Sumo's place in Japanese life

A sport built on sacred ground

Every professional sumo bout begins with an act of purification. The referee — the gyoji — enters the ring dressed in robes derived from Heian court costume. The wrestlers throw salt to purify the clay of the dohyo. They stomp to drive evil spirits into the earth. They face each other across the starting lines in a ritual of mutual acknowledgement that can last several minutes before a single touch is exchanged.

None of this is performance in the theatrical sense. These ceremonies are Shinto practice — the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan, which holds that the natural world is inhabited by spirits called kami, and that ritual purification is necessary before any significant activity. The dohyo itself is a sacred space. It is rebuilt and reconsecrated before every tournament during a ceremony called the dohyo-matsuri, with offerings buried beneath its clay: dried squid, kelp, chestnuts, torreya nuts, washed rice, and salt — each a traditional Shinto sacred food symbolising prosperity, longevity, and purity. Sacred sake is poured into the hole before it is sealed and the clay packed down. No women are permitted to enter the ring — a prohibition that has generated significant controversy in the modern era but reflects the ritual classification of the space as sacred ground subject to traditional purity codes.

This Shinto foundation means that sumo operates simultaneously as sport and as living spiritual practice. The two cannot be cleanly separated, and the sport has consistently resisted attempts to modernize away its ceremonial dimensions even as it has adapted in other respects.

Television and the making of a national sport

If Shinto gave sumo its spiritual identity, NHK gave it its national audience. Japan's public broadcaster began televising sumo in 1953 — among the first sporting events broadcast on Japanese television — and has maintained an unbroken broadcast relationship with the sport ever since. For generations of Japanese households, the afternoon NHK sumo broadcast was a fixture of daily life in the same way that certain radio programmes became embedded in national culture elsewhere.

The implications of this relationship are difficult to overstate. NHK's treatment of sumo — reverential, unhurried, attentive to ceremony as much as to competition — shaped how the entire country understood the sport. The commentators who became synonymous with NHK sumo were not simply sports broadcasters; they were cultural interpreters, explaining the significance of each ritual gesture, each rank, each beya affiliation to the audience.

This broadcast intimacy created something unusual: a sport that felt genuinely familiar to people who had never attended a tournament or followed the results closely. Sumo was background music in Japanese cultural life — always present, always recognizable, always carrying the weight of tradition.

Sumo in wartime Japan

The relationship between sumo and Japanese nationalism reached its most explicit and troubling expression during the militarist era of the 1930s and 1940s. The sport's existing associations with masculine virtue, endurance, and hierarchical order made it easily co-optable as propaganda. Tournament posters depicted wrestlers in poses borrowed from military imagery. Sumo was promoted as an expression of the Japanese spirit — Yamato damashii — in contrast to what nationalist rhetoric framed as the decadence of Western sport.

Wrestlers were deployed to military bases to boost morale. Several were granted exemptions from military service on the grounds that their public role was of national importance. The sport continued throughout the war years even as other forms of entertainment were curtailed, a reflection of its perceived value to the national psychological effort.

The postwar reckoning with this history was incomplete, as it was across many Japanese institutions. The sport moved quickly to reestablish itself under the occupation as entertainment rather than ideology, and the association with militarist nationalism was rarely examined directly. What remained was a sport with an unusually strong sense of its own Japanese-ness — a quality that would become central to its identity crises of the 1990s and 2000s.

Foreign-born rikishi and the identity of sumo

No development in the modern history of sumo has generated more sustained debate about the sport's identity than the rise of foreign-born wrestlers to its highest ranks. The question of what sumo is — a Japanese national practice, or a global sport — has never been resolved cleanly, and the sport's institutions have sometimes struggled to hold both possibilities simultaneously.

The first significant wave came from Hawaii. Takamiyama Daigoro, a Hawaiian of Japanese descent, became the first foreign-born wrestler to win a top division tournament in 1972. He was followed by Konishiki Yasokichi, whose enormous size and considerable skill made him one of the most dominant wrestlers of the late 1980s and early 1990s. When Konishiki was passed over for promotion to yokozuna despite a record that many argued met the criteria, the debate became explicit: was sumo prepared to have a non-Japanese yokozuna?

The answer came not from the Hawaiian wave but from the next one. Akebono Tarō — born Chad Rowan in Hawaii — was promoted to yokozuna in 1993, becoming the 64th to hold the rank and the first non-Japanese. His promotion was followed by that of Musashimaru Kōyō in 1999. The institution had opened the door, if not without considerable internal resistance.

The Mongolian era and the new debate

If the Hawaiian question was ultimately answered — however imperfectly — by the decision to promote Akebono and Musashimaru, the Mongolian era that followed created an entirely different set of tensions. From the early 2000s onward, Mongolian wrestlers came to dominate sumo to a degree that had no historical precedent. By the 2010s, Mongolians had won the majority of tournaments for more than a decade. Hakuho Shō — born Mönkhbatyn Davaajargal in Ulaanbaatar — became arguably the greatest rikishi in the history of the sport.

The response from parts of the Japanese sumo establishment ranged from quiet discomfort to open hostility, with debates about whether Mongolian wrestlers showed sufficient deference to Japanese tradition, whether their style of sumo was too aggressive, and whether their presence was changing the nature of the sport. These debates were sometimes nakedly about ethnicity and sometimes genuinely about questions of style and comportment — and the two were rarely cleanly distinguished.

What sumo's foreign-born era ultimately reveals is that the sport's identity was never as singular as its mythology suggested. It was always a practice that evolved, absorbed, and adapted — from the Shinto courts to the Edo entertainment district to the NHK broadcast era to the global recruitment of talent. The question is not whether sumo can accommodate the world. It always has. The question is how honestly it can acknowledge that history.