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Last man standing: how Mongolians came to dominate sumo, Japan’s national sport www.scmp.com
It was the final showdown, day 15 of the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament, in Japan’s Aichi prefecture. After 14 days and 14 wins for each wrestler, the title bout on July 18 was made all the more tense for its involving grand champion yokozuna Hakuho and second-ranked ozeki Terunofuji, who, after the former’s more than a decade of sumo domination, was widely seen as the next ascendant in the ancient Japanese sport.
As the gyoji (referee) assumed position inside the raised clay dohyo (ring), the two giants set their fists on the floor, and at the signal, launched their combined 340kg of muscle and fat into each other. The champion rammed his forearm into Terunofuji’s face, before the challenger manoeuvred his hand inside Hakuho’s loincloth to attempt a throw, but, drawing on his experience of 1,187 wins in 84 tournaments, the veteran unbalanced Terunofuji and with an outside arm grip sent him face first to the ground.
The entire match lasted 20 seconds. Having been defeated in several bouts in the preceding six tournaments while carrying a knee injury, this final victory before retirement served to affirm 36-year-old Hakuho’s place among the greatest of all time.
Soon after Nagoya, 29-year-old Terunofuji – with 422 wins in 63 tournaments – became the 73rd yokozuna in sumo history, a lineage that stretches back to 8th century mythology. More noteworthy, though, is the fact that this new grand champion became the fifth yokozuna born not in the Japanese archipelago, but the vast plateaus of Mongolia. Hakuho had been the fourth.
Landlocked Mongolia is a country of just 3.3 million people, but during the Naadam Festival – an annual celebration of the traditional Mongolian sports of bokh wrestling, archery and horse racing – there can be as many as 20,000 wrestlers on any given day. In 2020, there were 683 active, professional sumo wrestlers in all of Japan.
At the pinnacle of sumo culture, yokozuna are revered above all other sports icons, and even film stars. Given the deep cultural respect they command – and the astronomical fees and endorsement deals that accompany it – a sumo champion is nothing short of a hero in Japan.
Between 2007 and 2017, however, the three active yokozuna were all Mongolians. In 2007, the Japan Sumo Association, the sport’s governing body, had to cancel a fitness test for new recruits after it received zero applications, a situation that was repeated in 2018.
In fact, since 1999, only one Japanese – 1986-born Kisenosato Yutaka – has reached sumo’s highest rank. But having won his first tournament as a yokozuna in 2017, he suffered a chest muscle injury, missed eight consecutive tournaments on medical grounds, and retired in 2019.
This lack of Japanese success in the national sport defies convention in what is one of the most homogeneous countries on Earth.
In Japan, a place where being born there does not automatically confer citizenship, more than 98 per cent of the population is “native”. This is perhaps to be expected in an archipelago that remained deliberately isolated until American warships forced it to “open for trade” in the mid-19th century.
Between 1868 and 2015, just 581,000 foreigners were permitted to become citizens. To put this century and a half of immigration into perspective, in 2018 alone, 756,800 foreigners became United States citizens.
Add to this the fact birth rates in Japan have been so low for so long that more than 20 per cent of the population is now over 65 years old – and that by 2065, the roughly 125 million population is expected to decrease to 88 million – and it is hardly surprising that the concept of preservation of the national identity runs deep.
Indeed, the government has designated several masters of ancient Japanese art and craft as Living National Treasures, and funds efforts to ensure the continuation of ancient techniques, from sword-making to the fabrication of musical instruments.
How, then, in a country so protective of its hermetic cultural heritage, have high-plains farmers from Mongolia been allowed to dominate Japan’s national sport for almost two decades?
Thirty-three-year-old Gannyam Ganbold, owner of Goldish Gym in the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, is a former high-ranking competitor in both sumo and bokh wrestling. He lived in Japan from 2003 to 2006, training and competing in sumo while attending high school in Fukushima.
In 2005, he placed fifth in the high-school division of the all-Japan amateur sumo championship outside Tokyo, and like most other Mongolian sumo wrestlers, he attributes his prowess to his own native wrestling.
“Mongolian bokh champions are usually the sons of champions,” says Ganbold. “Three of the five Mongolian yokozuna were children of bokh champions. In Japan, there are children who’ve been raised with constant training for sumo, but there is a difference in strength.”
