Gurowake

Intended as a repository of pointless bits of trivia I or others find, particularly while browsing the database. It happens a lot between basho. In a total of 5 basho since the 15-day era began, the last match was between two undefeated rikishi. Twice it was Taiho vs. Kashiwado, and they split the matches. All matches featured Y1e. No such match was a playoff (theoretically possible between stable members). Harumafuji is the only one to appear in such a bout that was not a Yokozuna at the time. No other Day-15 matches involving 2 14-0 rikishi have occurred. In Haru 1996, there was a 6-0 match in Jonidan on Day 15, but two other rikishi were also 7-0 from previous days. Incidentally, a few basho in each direction in that time period there were many Day-14 6-0 matches in the lower divisions, but none that basho and one on Day 15 instead. Only one Day-14 6-0 match took place outside that 1995-1996 window.

Things have sure gotten quiet on the 4+ point front. Only 1 this year, 2 last year, and 1 the year before. I think it's pretty rare these days to even have someone over 3 points per players. I think the main cause of this is the relative lack of very strong rikishi at the top of the banzuke, meaning that joi-strength rikishi have a much easier time staying there, so there's less rotation into the joi of mediocre rikishi that get a lucky 10-5 at M10 or something and end up M2 (something like Sadanofuji once did, then got creamed as expected).

So i can understand Tamawashi on the top ten from his first two wins against relative kensho magnets Yoshinofuji and Oshoma, but then he gets just as many (the average from the first two wins, not sure how they're split) from beating Hiradoumi? I guess the latter had to have an average of 7 on his wins, and I'm not sure how much Oho and Takanosho would have on their matches, though Oho must have had 5 on average on his two wins based on the Day 2 numbers.

This is...somewhat of a disconnect between the Latin transliteration and the kana transliteration, especially for "Bukhchuluun". I'm guessing "fu" and "kh" are the best ways to represent the actual sound from Mongolian in each system, but I normally wouldn't consider them equivalent.* Google Translate actually picks up on that transliteration somehow when fed the kana. What it doesn't pick up on is the few places that the kana uses so 'o's where the Latin uses 'u's, so it has "Bukhchoron". I admit I generally don't look too hard at these things, so this might all be perfectly normal. There's also weirdness in Google Translate's choices for how to Latinize トワードルジ, but that's only an issue with Google and the kana are a reasonable choice. The only kana weirdness is not changing the vowel of "to" to a 'u' with a small kana, so leaving using an 'o' instead of a 'u' just like with the first name. *Edit: Actually, thinking about it more, it does make sense. Latin script is generally only going to use "kh" for IPA /x/, which probably is best represented in kana as "fu" even though the two systems end up looking quite different. I still have no idea how Google Translate divined this though.

Sure, technically の and ノare different glyphs, but that's a very modest distinction compared to when different kanji are pronounced the same.

This is an extremely disingenuous translation of "sumo no kami-sama" that misses the entire point of why he was called that. "Sumo kindly spirit" would be much more appropriate.

But giving Ochir "Asahifuji" now is like giving Daiki Nakamura (II) "Takanosato", not "Onosato", in terms of a prestige name. Onosato was only a reasonably decent Ozeki who's probably known more for the mutiny than his skill.

I think if the current Miyagino (the former Yokozuna Asahifuji) is going along with it, that's what really matters in such a situation. That's at least how I interpret what was written above.

I have to pin some of this on the three-per-basho rule. Back when you could pick the same person every day all basho, given what Hakuho had accomplished at that point, I can imagine plenty of people planning on just sticking with him until he started fighting people higher ranked than him. Even if people today thought Aonishiki just as likely as Hakuho was thought then to go on another double digit run, they'd probably want to consider waiting to use one of their three picks for when in the tournament he was up against someone comparatively weaker when Asanoyama or Takerufuji might be fighting relatively weaker opponents now and you might be considering to rotate among them based on their opponent. There were some guys in Juryo that were injured the previous tournament back in 2005, but they weren't comparatively as strong overall, so it was probably more reasonable to just pin all your hopes every day on Hakuho, who probably seemed nearly unstoppable, especially considering you could pick him until he lost. I'm not sure when the three-per-basho rule was instituted, but it definitely wasn't around when I started in 2014.

