onto our bench, so I didn't stay long.  But even if I had, it wouldn't be the same.  The wrestling palace is a much smaller venue than the Naadam stadium, so you feel much closer to the action.  There's a great deal of pageantry involved in a Mongolian wrestling tournament.  When things were finally ready to start, some of the lamas chanted, after which the referees and wrestlers came out onto the "mat" - a round green carpet that covered the floor of the palace.

The names of the wrestlers and their home aimags was announced, if Engrish can be trusted (and since she's practically Mongolian, she generally can).  The wrestlers left the floor, some of them to go back and change into their deel for a later match, and some to merely come back in a few minutes.  Before they start, they "salute" the referees and the Mongolian flag.  Or salute is the best description I can come up with for it - it's actually more graceful, and involves more of the body, as they walk or kind of skip around, gently flapping their arms like an eagle.

I have to admit that I haven't seen much wrestling in my life.  As a band geek, I played at football games and basketball games, but we didn't go to wrestling meets, so the sum of my experience with wrestling comes down to when I couldn't get Shaggy to change the channel as a child and had to watch Hulk Hogan duke it out with Randy Roddy Piper.  This was NOTHING like that (obviously).

For starters, while Mongolian wrestlers have muscles and then some (the shoulders and the legs on these guys!  I swear!), but quite a lot of them had a lot of fat on them, too.  And they weren't paired up according to size - there were very big wrestlers in matches against much more wiry guys.  Engrish and I both wondered how the matches were decided.

The technique seemed different, too - really intense.  They would grapple with each other for what seemed like a really long time, in some matches.  For long periods, their heads would be locked, like a couple of stags, and then they would start spinning, trying to lock a leg around their opponent or simply just throw them off balance.  It truly was "no holds barred;" they had a hold of each others' tops (open fronted, because once upon a time a woman decided to compete - although some of these guys had more boobage than a couple of my girls...) and bottoms.  I was hoping for a wardrobe malfunction at some point, but Engrish pointed out that most of them seemed to be wearing bloomers under their...bloomers.

Then there was the fact that there were LOTS of matches going on at the same time.  It was hard to know where to look.  Engrish and I would pick a couple to watch - occasionally the same one - but it became harder to keep track of them as they moved around the floor.  Wrestlers were constantly hitting the mat.  I found it amazing that nobody got hurt - tribute, I guess, to the refs' hard work (and occasional ass smacking).

The lamas who did the chanting earlier in the afternoon were also the keepers of the winners' brew - airag (fermented mare's milk) - and these fried dough things that you always get served when you visit a ger.  The wrestlers tossed these up into the crowd.  Engrish suggested that it might be lucky to get a treat from the winner.  I suggested that it would have been MORE lucky for them to lay a big wet one on a ginger girl (I've read somewhere that being fire-kissed brings luck), but unfortunately we were sitting in the wrong section to find out.

The truly incongruous thing seemed to me their boots.  Mongolians wrestle in big, ass-kicker boots, which seems funny with their teeny tiny costumes.  It was especially funny to see them walking down the stairs for their next match in just their underpants and boots.  Not that I'm complaining.

Well, we made it to nearly 5 o'clock before Engrish asked if I'd gotten enough photos and 5,000 tugrugs worth of entertainment.  I'd just been thinking to myself that it seemed like the matches were going to go on ALL NIGHT, and since I hadn't had lunch, I was ready to go try my student's restaurant, Korea House (conveniently located behind the wrestling palace).  But I wouldn't hesitate to go again.

The End.