Benevolance

I gather it's more-or-less confirmed that Takamisakari is staying in Juryo then? His 5 wins last tournament were enough?

Those are fantastic photos.

Haruko is an english speaking tour guide in Tokyo that loves sumo. She's posted some pics of her visits to heyas on her blog. On twitter at: @haatourguide and her website bio/contact info is at: http://japanese-culture.jp/tour_guide/sumo/profile/.

Shohozan got a lot of chants this tournament after he tore through the ozeki. It's the first time I've ever heard chanting and cheering like that at a sumo venue. My wife and I were talking about that a bit afterwards. You'll get a few people or a group calling out and cheering on a wrestler before his match. But it's otherwise pretty quiet. I think the problem with getting a chant going is that not everyone in the audience likes or follows every wrestler. It's not like a baseball game where the audience is there for one team or the other and both teams are involved for the whole event. Even just watching makuuchi, there are 18 fights in a day? That's 36 wrestlers to follow and not everyone is loved equally.

I think they call it a full house because all the boxes are sold, not because the boxes are full. We bought box seats on a few of the days - we had been going to buy in advance, but the lady at the kokusai building office actually said we'd get better seats if we showed up on the day; they'd give us a four person box down front just charging for two of us. And there were boxes available right up until Saturday.

This is really neat to learn! The free internet feed is so poor, I had assumed that all the presenters were Japanese and just had trouble reading the scripts because they were nervous. Public speaking jitters and all that. :D

Anyone know what the deal is? I thought his surgery was normally supposed to be 6-8 weeks to heal? He'll be lucky if he's still in sandanme when he returns...

Hey folks. New here, but I've been following sumo for about 6 years now. Araibira keeps hyping the forums on his FB and youtube pages, so I figured I'd come see what the fun was about.

I'm all about the okonomiyaki. Hiroshima-style is best.

So does this mean that Shouhou doesn't get to do the bow dance anymore? Or will they alternate performing the closing duties?