So I was recently playing a game called Blade Chimera (an OK but not great Metroidvania) set some time in the near future in Japan. You can see an image of a Japanese driver license of one of the game's characters at 12:36 of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcMsmUwPNLI and I decided to see what information I could pull off the image and see how well it corresponds with the information given in English. The character's name is established to be Fumiaki Baba (given name first), and it appears as though his given name is spelled entirely in hiragana, which can just barely be made out. This seems rather unusual for a male born in 2004, but the name itself is a common male name written typically with kanji. The images of Japanese licenses I can find don't seem to have the given name in hiragana, only kanji or katakana for foreigners. I would think though that given the disconnect between spelling and pronunciation in names, it makes sense for both the official spelling and the kana pronunciation to be included, but I'm not seeing that on any images other than one of a foreigner. The internet suggests that "Baba" is a real Japanese surname that would likely be spelled "馬場", and while there isn't detail enough to confirm those are the kanji used, they could be. Going from what I see online as a guide for the layout of the driver license, it looks like it would have been issued in some regnal year #27, with the most likely era being Reiwa, though there's not enough detail on the kanji to tell for sure, except that given the English text on screen at the time, his date of birth was 2004 which corresponds to Heisei 16 as shown, and the expiration date in 2032 shown as Reiwa 14 would be accurate, but that would mean the license was issued many years after it expired. The date of first issuance of the license appears to be in March of Heisei 7, which is also known as 2025, making him a bit over 20 when he got the license. This seems like a rather strange time to get a license. I guess given the urban lifestyle of a lot of people they're not going to necessarily get one when they turn the age that allows them to get one (I certainly got one the day I turned 16 and drove myself to school the next day), and I suppose it's possible that he just got a job then that needed him to be able to drive, but it overall seemed strange to me. For the address, the first character is clearly 大 and the next two characters at least *could* be 阪府 for Osaka Pref. That leaves only one character before the 市, and according to Wikipedia the only city with one character in Osaka Pref is Sakai and I suppose the character before the 市 could be a 堺. The same character shape is repeated before the 区, so it would be the city center of Sakai. There then appear to be two characters before a 町, but Wikipedia does not list any 町 in Sakai, so that's no longer any help determining what they might be. There clearly are machi and cho in Sakai according to Google Maps, so I had to browse it to see if I could find a 町 name that might match. The best match appears to be 栄橋町 (Sakaebashi-cho), then a clear 1 Chome after that, leading to https://maps.app.goo.gl/dTMeUzk8wh57a56GA. I'm not sure how to interpret the numbers of the address, and my best guess is that it doesn't actually exist - block numbers only go up to around 6, not 10. Now the English text says that he's qualified to issue mid to large-sized vehicles, but the restrictions as shown on the card don't seem to support that. There's a "3.5t" in the area where the restriction would be, which would limit him only to the smallest strata of vehicles, though there are two valid categories, which seem to correspond to 大特 and 中型 on the layout shown on Wikipedia, which would be medium sized regular vehicles and large special vehicles, which I don't think is a possible combination of valid categories, but I only know what little I can glean from the Wikipedia article. So there was a lot of effort put into mocking up this license, but it seems like there are at least two areas where it fails to make complete sense. Any other opinions?

https://sumodb.sumogames.de/Rikishi.aspx?r=3661 is the most recent career-high Ozeki I found that was promoted to Ozeki without a prior MK in the historical record depending on how you count a 2-1-2a, but that's hardly saying much. He could easily have had a lower division MK outside the historical record.

Terukuni had a MK in Juryo. I checked everyone else back to Musashiyama and found at least one MK before promotion. The closest after that was Musashimaru, who had one lower division MK but none as a sekitori before hitting Yokozuna, which was quite an amazing streak considering how long he was Ozeki.

