Sumo is walking a “tightrope” as it prepares to stage events outside Japan for the first time in 20 years while also trying to preserve its ancient traditions, experts say.
The sport is to hold exhibition tournaments in London in October and in Paris in June next year, the first time the Japan Sumo Association has been abroad since Las Vegas in 2005.
Sports such as soccer, baseball and football play domestic games overseas in a bid to gain new fans in emerging markets.
Photo: AFP
John Gunning, a former amateur sumo wrestler who commentates on the sport in English on Japanese television, says its centuries-old history and traditions make it unique.
“It’s always a tightrope,” Gunning told reporters. “If you start turning sumo into just a pure sport, you start losing a lot of the things that make it attractive or the whole reason that it exists in the first place.”
“There’s always the push and pull that sumo wants to continue the traditions, but also try and keep adjusting and fitting into a 21st century sporting and business landscape,” he added.
Photo: AFP
Japan Sumo Association chairman Hakkaku, who goes by one name, has said it is “important to show our sport to the world,” telling reporters that “our traditional culture has been recognized.”
European promoters appear keen to make overseas events a regular fixture.
David Rothschild, promoter and executive producer for Paris event organizers AEG, said that “the idea would be to have sumo going to one country or another in the world once per year.”
Gunning said that there has been a surge in interest in sumo outside Japan in the past six to seven years, especially people who got hooked on the sport from afar during COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.
Sumo chiefs have made an effort to reach out to foreign sumo fans in the past few years, in 2022 launching the Sumo Prime Time YouTube channel, which has 71,000 subscribers.
There is also more language assistance in stadiums in Japan for visitors.
Tickets for regular tournaments in Japan are “like gold dust,” Gunning said, adding that many are snapped up by tourists who are visiting the country in record numbers.
A sumo-themed drama series, Sanctuary, was released on Netflix in 2023.
Gunning said that the trips to London and Paris are “pretty much automatically guaranteed” to be a success.
The events are a result of public demand from overseas audiences and “not a cash grab,” he said.
The Japan Sumo Association organized its first overseas sumo exhibition in the Soviet Union in 1965 and has visited a diverse range of countries since.
The five-day tournament at London’s Royal Albert Hall is to be the second time that the association has staged an event there.
The two-day Paris tournament is to be the city’s third — the first since 1995 — and is to take place at the venue that hosted gymnastics and basketball at last year’s Olympics.
Sumo holds six regular 15-day Honbasho tournaments in Japan each year, three in Tokyo and one each in Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka.
When they are not competing, training, resting or performing in ceremonies, wrestlers take part in exhibition tours across Japan.
These domestic tours can last for almost a month at a time, and sumo journalist Shoko Sato said that some would likely be scrapped to make way for other overseas trips.
“Overseas exhibitions would only happen about twice a year, if that, so I don’t think anyone in Japan would be dissatisfied if that meant not having a domestic exhibition,” Sato said.
Sato has covered sumo events in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Mongolia, and said the atmosphere at overseas exhibitions is “completely different.”
“It’s a bit more like entertainment,” she said. “It’s not a serious competition, but more like introducing sumo to people in an entertaining way.”
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