Day Twenty: Ryogoku

im up that day and feeling slightly disgusted at the foreigners living in Tokyo. I ended up smacking myself with my umbrella all the way to to the subway station which connected me to ryogoku, the location of kokugi-kan.

now it just so happens I picked the right time to come to this country, cause the sumo tournament is going on right now, maybe not at this very moment, but It was going on when I was there in Tokyo for that couple of days.

I made my way towards the sumo arena and waited in line with the rest of the foreigners who had not bought tickets previously and were hoping for a shot at the nosebleeds or the standing room only tickets. I was able to get myself a ticket in the nosebleeds for 2100yen, and felt pretty good about it.

that was sometime around 8 in the morning. the dudes got all greased up and ready to go at about 9am. during the first half of the day, it’s the lightweights and the up and comers facing against each other for the chance to be ranked among the greats.

lightweight, here being a very loose term not to be taken too literally, every single one of the sumo had to weigh in at least 50lbs more than me, and even though I think I have a big head, these guys heads were something like watermelons set on top of a mound of wet blankets about to be put into the dryer.

I haven’t been this excited to see men wrestle in thongs since my high school days.

sumo seemed to have many spiritual and ritualistic practices involved. before they squared off, they would throw salt into the ring as a way of purifying it for the new matches. the ring is made of this thatched barley I reckon. the ring creates a perfect circle.

so the guys wait for the instruction of the other man that’s in the ring-- kind of the referee, the mills lane of sumo. mills lane looks great in not only his referee clothes and his judge robe, but hes got nothing on these guys.

when the guy says its time to go, the wrestlers go at it, loud and proud, pounding into each other with loud grunts. sometimes they slap each other before grabbing each others diaper and trying to throw one another out of the ring.

the matches seemed to last, on average, about thirty seconds. some of the better ones went on for over a minute.

there were times when they would throw one another out with such force that they would cause their opponent to fall out of the raised area in the center of the arena altogether. he would fall to the side and land among the crowd, and in one case, he ran square into one of the judges. he ended up being okay though, he acted as if it happened all the time, only because it probably did.

I looked around the arena, checked out the museums and whatnot, and eventually found my way downstairs to an area that was selling sumo wrestler kibble.

I reckon it’s the stuff that they give the sumo seven or eight times a day to bulk them up. it was called “chanko”.

how could you not be as happy as this man here while eating chanko.

it is a physical impossibility.

I bought myself a bowl of this stuff and sat down with two new Japanese friends. they of course were very nice like most Japanese folks, and the food was amazingly good. apparently it was also supposed to be very high in calories and would turn me into a sumo wrestler if I kept eating it.

which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

every time I scoped out a honey walking around, the first man she went up and talked to was a sumo. these sumo wrestlers have, by far, the best looking wives and lady-friends. even though they were usually about double the size of these women, they were still being spoon fed chanko by them and the women were laughing at the sumo wrestlers corny jokes.

being a sumo wrestler might not be so bad, I thought.

you have to live your life with a constant difficulty to breathe as well as having a very high chance of dying much younger than everyone else.

but on the upside you get to eat chanko everyday and have Japanese women laugh at your lame jokes.

but my friends my friends, don’t get me wrong, every single one of those sumo wrestlers was a stud. I went around and talked to a few of them and tried to make friends. they were nice and even let me take some pictures of them.


this one is one that can be added to the great awkward pictures list of 60cities60days. the dumb American and the dumbfounded sumo, living together as one. something about that seems like it would make a great sitcom.

and this man here was maybe the largest sumo I saw that day.


if you are ever in the area during the month of may, I would strongly suggest you go check out this sumo tournament. it was something unlike anything I have ever seen, it was just as amazing as so many of the other things I have wanted to see in this country for years.

I left and rode the shinkansen toward a city called nara.

on the way, I felt an obligation to take more pictures of mount fuji as we went through shizuoka prefecture.

here is a good one

and another one


and


drat! and double drat! sweet irony how could I let this happen again!

I arrived in nara about the time the sun was going down. I had to go through Osaka, home of the swine flu, but luckily I was able to escape again and make it out of there with most of my body still intact.

I checked into the nara tree guest house, owned by a man from Nashville named bob and his girlfriend, a down home kansai girl named mayumi.

they were two very nice and wonderful folks.

I slept the night in a room by myself looking out onto a street in the center of the town