We pick up whee the previous entry left off, having just finished watching yabusame (Japanese horse archery) and getting some lunch at various festival-food stalls and a Freshness Burger. With our morning activity complete and sans hunger, we were finally able to go get the luggage we'd all left at Shinjuku Station and lug it across the city to the condo, where we could get clean and change clothes after the whole unexpectedly-riding-the-night-train thing. Refreshed and much more lightly equipped, we were ready for the second major event of the day: watching sumo wrestling at Tokyo's dedicated sumo coliseum. As always, the full picture set is available on Flickr.
Just outside the gates to the stadium
The home of sumo in Tokyo
Top-level sumo tournaments last fifteen days, and there are six tournaments per year, three of which take place in Tokyo while the other three are each in a different location. Each higher-level wrestler has one match per day (the lower ranks every other day), and whoever has the best win-loss record at the end is the winner for that division. In the morning and early afternoon the lower-ranking professionals have their matches, giving way to the top classes at the end of the day. We arrived early enough to catch several bouts of the lower-ranks, before watching the whole set of high-ranking matches.
The rules for the matches are probably more complicated than this, but the basics of who wins and loses we picked up pretty quickly. To win, push the other guy out of the ring, or make any part of his body that isn't his feet touch the ground. Avoid having the same done to you. You can hit the other guy, grab his special belt, or pick him up entirely if he'll let you.
Note the closer wrestler's skin rippling under the impact of the other guy's hand
At the beginning of the top-level matches, the wrestlers paraded into the ring wearing colorful and fancy apron-like garments which I believe are have the marks and colors of their training dojos. Two groups of wrestlers come to the ring one after the other, such that no wrestlers who will later face each other are in the same opening parade.
After the opening parade ceremony, further rituals needed to be performed before the pros could get down to business.
One thing that should be mentioned about sumo is that it, like yabusame,
is supposed to be a Shinto ritual at heart. Unlike yabusame, the ratio
of ritual to action is far less favorable. The matches themselves can
be over in five seconds, or stretch out for perhaps a minute, but you
are pretty much guaranteed five to ten minutes of the fighters stomping
the ground, slapping their legs or arms to make sound, getting into
position to fight, then standing up, rinsing their mouths with water,
washing their faces, and throwing salt into the ring between each
match. The referee wears Shinto priest robes and the whole thing goes
down under a shrine that hangs from the ceiling. The ring has about 15
people who sweep it constantly, though this is partly to keep the sand
outside the ring very smooth - so that if a fighter steps outside of it
the imprint will be clear. There were a few times we almost
missed seeing a match, just because it can be difficult to tell when
they're pretending to get ready to go and when they're actually on the
cusp.We eventually caught on to the fact that when they use the towels handed to them by their assistants, they're about to fight, but it took awhile.
So you get a lot of this...
...between short bursts of this.
However, you the reader are in luck because we filmed a number of the matches we watched in 1080p high definition using our snazzy camera, and made a montage of sumo matches that you can watch without any of the pesky Shinto ritual getting in the way:
After sumo finished up, all of the many thousands of people there streamed out into Tokyo. The nearest train station was simply overrun, so we walked past it to the next one down the line, which was empty. From there we did a quick jaunt to Akihabara to see some neon and some very nerdy places indeed, before moving on towards dinner...
...which we didn't actually take any pictures of because we were too busy stuffing our faces. I'd made reservations at a dedicated tempura place that was reasonably priced, conveniently located, and was known to offer some level of service in English. It did happen to be named Tempura Fukushima, a name probably not quite so fortunate as it was before nuclear disaster struck that city, but we had no complaints. We ordered a set menu that had prawns, delicious little white fish morsels, scallop kakiage (deep fried seafood and vegetable cakes), and assorted vegetables. In addition to that, I convinced everybody to order sea eel, for which skepticism abounded until they actually tried it, after which everybody agreed it was excellent. We were all sitting at the bar, while the master stood behind it with his cauldron of oil - within arm's reach of our plates. From that vantage point he regularly bestowed fried goodness upon us. Very fresh ingredients, expertly deep fried and delivered within seconds for consumption. We all probably burned our mouths a few times, but it was mighty good, and the master and the woman who I presume was his wife were very friendly - between our Japanese and their English we got along fine.
We did remember to take pictures outside of the restaurant.
After dinner everybody was beat - them from the jet lag and us from not sleeping particularly well on the train, so we called it an early night and got about twelve or thirteen hours of sleep, which put us in a good position to enjoy the second day of tourism, which we'll document in the next two blog entries. Dinner on the second day definitely deserves its own entry, and we took plenty of pictures of that one, to be sure. Tune in next time (and the time after) for those!
No comments:
Post a Comment