Just as highland Kenyan runners have a physiological advantage due to acclimatisation that allows them to absorb oxygen more efficiently at high altitudes, so, too, do Mongolian wrestlers. Combine that with a spartan lifestyle of “herding, carrying water, breaking ice and chopping wood”, and a diet of almost nothing but milk and meat, and you have all the prerequisites necessary, Ganbold says, for transforming boys into powerful wrestlers, with tremendous thighs and a huge lung capacity.
Damdinbazariin Ganbold, a Naadam title holder, refers to those born in the city as “apartment boys” who, lacking the hard work and experience of herding, would be “as weak as orphaned lambs”.
Chanko nabe: the Japanese hotpot loved by sumo wrestlers
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Health researchers may well agree on that point, having determined that due to the extreme pollution in Ulaanbaatar, city dwellers have only 40 per cent of the lung capacity of those from the countryside.
Former bokh wrestler turned mixed martial arts (MMA) coach Zorigt “Zorky” Ulaankhuu credits “the blood of the ancestors – both the legacy of Genghis Khan and the fact that many boys come from wrestling families, where even their grandfather’s grandfather was a wrestler”, for the Mongolians’ prowess.
American freestyle wrestler and judoka Colt Amborn, 37, teaches freestyle wrestling in Japan. His love of sumo, combined with years of practising Japan’s other major grappling sport, judo, has given him a keen eye when dissecting sumo matches.
He says Mongolians in judo frequently use the fireman’s carry throw, where they squat low and take the opponent over both shoulders, a technique common to Mongolian wrestling, but most Japanese “won’t do that in judo, because if you fail, the opponent winds up on top of you, and you’re trapped underneath in a horrible crucifix position”.
Similarly, Mongolians brought new techniques and skills to sumo. In 2000, the Japan Sumo Association added 12 winning techniques based on Mongolian wrestling, bringing the total to 82, the first such new additions to the sumo rule book since 1960.
About half of the techniques were based on gripping, while the others were leg sweeps or trips, especially useful for Mongolian sumo wrestlers, who are often smaller than their Japanese counterparts.
Apart from the five Mongolian grand champions, the only foreigners to have reached sumo’s highest rank have been two Americans – Akebono and Musashimaru, both Polynesians from Hawaii.
Other foreign wrestlers have reached the second highest rank of ozeki, such as Bulgarian Kotooshu Katsunori, Estonian Baruto Kaito, Georgian Tochinoshin Tsuyoshi and American Konishiki Yasokichi.
There have also been two mixed-race (hafu) ozeki: Korean-Japanese Maenoyama Taro in the 1970s and, currently, Filipino-Japanese Takayasu Akira.
Which raises the question, if being Japanese is not necessary, and, if as often seems to be the case, there are not enough Japanese interested in taking part in the sport to sustain it, then why have so few foreigners taken it up?
Long before daring to dream of becoming a yokozuna, wrestlers must survive years of training while growing up in a sumo stable. The novice’s life is an arduous, unrelenting and near-monastic one, all of which discourages Japanese youngsters from joining the sport. (For Mongolians fresh from the plains, by contrast, the relative affluence of Japanese stable life may seem like a step up.)
“Maybe there would be more foreigners in sumo if you didn’t have to invest so much time, starting at the bottom, as a trainee, living in a stable, working your way up,” says Amborn.
Perhaps American football players or Olympic freestyle wrestlers could be trained to compete in sumo, he says, just as they have learned to fight in MMA, “but, they wouldn’t speak the language and wouldn’t want to live in a dormitory, doing the cooking and cleaning, and serving their seniors” for years before being allowed to compete.
Until they earn rank, by winning a honbasho, or a grand tournament, wrestlers must live in the stable, every aspect of their lives dictated by their trainers.
“Sumo is not only about winning,” says Amborn. “It’s about the culture, the tradition and the rituals.”
Culture needs evolution and revolution. Foreign wrestling techniques and mentality make the traditionalist association rethink what sumo is
Hiroyuki Imamura, a Japanese PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Sokendai University
In the stable, the usually dozen or so young recruits wake up at 5am to do the cleaning and washing for the older wrestlers before beginning morning training. The wrestlers do not eat breakfast, so their first several hours of training are undertaken on an empty stomach.
