Sumo

Caught up with sumo wrestling this weekend. There are about 6 tournaments every year in Japan, 3 of them in tokyo.
I guess i could still be around when the next one came along, but decided to go anyways. I went on saturday, but it was all sold out for the day and the next weekend as well. So I bought tickets for the next day and returned home.
The next day it was back to Ryogoku on the sobu line from Akihabara. Sumo tickets are pretty expensive, the cheapest ones being around 3500 yen to ringside seats going upto 15000 yen for one day. I had decent tickets although on the second floor. I got up a bit late it being a sunday and all and missed having chanko nabe which is the staple diet of the sumo wrestlers.
The fights were fun and I generally had a good time. Sumo is not that complicated to understand, and as long as you dont find the sight of two overgrown men jostling with just jockstraps on a bit wierd, it's time well spent. Sumo anyways is pretty well known around the world now, so everybody does have an idea about it. But watching those really huge guys in person was something. I also learnt that "rikishi" and "yokozuna" were actually titles and not just the names of wrestlers I used to watch as a kid in WWF. Yokozuna is the highest title you can have and rikishi follows next. I remember the yokozuna in WWF sitting down on his opponent after the end of a fight, and the poor guy would have no chance. No such thing in Sumo though !!
They say its real tough to become a yokozuna. It takes years of training and winning consistently. And once you are a yokozuna, you have to keep winning or quit gracefully when you start losing too much. How very Japanese !!!
I wish we could have that in some of our popular sports back home, where yesteryear heroes go on well beyond their prime and have to be literally kicked out disgracing themselves and their supporters.
Cheers !!!