Sumo

On Thursday we had the very shouty teacher again. On that note it turns out we have three teachers a week, it goes like this:

Monday – a man who friendly, very animated, wears glasses and to me seems to be very stressed.

Tuesday – Koganazawa Sensei, I remember her name because it rhymes and she is the best of them. She is very comical with her play-acting, and seems to be obsessed with Angela’s Pokemon pencil case.

Wednesday – Koganazawa again.

Thursday – Shouty teacher.

Friday – stressed man.

On Thursday’s the shouty teacher drew a sumo wrestler on the board and then said “Ashita, Ju itchi Ji.” We worked out this could possibly mean tomorrow at 11’o’clock. I sad to Ian, as a joke, that we might be going on a school trip to see Sumo wrestlers tomorrow.

I was right.

Our class, led by our stressed teacher, left school at 11AM and walked up the road to this stunning park I had not seen before. It turns out that my school is not only near the Tokyo Dome and themepark, but also a beautiful park next to the station. When we were there the trees were selectively letting go of their petals into the wind, but the park had other beauty in the form of its buildings. There are some huge gates on one side of the park with gold letters, and many tradiational wooden buildings amongst strange stone statues. Unfortunately I did not have my camera. Other people did and that is why our class found itself split into two.

The first group included Ian and Henrik and our teacher; they were ahead. I was in the latter group of stragglers who had stopped to take pictures or be taken in pictures. We roughly knew where to go because there seemed to be a lot of people going in the same direction

I am always very cynical about school trips because I have been taken to Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station about five times with two different schools. I think they must have been on a drive to convince kids that nuclear power was safe and friendly. I remember asking the tour guide, at about the age of 13, what they did with the nuclear waste but I’ve forgottn what the response was. I also remember that they made us wear hard hats and told us the many dangerous reasons why, and yet the small blue uniformed women who took us on the tour apparently had indestructible skulls and so didn’t need to wear anything on their heads. Must have been the radiation.

So anyway, I was expecting the trip to result in us all cramming into a shed in the backyard of some fish shop while some ex-sumo wrestler sat on a stool in traditional dress and distractingly spread legs telling us about sumo in broken English.

I was wrong.

There were probably about a thousand people crammed into a big square space surrounding a tiny sumo ring. The ground had been tiered into large steps for seating. We had our bags checked before we were allowed in and as we entered the square in the slow procession of people we couldn’t see the rest of our class anywhere. Whilst losing hope a woman in a suit started shouting at us and we approached her. We found the rest of the class standing and looking bored. We tried to find somewhere to sit and I ended up squatting on the ground behind an Italian girl, another student of my school, and next to a Japanese guy. One of them had a plastic mat to sit on and they spread it out on the floor and let me sit on it too.

I didn’t know anything about sumo before so it was a real eye opener. First though, an ear opener when a guy got into the ring and started singing. I have heard traditional Japanese singing of stories in films before, this sounded similar because they both sound to me to be tremendously sad. I have no idea what he was singing, maybe that noodles would be available in the foyer and that, despite us being outside, it was no smoking. However, the tone of the song and his voice just made me feel depressed and I imagined he was singing about past gloried days, of traditions been and gone, of when honourable samurais walked the dusty roads and people worshipped the spirits of land and sea.

Then the fighting began. Two hefty men with tied up hair and not much on got into the ring. They faced us and lifted one foot high into the air. They brought it back down and did the same to the other. They approached the centre of the ring, bowed towards each other and then squatted in the middle. The referee, not really the right word, was in a kimono holding a wooden thing that he used to indicate when the match started.

Bang, the two men lunged at each other, not with any particularly specific part of their bodies, just to make contact. As large forces played out between them bodies they shuffled left and right. Then one force over tipped the other and one man was pushed out of the ring without question. No match lasted more than twenty seconds it was very very quick.

The loser walked away and the winner crouched on the floor for an extra moment while the singer, I presume, announced the score. As the next fighters could be seen approaching the ring the former winner and the singing man walked away and the next fight began.

Then the slapstick started. It was between a very large sumo wrestler and a taller thinner opponent. The fight seemed normal until they started doing girly slaps at each other and running about the ring shouting, “Honto honto honto.” After that they pulled each other’s hair, argued, threw sand at each other, hit each other with appropriate props and eventually bowed and left while we clapped. They probably performed for a whole five minutes; I don’t know whether it is normal for that to happen, maybe it gives the other wrestlers a break.

The Japanese guy sitting next to me started to make conversation. He knew the Italian girl somehow and via the use of two electronic dictionaries he was able to tell me that he liked trains, especially steam trains, which were invented in Britain. We talked about how expensive Tokyo is compared to Britain, about what I was doing in Japan, how he is looking for a job and that sadly there were not many steam trains left in the UK.

After the fights were over all the winners returned to the ring wearing large pieces of material on their fronts, kind of like beach towels hanging from their sumo belts. The singing man stood in the middle doing his job and the wrestlers clapped and chanted too, occasionally looking out into the audience and subtly waving at people with cameras. The singing man handed the microphone to one of the more multi-talented wrestlers who took his place and began to sing instead. This went on for a long long time. Most of my class was leaving and I was thinking about dong the same. Eventually all the wrestlers stomped off. But then they came back! This time there was a man in a white kimono leading them and holding some kind of important artefact. They all walked around the ring sombrely.

It was time to leave. I had the feeling that my conversation with the Japanese guy was going rather well and when I made the move to go he told me his name. I told him mine and then he asked me if I had a pen. I did but the Italian girl got their first. From his bag he pulled out a little square notebook and wrote his name and telephone number on a page. I wrote my name and email in his book and he said thanks and so did I.

Stepping into the future slightly, he emailed me the same night. He said this:

HI!!

I am ******** (I’m hiding his name, though imagine if it was this, it’d be so hard to pronounce)

thank you for your conversations in YASUKUNI temple with watching SUMO today.

Please you have mucg interestings( about Japanese traditional cultures ) ! I think so

I was happy today

See you next time !(σ・∀・)σ

∧＿∧
( ´・ω・)
( つ旦O
と＿)＿)

So there we go. What do you think? Pig or cat? Has the ears of a cat, the nose of a pig but the boxing gloves of neither. Hmmm.