Half-An-Hour Of Preliminaries, 20 Seconds Of Wrestling

Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 1935, Page 16 (Supplement)

Half-An-Hour Of Preliminaries, 20 Seconds Of Wrestling

•“SUMO” EXPERTS DRAW HUGE CROWDS

'THE Japanese, in their determinaiX tion to do as Europe and America do, if possible a little better than the Europeans and Americans, have taken tennis and baseball very seriously. But it is still “sumo”— the Japanese convention in wrestling—which speaks most directly to the,hearts of the people and, though our Western games count their fol- ‘ lowers in Japan by the thousands, sumo, with all the prestige of centuries of tradition behind it, draws its tens of thousands of enthusiastic “fans.” ' As the sumo matches take place only twice a year in Tokyo, and that in spring and autumn, when few tourists are there to see it, little is known about it outside Japan; and we are accustomed to think of the term, “Japanese wrestling,” as synonymous with “jiu-jitsu.” Yet jiujitsu, which means the art of the weak, is a thing which almost every Japanese learns, just as the Englishman learns boxing, purely for the purpose of self-defence. Sumo, on the other hand, is an art practised only by a guild of professional wrestlers who, like the actors guild, keep up their numbers by adoption into the clan of suitablygifted youths. In its professionalism and its appeal to every class of the people sumo is more akin to our national sport of horse-racing than to the more specialised athletic sports. In Tokyo the sumo meetings take place in the immense “Kokugikan,” a great domed stadium capable of accommodating 15,000 people. In the centre is the “ring,” about 12 feet square; arouhd it rise up on all sides tiers of loges, each loge designed to contain four people, who squat in it on cushions. • . . The atmosphere is very reminiscent of that in one of our boxing stadiums. You make your way to the loge through an accumulation of discarded orange rind, banana skins and empty lunch boxes, and through a clamour of shouting and barracking that is almost palpable, so that you appeal' to be pressing your way through a sort of viscous atmosphere of sound. „ . • On the podium, or m the “ring, crouch the wrestlers, and to the uninitiated they present a curious and wonderful appearance. Not muscle —though that counts, too —-but fat, seems to be the prime qualification of the sumo wrestler! The blurred outlines of these curious figures seem so to have grown out of all reasonable bounds of human proportion that it is difficult- to know where chin ends arid trunk begins. Of neck there is no indication! The whole immense structure _is borne by a pair of legs more like pillars than anything else, the sort of pillar on e sees bearing aloft the vaulted roof of a mighty Gothic cathedral. To a European, at least, these doughty wrestlers look for all the world like partly-melted snowmen. These monsters wear their long, straight.hair saturated with grease, and bound in a bun on the crown of the head; over the ears it is 'bunched out like a woman’s. Their countenances are about twice normal Japanese size, with lips so scarlet in the midst of a great expense of pale and moonlike face, that they are like a shriek in the great stillness. They are almost reached on either side by unnaturally long ears. Yet, such is the immense power of ’endurance practised by these grotesque creatures that you will need to exercise a most un-Occidental , amount of patience and concentration if you are not to miss the point of the whole show. Preliminaries may last a good half-hour or more; .-tha.actual hostilities are over in 20 seconds or so!

The opponents, more spoilt by the Tokyo public, and possessing more complacently liberal patrons than the most spoiled cinema star, appear in the ring. Balanced on the balls of their feet, they face each other, crouching. The noise of their breathing echoes through the hall. They clear their throats with much ado, take pulls at the water-pan, gargle, and spit out. The referee, in his heavily-braided, formal kimono, and bearing a stiff fan which looks for all the world like a schoolboy’s slate on a handle, hovers above them; and the audience, eager for the decisive moment, shakes the walls with its noise.

The grotesque masses of flesh in the ring continue to breathe thunderously; they ease themselves on their feet, rise a little, and bow inward toward each other. The audience becomes still; the great moment has arrived, and already they feel that

it will have been worth waiting for. But no! ■ The time has not yet come; the referee’s fan did not give the signal! He is waiting until the opponents are breathing regularly, and in unison, for the split second of an advantage in breathing will decide the whole business.

The man mountains do a little more gargling, rub their massy limbs with salt, and strew salt on the arena. One has to admire them for, built as they are, standing the strain of these preliminary evolutions without cracking. When finally the referee does give the signal for actual hostilities to commence, he will very probably have judged the moment so exactly that neither wrestler has a “breath advantage”; and the two men become so locked together, brow to brow, and fist in fist, that a deadlock is declared, and the whole affair must begin again from the beginning! Defeat consists in being forced to touch the ground with the palms of both hands, or, extreme humiliation, being forced out of the ring altogether. Whichever happens, it happens in a great deal less than a minute. . The audience, knowing that this will be so, is kept on the tip-toe of expectation, and of no silent anticipation either, as the shattering commotion from more than 15,000 voices indicates.