fwuzzle23

I believe so, at the very least it's too late to have made an extra promotion from juryo to take his spot, so it's just a matter of whether you keep Hakuho or blank out his spot, and the latter seems like a punitive option to me so he'll probably still be there.

He retired too late to not be on the banzuke, and obviously he didn't do anything that would merit being deleted from it a la Takagenji...he's also not a former sekitori for whom they tend to acknowledge their retirements immediately as they just did with Sagatsukasa. So he's officially counted as kyujo for this basho and his retirement will be acknowledged on the post-basho intai list. Just one of those weird quirks with how they do things.

The problem is the heya itself is quarantined, and even sekitori who live outside the heya need to go there for morning practice on honbasho days thus exposing them to any still-extant pathogens. The only reason the personnel listed in the OP are exempt from the quarantine is they weren't exposed and wouldn't need to go to the heya each morning to do their jobs.

There's two attached oyakata, ex-Tamarikido and ex-Tamanoshima, who won't be retiring for another 20 years or so (there's also ex-Daitetsu but he retires in a couple months), so I don't think it's particularly necessary that anyone cut their career short to take over for ex-Wakashimazu. The second scenario is plausible enough, but by this point I've learned not to assume when someone will retire because it's almost always wrong.

Moti posted on August 6 that the second round of shots had wrapped up, with the exception of Takasago beya where they had the recent cluster which meant they had to delay theirs. It's been 3 weeks since then so I would assume Ichinojo's as protected as he's going to get now.

From what Wikipedia's article on Japanese nationality law says, I don't think it was ever a rule necessarily. You just need a name composed of Japanese kanji and/or kana, which doesn't even have to look ethnically Japanese.

I'm pretty sure the people in said quarters understand the difference between amazumo (which already has women competing in it) and ozumo.

The kabu switches are when it's a stablemaster retiring, so they don't have to rename the entire stable in the succession process. Any kabu can theoretically be used by sanyo, but obviously there's going to be more effort put into making sure the more prestigious ones aren't used for that purpose.

Honestly I'm somewhat glad there doesn't seem to be a consensus on the komusubi number, and I wouldn't be surprised by any of the plausible choices. I'm not posting my full guess but I went down the middle and did three, promoting Daieisho but not Hokutofuji. My justification is Daieisho had a 4-2 record against sanyaku opponents last basho (compared to 1-4 for Hokutofuji). I feel like a big part of these judgement-call promotions is showing through their results that they deserve the promotion, and having a winning record against sanyaku opposition does that for me. Daieisho's also been slightly more successful at sanyaku level than Hokutofuji has (11-4 a few basho ago at K vs. Hokutofuji never having recorded a KK there). Finally, if nothing else, 3 Ks is my way of hedging my bets to avoid being too badly hurt if it's 2 or 4. But again, they could go any way with it and I wouldn't be surprised. You guys having Midorifuji and Akiseyama so far down when I have them in the M13-14 area is definitely giving me some anxiety, though....

I think the argument is more that the virus restrictions are keeping them from getting adequate practice with other top-rankers through degeiko, which leads to the injuries. The closest thing they've had to degeiko since this started was that joint practice last month, and that was probably too far away from the basho to really be of use.

For what it's worth, expulsion is not retirement... no intai-todoke was filed in Sokokurai's case. Theoretically the same could have happened for Hoshikaze since those were the only two caught in the match-fixing scandal that didn't put in their retirement papers, but he lost his court case.

Nope, once the papers are handed in and accepted, there's no going back. It's for that reason that stablemasters frequently delay handing in retirement papers for runaway deshi for months, because sometimes the deshi, given enough time to reflect on things, might decide to come back.

At the very least it's the interpretation I've always gone with, a practical reason for why the sanyaku needs to be balanced but makuuchi as a whole doesn't need to be.

The only way Daieisho would be placed in the west is if there were an odd number of either yokozuna or ozeki. Balancing only happens if there's more than one sanyaku rank with an odd number of rikishi. In that 3Y/3O/2S/2K example Jakusotsu gave you earlier, the third yokozuna was left in the east while the third ozeki was shifted over to the west. Remember that the sanyaku-ranked rikishi are written on the banzuke in wider characters so the balancing is more of a way to prevent overcrowding of names in the east column. On the other hand, the maegashira ranks can be squeezed together a bit more given their names are written with narrower characters, so the balancing doesn't need to extend to them.