Seiyashi

Within the ichimon, Chiganoura and Minezaki are possibly imminently available, although Chiganoura may already be spoken for by one of the Tokiwayama sanyaku.

Tegata.

Seeing all of Hakuho's other sports activities in this thread makes me feel he won the genetic lottery not just for sumo, but also for sport. He seems a born natural at most of it, unless someone now tells me he went to a bowling alley and prepared for a day straight just for a TV appearance.

For my part I'm surprised Takanosho has outperformed Terunofuji; I assume it has to do with his longer time at the top of makuuchi. Is there a link to the Bench Sumo scoring criteria?

Guess he couldn't cut it...

The iast update from his oyakata was essentially asking for thoughts and prayers 2 days after the injury, and we've heard nothing since.

I don't think he'll be ready for Natsu. He needs to be able to last the 15 days and not end with a howler result. Between the Nagoya basho, the torch run, and the Olympics dohyo-iri, I think he'll sac the torch run because the basho is his ticket to the Olympics dohyo-iri, and that is precisely what he has pulled out multiple stops repeatedly to try and make happen.

The details of the accusations were posted in earlier articles, the proper papers then just mention them and the court decision. For other cases they'd also report the reason why the there was no indictment, thus no full court trial and just a summary order by the summary court. That there are none given may indicate that the public would not expect an indictment in this type of case. For "background" and other speculations on this you have to look in the tabloids. So the report of the court decision itself is at best non-indicative as to the truth of those allegations? I was originally thinking that it was odd that the formal report of the indictment and fine mentioned only abuse and didn't mention the acts that constituted the abuse.

Quick question: are reports of court findings from reputable mainstream news outlets usually this terse? Other sources I can find are equally sparse on details.

Thanks, my bad.

Tokiwayama-beya's new recruits: Takashoki and Takatairiku, will start sumo school tomorrow, Monday 5 April. Presumably, this batch might include all the shinjo for whom maezumo was cancelled. 常盤山部屋 on Twitter: "場所休み中に常盤山部屋での生活をスタートさせた隆翔生（たかしょうき）と隆太陸（たかたいりく）１５歳の春です。月曜日から教習所に通い始めます。初日は優力が付き添ってくれます。 （最近部屋で人気の赤身のお肉、コップの中はもちろんお水です^_^） 新弟子二人の応援もよろしくお願いします！ https://t.co/9OcxbrxMAn" / Twitter

As far as the specific instance of abuse is concerned, I do agree with you. I wrote this: There's no dressing the spraying of chemicals up as anything else. In that she is clearly in the wrong and she has been judged and deemed guilty by a competent court of law according to the laws of the land. Whether or not the penalty is sufficient is a different matter, but she has been penalised and the law has run its course in this matter (though not yet in the overall context of the divorce). As far as the specific incident of chemicals are concerned I don't think we disagree at all that she is clearly in the wrong. Where I am saying there is wiggle room for everything else. Abuse in general is to be condemned - sure. But abuse isn't a binary yes/no. There is still a grey area, perhaps increasingly small nowadays, where people might reasonably disagree if something was abuse or not. When a newspaper reports the rest of what she did (i.e. sans chemicals) as abuse, someone has made an editorial judgment to call what they saw the wife doing as abuse. Maybe it was well over the line and maybe it wasn't. I'm not saying that it was or wasn't either way, but I am asking people to bear in mind that there is this intermediation of interpretation by the informative sources that we have that, by its very nature, causes a loss of nuance which may or may not affect our judgment had we been the one to interpret it ourselves. That is all I am saying, which goes back to the original intent of the post that I tried to defend. By extension, therefore, while there's no defending the wife as regards the chemicals, we ought to bear in mind that for everything else, we are getting our information second or third hand and therefore the information we get has already been through someone else's value filter. Before the chemicals incident broke, we were already lampooning the wife about the dollhouse and her chosen lifestyle (not befitting an athlete's wife, apparently); the latest incident of abuse has just confirmed our "judgment"/"assessment" that the wife is definitely "off". If it had been the other way round, if the wife had been a relatively upstanding and virtuous okamisan, how would we have judged her instead? P.S. If the tenor of my two posts are too "off" for the forum I accept if they are to be removed. I do not condone child abuse at all. However, I feel it is a worthwhile point - although this may be quite reasonably disagreed with - to raise the possibility that this incident of child abuse by the wife is just solidifying our preconceptions of her as a wrong'un which she may or may not deserve in totality once this entire matter has run its course. But for the absolute avoidance of doubt once again, I do not condone child abuse, but neither will I accept a simplistic reduction of my position to say that I defend child abuse under some circumstances - my point goes towards how we are judging the wife in toto on the basis of the evidence we have.