If there's any desire to limit the number of players that count for the weighting on Super Banzuke, something that you might consider doing - and I recognize this might be more work than it's worth - to only count people who have a minimum number of basho experience, which might depend on the game and optimally would be roughly correlated with how long it would take at minimum to get into the top 42 players. If you want to just restrict GTB to players who have 5 or 6 basho experience and not worry about making the same correction for other games, that probably would work as well and limit the required work, but I feel any change to how the number of players is counted should really be applied to all games. Alternatively if you like the idea but don't like doing the necessary work yourself, you could request that the banzuke makers for each game note how many players would count for the SB weighting under this idea of needing a minimum number of participating basho which would be roughly the minimum number required to get into the top 42. They would not need to report which players, just the number of them. I don't think this would be too big a burden on me personally (it would take some work to set up initially for sure, especially to get the basho count for all the current players, but after the first basho, it would be a very minor amount of work per basho), and there's no way I would suggest something like this without being among those asked to do more work, but I can't speak for other banzuke makers that are involved in multiple games and that probably don't have anywhere near the same setup I do for making a game's banzuke. It's a solution that's probably more complicated that it needs to be, but it's at least something that tries to better capture the difficulty of making it into the top 42 when compared across games than just counting active players when plenty of them wouldn't have played enough to have potentially gotten into the top 42. It prevents the ballooning of the weighting of scores for GTB until such point that the huge number of players actually makes a real difference.

I was wondering why in the world that a Japanese club would be called "Avispa", as that doesn't mean anything in English, so why go with a name that has multiple problems with fitting into Japanese phonology? Apparently, it's because it's the Spanish word for wasp. Their Wikipedia article doesn't indicate *why* they chose the Spanish word for wasp, just that they did.

There *was* a rikishi named "Yoshikaze" with the same kanji for "yoshi" at Oguruma-beya - but before the one that's now the oyakata. The kanji was also the middle one in Myogiryu's name and a few others as -ki- or -gi-. Here's a list of all shikona that have used it: https://sumodb.sumogames.de/Rikishi.aspx?shikona=*義*&heya=-1&shusshin=-1&b=-1&high=-1&hd=-1&entry=-1&intai=-1&sort=1

While the hype behind Endo was real given that he was a Ms10 entrant and only spent one basho in Juryo, once he hit Makuuchi, things weren't quite as rosy as they were for recent phenoms like Onosato and Aonishiki. He had an MK before he hit the joi, and didn't stick in the joi once there either even before his major knee injury. After that injury, it was impressive that he managed to hang on in Makuuchi and even make sanyaku on a few occasions, but it was pretty clear that's all he was going to be. So early on he was hyped, and I recall someone saying on this forum that a Japanese friend of his who didn't really follow sumo knew about Endo, but didn't know about recently-promoted Yokozuna Kakuryu. That's the level of hype and media coverage that he had - a random maegashira became covered more than a Yokozuna. That hype led to increased expectations, but a few basho into Makuuchi it was fairly clear he wasn't going to be a mega star, since someone his age who was going to be such a star would have done much better first starting out in Makuuchi.

Didn't we see someone in the top 25 of Sd fail to get into the promotion zone with a 7-0 a bit back? I guess it's one of those things that just depends on the banzuke rather than being a strict promotion size given that it's not actually the boundary of a division, even if it is potentially quite meaningful to grab that ms15w slot when it's reasonable that he might get another 7-0 this basho given his history (though obviously it will be much harder).

The Wikipedia article also notes the issues with her having to officially renounce her US citizenship. Most people when they become Japanese citizens only have to say to the Japanese authorities that they renounce their other citizenships, but the process for officially renouncing US citizenship is a bit more complex. For most people, this is completely irrelevant and no one probably cares if you do it or not, but when it comes to politicians...

The only way it happens in my mind is if WMH ends up as Komusubi, which I think is at least within the realm of possibility (not that I think anyone would actually go that way with their pick) given https://sumodb.sumogames.de/Banzuke.aspx?b=201607&heya=-1&shusshin=-1&spr=on&sps=on having them promote to Komusubi someone with sanyaku experience over someone without when there was a full rank separation by the numbers. It's not entirely the same, as in that case it was more of the same kind of thing as with Aonishiki - Mitakeumi was extremely new and not in the joi, and they didn't want to give him the promotion most likely. Hakuoho has many more Makuuchi basho and now has multiple KKs in the joi, so I don't think they're as biased against him to promote someone with a slightly weaker claim with sanyaku experience, but obviously the lack of sanyaku experience is often a factor in these things and it's hard to know exactly how much.

As mentioned above, there is a prize for those one-day tournaments that is quite a large amount of cash for someone that doesn't typically win honbasho Yusho. Those events tend to at least have some people trying reasonably hard, but the relative size of the prize for those who already make a ton of cash tends to mean that the top dogs are not interested in competing at full speed. Maybe when they're still young and have yet to accumulate that many Yusho the top ranks might be interested in the prize, but as with everyone in the event they need to weigh the risk of injury and losing income that way against the prize the tournament offers. The fact that there wasn't any prize pool announced for this one makes it much more likely to be scripted, as they're just getting paid to show up like any other jungyo.