Despite their huge bodies, they do the splits, followed by shiko, a kind of squat, where they lift one leg high in the air, allowing it to crash to the ground, before lifting the other leg and doing the same. This is repeated, over and over again, side to side, building up both muscular strength and flexibility. They spar and do push-out drills, driving into an opponent, again and again, until they collapse from exhaustion.
Skipping breakfast ensures that they do not vomit during training. The first meal of the day is usually around 11am, and the portions are superhuman. It is followed by a nap.
Such a life requires more discipline than most could bear, and extracurricular shenanigans are not tolerated. Sumo wrestlers who get caught up in scandals are suspended, as were Mongolian Harumafuji after a bar fight, and fellow countryman Asashoryu, who was repeatedly sanctioned for unsportsmanlike conduct and eventually banned from the sport after being discovered playing in a charity football game back home in Mongolia while on sick leave from the sumo circuit. In 2011, nine sumo wrestlers were forced to retire after being implicated in a match-fixing scheme.
But for those Mongolians who can hack it, sumo offers a chance at fame and riches. Coach Dandar Jamsran has sent several of his young bokh wrestlers, usually 15 or 16 years old, to Japan.
Jamsran says that in Mongolia, there is no real sumo training, but once the boys are selected, he would have the young wrestlers launch their bodies at each other, over and over again in the sumo style, to build up their thighs and backs. The youngsters would also be encouraged to begin eating as much as possible to bulk up.
“For the Mongolians,” says Jamsran, “there is the added burden of knowing they represent our country.”
Even the Mongolian yokozuna, assimilated to the point of marrying locals and some even granted Japanese citizenship, will never be truly Japanese. And there are rules in place to make sure of that, starting with allotments.
While foreign yokozuna may have saved sumo from extinction in the past two decades, each stable in the country is permitted only one foreign wrestler.
Professional sports leagues in Japan have similar restrictions: hockey teams can have only two foreign players on the ice at any one time, and the same goes for American football players on the field. Baseball teams are allowed to sign as many foreign players as they wish, but are permitted to have only four foreign players on the 25-man game roster.
The Japanese football league limits teams to four Western players on match day, though they are allowed a fifth if from another Asian country. Similarly, Japanese basketball teams are allowed a maximum of three Western players, but can sign a fourth foreign player if they are Asian.
Hiroyuki Imamura, a Japanese PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at Sokendai University, in Kanagawa prefecture, conducts research into martial arts as a part of national culture. He says that most Japanese have nothing against the Mongolians, “except fanatic nationalists or the hard right”.
The media, he adds, plays a big role in whether the Mongolian wrestlers are in or out of favour with Japanese fans. “When Asashoryu or Hakuho, ex-yokozuna, made trouble for the [Japan Sumo Association], the mass media reported it as: ‘Are Mongolian sumo wrestlers acceptable for Japanese culture? I think not!’” he says.
The sumo association was frequently unhappy with the level of emotion exhibited by some of the Mongolians. “Asashoryu often showed a deadly expression before he started fighting and his happiness at winning,” says Imamura. “For the sumo association, such an expressive champion is intolerable, because for them, the ideal yokozuna is calm, dignified and does not show his feelings.”
Before his matches, Hakuho would often display strong emotions, reflecting a fierce determination to destroy his opponent. After a win, he would allow himself a quick celebratory shout or a split second’s victory dance. When he defeated Terunofuji, Hakuho smiled broadly and punched his fist in the air.
“Culture needs evolution and revolution,” Imamura says. “Foreign wrestling techniques and mentality make the traditionalist association rethink what sumo is, in terms of techniques, philosophy and pedagogy.”
Twenty-five-year-old Mongolian Narantsogt Davaanyam – sumo name Sadanohikari Shinta – has been trying to make his way up the rankings since arriving in Japan nearly a decade ago. He feels Japanese fans “accept Mongolian yokozuna because [they] are capable and talented and did it by the rules. People who are working hard and make it up there and become champions.
“There’s no prejudice […] There are many audience and fan groups that support Mongolian or European sumo wrestlers.”
He adds: “For big fans of sumo, I think Mongolians are no problem at all. Because of Mongolians, sumo can survive as Japanese popular culture.”
BY: Antonio Graceffo is an author and economist working in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Published Date:2021-12-19
