About<br>Sumo

Glossary

用語集

The terms you will meet watching a tournament or reading results, grouped by where they come up. The winning techniques have a searchable table of their own, further down.

The 90 kimarite

決まり手

Every bout is officially assigned a kimarite — the technique that finished it. The Sumo Association recognises 82 winning techniques plus a set of non-technique outcomes. The figures below are real: total recorded uses of each technique in professional sumo since 1958.

What it shows is how lopsided the sport is. Two techniques account for a little over half of all sumo ever recorded, and the bottom forty are rarer than most fans will see in a lifetime of watching.

The rules

相撲の規則

The rules are famously short. Two ways to lose, and that is nearly all of it:

There are no weight classes, no rounds and no points. A 98 kg man can be drawn against one of 180 kg, and regularly is. Bouts are decided in seconds — the great majority inside ten — which is why the preparation takes four minutes and the fight itself often takes four seconds.

Forbidden acts — kinjite

A handful of techniques bring immediate disqualification (hansoku): striking with a closed fist, grabbing the hair, gouging the eyes or solar plexus, seizing the throat, kicking the chest or stomach, bending fingers back, and grasping the vertical front fold of the opponent's belt. Open-hand slapping to the face, by contrast, is entirely legal and common.

When it is too close to call

The referee must always point his fan to a winner — he is not allowed to hesitate. If the five ringside judges disagree, they climb into the ring for a conference (mono-ii) and may uphold the call, reverse it (sashichigae), or order the bout fought again (torinaoshi). A rikishi who is already falling irrecoverably may still be ruled the winner under the shini-tai "dead body" principle, because his opponent's defeat was inevitable first.

The dohyō

土俵

The ring is built from scratch for every tournament out of a particular clay, and dismantled afterwards. It is not a floor so much as an altar: a roof in the style of a Shinto shrine hangs above it, and the four coloured tassels at its corners stand for the seasons and the guardian beasts of the four directions.

Four of the bales are set slightly outside the circle at the compass points. These are the tokudawara, and the small pocket of space they create has saved countless rikishi from stepping out — a survival that is very much part of the ring's design rather than an accident of it.

Women are not permitted to enter the dohyō. The Japan Sumo Association maintains the ring is a sacred space under Shinto practice; the rule has drawn sustained criticism, most sharply in 2018 when officials asked nurses to leave the ring while they were giving first aid to a collapsed mayor.

Ranks & the banzuke

番付

Everything in sumo is rank. It sets a man's pay, whether he may wear silk, who carries his bags, and whether he is a salaried professional or an unpaid apprentice. The ranking sheet — the banzuke — is published thirteen days after each tournament, hand-brushed in a dense calligraphic style called sumo-ji, and the size of the lettering shrinks with rank. The list below is set the same way.

The line that matters

The meaningful border is between jūryō and makushita. Above it a man is sekitori: he draws a salary, wears a silk belt, has junior wrestlers to attend him and fights fifteen bouts a tournament. Below it he is an apprentice on an allowance, fights seven, does the chores, and eats after his seniors have finished.

Kachikoshi and makekoshi

A winning record — kachikoshi, eight wins or better from fifteen — moves a man up. A losing record, makekoshi, moves him down. The whole ladder turns on that single figure of eight.

Promotion to the top

Promotion to ōzeki is conventionally taken to need roughly 33 wins across three consecutive tournaments at sekiwake or komusubi. Yokozuna promotion requires two consecutive championships as ōzeki, or the equivalent, plus a judgement about dignity — hinkaku — which is deliberately not quantified. A yokozuna can never be demoted; if he can no longer perform to the rank, he is expected to retire instead.

Ceremonies

儀式

Dohyō-iri — the ring-entering ceremony

Before the day's bouts, the wrestlers of each division enter the ring in ascending order of rank, wearing keshō-mawashi — heavy silk aprons, embroidered and fringed in gold, often paid for by a supporters' association and costing as much as a car. They form a circle, face outward, then turn inward, clap, raise one hand, lift the apron slightly and raise both hands. The gesture means the same thing it has always meant: I carry no weapon.

The yokozuna's own entrance

A yokozuna does not appear in the group. He performs alone, wearing the white tsuna — a rope of up to twenty kilograms, hung with folded paper zigzags of the kind found at shrine gates — and attended by a sword-bearer (tachimochi) and a herald (tsuyuharai). He claps to summon the gods' attention, spreads his arms with palms up to show he is unarmed, then raises each leg high and brings it down with a heavy stamp — shiko — driving evil out of the ring.