So it looks like they're doing this Swiss style, which with 40 people participating and assuming no one gets hurt gives them after three rounds 5 3-0 and 0-3 and 15 2-1 and 1-2, after which they'll have to do at least some cross-record matches with a 3-0 vs 2-1 and 1-2 vs 0-3 presumably. There could be either 1 or 2 people undefeated after the fifth day, which is good compared to doing the pairings more unstructured which could have led to a huge 4-1 playoff, as there was an indication that there would be a playoff if there was a tie. Which makes me wonder - why 40 rikishi then? I can imagine that there's a cost/benefit tradeoff with how many people they're sending, plus the amount of time that they want the exhibition to last, but why 40? Because that's the number they had last time, and that's the number of Makuuchi rikishi there were at that time? Are they trying to say here: "These guys are all Makuuchi*, they're the entire division, and the division size hasn't changed since last time", all of which are untrue? *Even if it counts people promoted on the unreleased banzuke, the likelihood Kotoeiho was promoted seems quite slim.

Oho looks poised to start a second stint at Sekiwake without having ever been Komusubi. This has also been done by the following rikishi in the 6 basho era: Asahikuni Kotokaze Tochiakagi (actually managed THREE stints at Sekiwake before ever being Komusubi) Daijuyama Terao Takanosho (who also was the last rikishi to make Sekiwake just once before ever being Komusubi prior to Oho doing it recently) And technically Terunofuji, though due to being promoted rather than being demoted in between. At first I thought it was going to be much rarer, as the nearly the first page of results of all the Sekiwake promotions in this time period had no one promoted to Sekiwake while having highest prior rank maegashira had done it, but then the first four on the list all did it with no one else in this situation not doing it. So now that we've had two in a row, it looks like a rather streaky phenomenon, with only Terao not part of a streak among those whose first stint ended in demotion. https://sumodb.sumogames.de/Query.aspx?show_form=0&showhighest=on&form1_year=>1955&form2_rank=s&form2_debutr=on&offset=50

I can understand why they didn't bring the raw material for the dohyo all the way from Japan, but how much research did they do in terms of trying to get the right material locally? "Central England" is a bit vague, and I guess means somewhat north of London, so presumably they're not just picking some local dirt but managed to find something close to what's normally used - perhaps from the same place they used last time they were there.

My compilation of those with the best chance to score the most final points due to having selected a rikishi and rank that ended up very close together. Based on the Juryo projection by Spiffy and my own low effort guesses for Makushita. This might not be 100% complete for those within 10 slots, as I didn't try all that hard to determine all of whom would be in the top of Makushita, so Hoshihitomi with Seihakuho/Ms9w and kuroimori with Dewanoryu/J13w will be at least somewhat close to 10 slots distance depending on where their rikishi end up, though they'll be less likely to take advantage of it since they won't be particularly high in Makushita. Player Rikishi pick Projected rikishi rank Rank Pick Projected Distance Ripe Asanoyama J4w J4w 0 Ronnie/Gawasukotto Shimazuumi Ms2w Ms3w 2 Gurowake Hakuyozan J10e J11w 3 Sukubidubidu Hakuyozan J10e J8w 3 Leoben Asanoyama J4w J6e 3 charliki/Gibuten Kitanowaka J12e J14e 4 LLCoolKay Asahakuyru J4e J7e 6 Yarimotsu Kyokukaiyu Ms1w J12w 6 Obana Kotoeiho J1w J5e 7 Naganoyama Kitanowaka J12e J8e 8 thatsumoguy Hidenoumi J9e J13e 8 Andonishiki Shirokuma J7e J11w 9 I'm impressed by those who picked Asanoyama, as there was no way to know he was even going to still be active, let alone anywhere near the torch.

Assuming that you mean the compiled data as of around 10 years ago for the average movements in the lower division, if you PM me your email address I can send you the data. I don't recall if I posted it here, but it's a lot of data and probably works better in the original Excel file than as a table. I wouldn't trust it very much though, since it's ten years old at this point. I certainly don't have the time that I did ten years ago to compile it again.