SUMO

, SUMO: I have been watching Grand Sumo Highlights on channel 322 of Direct TV. This is the Japanese channel. The English is perfect, there are no commercials and the topics include lovely cultural reports. Some of my favorites are the Japan Railway, the art. So many enjoyable topics. I became fascinated with Sumo recently. These men range in height from 135 cm tall to 185 cm and weigh between 135 kg to 200 kg, which is a whopping 440 pounds. I like the smaller men who train with a lot of weight lifting, it gives shape and firmness to their pectorals. The larger men have flabby looking breasts. Not pretty. There some mongols participating. The only way I can tell one of them from the Japanese is the fact that his eyebrows are very round and he is very hairy on his shoulders. There is a lot of ceremony before during and after. The men all assemble on the clay ring and parade around wearing very eleborate frabric in front which displays their home town. They clap and walk around the ring. Then they are paired up for each bout. They wear a large belt called a mowashi. It consistes of a very long strip of silk. It takes quite a while to get it wound around them. The belt is about one inch thick and is usually colored blue, red, but no print. They also wear an array of sticks that are tucked into the front of the mowashi. I do not know the significance of these sticks. The referee wears a a beautiful kimona and at the end of the bout hands the winner a packet with about 400 yen. I think this is about 700 US. Sometimes the winner does not take the packet. Maybe it is a tip to the ref? There around six seasons each year and the end goal is to win the Empress Trophy. The current leader is a man named Terunofuji. He is 12-1 because on Friday his bout was disqualified because he pulled on his opponents top knot. That is a big no no. Another Sumo wrestler was ejected from the competition because he broke Covid protocol by going to a party. Oopsie! I enjoy this very much. You probably want seats at least five rows back from the clay ring. This big guys fling each other out of the ring all of the time. The bouts are very quick. Lasting a half a second or as long as two minutes. Check out channel 322.