I find myself intently watching bouts and then leaping from my chair with a fist in the air or shouting unsolicited advice at the screen. I clearly have something to say and need somewhere to say it. Sumo has news sites, and forums, and games and... I wanted more. Opinions are there and some are technical, some entertaining, some personally biased in ways that make no sense to me, but none of it was quite what I wanted to talk about. My friends have limited patience for my nonsense, and so here we are. That's the honest starting point for this site, and I want to be upfront that it's still the starting point. I haven't solved it. I don't have a tidy answer for what English-language sumo writing is missing or how to fix it. What I have is a strong sense that the gap is real, and a decision to keep writing into it until something resembling an answer starts to take shape.
That puts Maemichi Sumo in a specific position, and it's one I think sumo itself gives me a useful way to describe. A rikishi who has just been recruited to a beya doesn't arrive with a technique. They usually arrive with basics (shiko, stance, the discipline of showing up every morning) and years of repetition ahead of them before anyone, including the rikishi, knows what their sumo actually is. Nobody expects a shindeshi to have a signature kimarite. They expect him to keep training and see what develops.
I'm not going to pretend Maemichi Sumo is further along than that. The site has basics: a voice, a set of standards, a critical framework I believe in. What it doesn't have yet is the finished thing those basics are supposed to produce. This piece isn't a mission statement dressed up as certainty. It's closer to a note pinned up on day one, before anyone knows how the wrestler's career is going to go.
The problem I want to solve
Sumo has a communication problem, and it isn't limited to English-language coverage, though that's where it's most visible to me as a reader. Both inside Japan and outside it, the sport hasn't figured out how to bring its fanbase into an honest, current conversation about itself. What exists tends to split into results coverage on one side and the ceremonial and official on the other. Both are useful, yet neither is written for the fan who has watched long enough to have real opinions and wants writing that takes those opinions seriously instead of summarizing around them or smoothing them over.
That diagnosis is the closest thing I have to a fixed point. I know I want the writing to be technical without being dry, critical without being careless, and honest about uncertainty rather than hedging everything into mush. For a couple of specifics, you will see I unironically use the phrase 'their style of sumo' and will say 'beya' instead of 'stable' or 'heya'. My usage of 'beya' was only settled as a preference while writing my third article, so you may see the others on the site today, but it exemplifies my process as I continue to find my voice. I know I don't want to fake authority I don't have: I'm a fan, not a coach or a journalist, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise while I continue to learn my style of sumo...writing.
What's actually built so far
The one piece of Maemichi Sumo that's further along than instinct is the predictions league, and it has become more central to the site than I originally planned: not a side feature sitting next to the writing, but something I now think of as running alongside it with roughly equal importance. It's free to play and currently in beta while the scoring gets refined, and I test different types of games and various other elements. There is a leaderboard for each tournament's results, and the overall leaderboard standings are continuously updated with rolling results for anyone who plays consistently enough, and are scored using your average finishing rank across your last nine tournaments. You first qualify to be listed in the overall standings once you have played for at least three basho, so a placeholder is there for now, and we will see it populated with data in November.
In the current predictions league, there are five mini-games each basho, and I built them to reward more than just picking the eventual champion. This is styled after a prediction game I play with my friends every basho, and I assume it (like everything else) will see several evolutions as we add new users. We start with a straightforward yusho pick from the full Makuuchi division, earning a point per win or a flat 15 points if your selection wins the cup. There's a parallel game restricted to M11 and lower, for readers who actually track the bottom half of the banzuke, where the surprises tend to live. A separate pick covers the Juryo yusho, an often overlooked aspect of coverage that deserves more attention. In our current Game 05, every rikishi newly promoted to or returning to Makuuchi gets a kachi-koshi or make-koshi prediction call in a game built specifically for them. And there's one I am fond of precisely because it's a little absurd: guess the combined total of kinboshi awarded and the number of times NHK World's commentary (I think it's Raja - and almost always when talking about Ura) uses a particular kitchen-related phrase during the broadcast. Guess low and you're leaving points unclaimed; guess high and you may leave with nothing.
Picks open once the banzuke is out and close on day one. None of it costs anything. It's the one part of this project where the shape is basically settled, and it's the part I'd most like you to actually try, rather than just read about. What comes next gets interesting, as I have lots of ideas on how to expand this segment of the site, although I will hold off putting those concepts into writing here until I actually have them developed. I can promise I will try to update the predictions game in the windows of time between a basho's end and the banzuke release, so that I do not interfere with anything in active use. I will also try to back up all the user data so nothing is lost in my updates, but development is weird, and I am still leaning on my AI assistant Claude fairly heavily, so I cannot make any guarantees. But check it out, enter your predictions, tell your friends, tell me how to make it better, and prove your sumo knowledge.
What's still raw
Aside from the league, I am working from direction rather than a finished design. There will be a membership of some kind for readers who want to support the site more directly, and eventually a shop because I have a background in sales and marketing and can't stop myself: what that actually looks like, what it includes, what it costs, none of that is settled yet, and I'd rather tell you it's undecided than describe something that doesn't exist so I can sound further along than I am. Site development has already shifted after I started sketching this piece, and I expect it to shift again before any of this is final.
I think that's the honest version of where Maemichi Sumo is. Not a finished technique and not even comparable to a rikishi who knows what their sumo is going to become. Just someone who showed up, is doing the repetitive, unglamorous parts on purpose, and is willing to let you watch while it's still being figured out.
On this site I write under the shikona of Makotoumi, which roughly means 'Sea of Sincerity', since that is what I bring to the conversation. I have not yet found my sumo writing style and will keep training to find out, article by article, what that actually is. I will keep pushing forward and listening to the advice of my readers. Maemichi Sumo means 'A way forward for sumo', and I hope we find that together.