There are two styles, and a yokozuna picks one for his career. Unryū ties the rope in a single loop and leaves one arm bent — read as defensive. Shiranui ties two loops and spreads both arms wide — read as aggressive, and superstitiously reckoned unlucky, since several who chose it had short reigns.

The end of a tournament

The wrestler with the best record in the top division takes the yūshō and the Emperor's Cup. If two or more finish level, they meet in a play-off on the spot. Three special prizes may also be awarded to maegashira-ranked wrestlers: shukun-shō for outstanding performance, kantō-shō for fighting spirit, and ginō-shō for technique.

Gyoji & shimpan

行司・審判

The gyoji is far more than a referee. He wears court dress modelled on the samurai style of some 800 years ago, calls the wrestlers up, sets the bout in motion, judges it, and between tournaments hand-writes the banzuke in the calligraphic style the job requires. Gyoji are ranked as strictly as the wrestlers are, and you can read a man's rank off his equipment.

Only a tate-gyoji may officiate a yokozuna's bout. The two most senior carry the inherited professional names Kimura Shōnosuke and Shikimori Inosuke, and by long tradition each carries a short sword — a formal reminder that a wrong call was once a matter for ritual suicide. In practice a modern gyoji whose decision is overturned submits a resignation, which is politely refused.

The judges

Five shimpan — retired wrestlers now elders of the Association — sit at the four sides and one corner of the ring. They, not the gyoji, have the final say. Any of them may call a mono-ii and stop proceedings, and video review has been used since 1969.

The shikiri

仕切り

In the top division a bout is preceded by four minutes of ritual, and the ritual is the part most spectators travel to see. It is not stalling; every element of it is prescribed.

Salt

Each wrestler takes a handful from baskets at the east and west of the ring and scatters it across the clay, purifying the sacred ground and praying for a safe bout. It has a practical function too — it disinfects the small cuts and grazes that come with the work. Roughly 45 kilograms of salt are thrown across a fifteen-day tournament.

Chikaramizu — power water

A wrestler rinses his mouth with water handed to him by the winner of the previous bout on his side, or by the man due to fight next if his side lost. A defeated wrestler may not pass the water on; the gesture carries only from strength.

Shiko and the crouch

The leg-lifting stamp drives evil from the ring and is also the sport's foundational training exercise. Then the wrestlers squat at the two starting lines, clap, spread their arms and turn their palms down — again, no weapons — and settle into the crouch, fists to the clay.

The tachiai

There is no starting signal. The two men must synchronise it themselves: both fists must touch the ground, and the charge begins the instant they agree, silently, that it has. A mistimed start (matta) is reset and disapproved of. This moment decides more bouts than any technique does.

The basho year

本場所

Six tournaments a year, each fifteen days, always beginning and ending on a Sunday. Top-division wrestlers fight once a day, every day.

Between tournaments the wrestlers tour — jungyō — giving exhibitions in regional towns. These bouts are not competitive and do not count towards any record.

A rikishi's life

力士の生活

Wrestlers live in a heya — a stable — under a stablemaster who is a retired wrestler himself. Juniors sleep in communal rooms, rise around five, and train on an empty stomach. Only sekitori may sleep apart, marry and live outside.

Why they are the size they are

There is no weight limit, so mass is an advantage and is deliberately built. Training happens before eating; the day's first meal is chanko-nabe, a protein-heavy hotpot eaten in enormous quantity and followed by sleep, which is precisely how you gain weight. Juniors cook it and serve it, and eat last.

Hair, belts and dress

Every wrestler wears the topknot — chonmage — dressed by a specialist hairdresser, the tokoyama. Sekitori wear the elaborate ginkgo-leaf style, ōichō, for bouts. In public a wrestler must wear traditional dress; junior men are restricted to a thin cotton robe and wooden sandals even in winter. At retirement, the topknot is cut off in a public ceremony, the danpatsu-shiki, by hundreds of guests in turn, with the stablemaster making the final cut.

Pay

Below jūryō there is no salary — only a modest tournament allowance. Reaching jūryō changes a man's life overnight: a monthly salary, prize money, a personal attendant, and the right to wear silk.

Origins

起源

Sumo's founding story is a death match. In the Nihon Shoki, the eighth-century chronicle, a strongman named Taima-no-Kehaya boasts that no one alive can match him. The emperor summons Nomi-no-Sukune to answer it. Sukune breaks his opponent's ribs and then his back, and is rewarded with Kehaya's land. He is still venerated as the patron of the sport.

What followed was less violent and more agricultural. For three centuries the Imperial Court staged sumai no sechie — ritual bouts held to divine the year's harvest and to entertain the emperor. Sumo was liturgy before it was spectacle, and the rituals that survive today, the salt and the stamping and the roof over the ring, are the residue of that.