Sumo: Purists wrestle with changes

By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY

In any sumo wrestling match, the magical moment comes before the fight has even begun, in the last few seconds before the wrestlers touch.

It's the moment when the audience draws a collective breath and the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end - the two mighty antagonists have climbed on to the clay ring dressed in their great nappy-like loincloths.

They have performed ritual purification by tossing handfuls of salt into the air. They have sunk to their haunches opposite one another, with their weight forward and the tips of their knuckles grazing the clay.

The wrestlers glare at one another, their breasts rolling over their immense bellies. In a few seconds they will spring forward like charging elephants and the air will be filled with the slap of their bodies and the shouts of spectators. But first there is a moment of intense calm.

The wrestlers practise a kind of breathing called "Ah-Unh," symbolising the first and last letters of the Sanskrit alphabet - the alpha and omega, the yin and yang. No signal is given telling them when they should start; instinctively they know when the time has come.

"In Christianity you have the Trinity and in sumo we have something like it too," says Takahiro Ono, a former wrestler. "It's the harmony of three people - the wrestler on the east, the wrestler on the west, and the referee. It is impossible to express in words." It is one of the things that makes sumo so much more than merely a competitive sport, a ceremonial rite, a rich fusion of Japanese religion, history and culture.

But the purity of the Ah-Unh moment has come under threat, not from Japan, but from abroad.

For sumo is suffering from something of an identity crisis. In competition with newer, international sports like football and baseball, audiences are in long-term decline. So the wrestling commissars are reaching out, with an ambitious plan to have sumo recognised as an Olympic sport.

Amateur sumo is becoming popular and 84 countries, from Kazakhstan to Britain, are members of the International Sumo Federation.

Next month, the Federation holds its ninth Sumo World Championship in Sao Paolo, Brazil, but internationalisation is having its effect on the sport's traditions. "I don't think that foreigners really understand sumo," says Ono, who trains Japanese amateur sumo at Senshu University in Tokyo. "They can understand the customs - bowing to your opponent, and so on. But the cultural and spiritual aspects of sumo, they don't really get it."

One thing that has proved almost impossible to explain is the meeting of minds which takes place before the fight. Foreign wrestlers were continually launching themselves into combat too soon or too late so, in sumo competitions outside Japan, a different system was adopted. When the wrestlers have rested both of their knuckles on the clay, the referee simply shouts, "Hakkeyoi!" meaning "Start!" and they do.

Professional sumo still uses the old system but, for the sake of uniformity, the Hakkeyoi rule was adopted by amateur wrestlers earlier this year, to the dismay of many competitors.

"I preferred the old rule and most of us feel the same," says Shinji Katayama, a 21-year-old member of the Senshu University sumo club.

"Under the old system, lighter wrestlers still had a chance because there was more scope for good timing. When you have to wait for the referee to shout, 'Hakkeyoi!' it depends a lot more on weight."

Then there is the problem of the part-time wrestlers, like young Katayama, who aspire to become professionals.

How is a man who has grown up with the amateur rules, waiting for a spoken signal, suddenly to accustom himself to a system which depends on ideas of mystical harmony? Or a woman? For the biggest change wrought by amateurs in the world of sumo has been the entry into the ring of women wrestlers.

There are still fewer than 100 in Japan but the numbers are increasing, bringing troubling questions. In professional sumo, no woman is allowed so much as to step foot on the clay.

Matters came to a head at this year's tournament in Osaka at which, by tradition, the prefectural governor presents the trophy. But this year the newly elected governor happened to be a woman. She was keen to carry out her duty but the Sumo Association was uncompromising and a male deputy did the job. .

A sport which excluded women on the grounds that their menstrual blood might upset the Shinto gods would probably not go down very well with the International Olympic Committee. With impressive flexibility, the sumo powers have determined that, in amateur sumo only, women are allowed after all. The next question was what they should wear.

Japanese female wrestlers devised their own costume, consisting of a leotard and loose trousers. But a number of female foreign wrestlers caused a sensation at the international tournament in Germany last year by competing in the famous nappy-loin cloths called "mawashi."

"Japanese women, you see, grow up with the firm understanding that, at the core, sumo is a sport for men and that only men wear mawashi," says Ono. "A Japanese woman could not do what those foreign women did."

The final blow remains several years down the road. Assuming enough foreign wrestlers take the sport up, the day will come when foreign wrestlers defeat their Japanese teachers.

"We're proud of sumo and we want it to spread all around the world," says Ono. "But that is the risk, that one day the Japanese, who invented this sumo, will be surpassed."