I see I'm not the only one who found this case's original description as being "domestic violence" very misleading... This was a child-abuse case, and no doubt the mother got to give her "side of the story" in court - where she was found guilty. To play devil's advocate a little, and to perhaps hearken back to Tigerboy1966's original intent: The caution here is that we already seem to have cast the wife in the role of the villain and to believe that Yoshikaze is in the absolute right in this whole affair. That may well be the case. But do remember that we are a sumo forum that tends to support rikishi; we all seem to be subscribers to a relatively liberal philosophy of childraising, which frowns on any kind of corporal punishment and condemns in relatively strong terms any acts that can be construed as abuse, much less acts that would be outright assault. I don't intend to get into debate over what is or is not appropriate childraising; this is just to point out as a fact that there is a spectrum of what various cultures would consider acceptable or non-acceptable acts of punishment on a child and one's moral antenna would be more or less strongly tuned against some acts depending on your cultural background. Don't forget that the term "abuse" is, even if factually accurate in the circumstances, a very loaded term that casts immediate aspersions on any alleged perpetrator; we are "passing judgment" in absentia and without the benefit of firsthand information in English. All our sources are at best second or thirdhand, and there already seem to have been nuances lost in translation such as "domestic violence vs child abuse". To be absolutely clear, I don't for a moment intend to insinuate or impute that Yoshikaze himself is guilty of any wrongdoing especially in the total absence of any evidence. The fact that his daughter trusted him enough to go to him for assistance when her mother did that to her is, I think, sufficient proof of the contrary. Nor do I condone the spraying of chemicals into a child's eyes; that has done a Hakuho run down the hanamichi and back to the shitakubeya, never mind the fact that the child in question is old enough to be reasoned with. If it had been an adult that would have been assault or the equivalent crime in any jurisdiction, and in my view it triply compounds the offence that the victim is a minor and in a position of trust to the offender. But the point I am trying to raise is, even if the wife has been found guilty in court for this specific instance of child abuse, we are in a very bad position to judge the wife because of our own biases and lack of information. To delve further into the cultural point, I come from a culture where spanking toddlers is considered acceptable discipline and, just half a generation ago, the cane/rattan was considered perfectly acceptable for major disciplinary infractions like lying or similar. In fact, the present reaction to noisy/other socially unacceptable behaviour by children in public is: "not enough discipline at home, one tight slap would have solved the problem earlier". I'm not saying that I believe that any of this is right, but in a not-so-hypothetical culture where this was relatively normal until not very long ago, the problem to the court would have been the insecticide only and not necessarily the rest of the physical abuse, hence the relatively lighter sentence than what we may think she deserves. Also, we don't know what has gone on behind closed doors between Yoshikaze and his wife. I'm not saying that anything justifies child abuse, but a very bad relationship between Yoshikaze and his wife could have led to his wife abusing the kids to get back at him, possibly, and you could, for the sake of argument, say that Yoshikaze could have done more earlier. It's easy to say frilly woman, abuses kids, clearly a rotten egg next to Saint Yoshikaze, but this is already what we are inclined to believe given the history of the thread. At the risk of sounding sanctimonious, perhaps we should dial back a little on the prejudging of the wife - this I read as the main import of Tigerboy1966's post and no more.

No, he hasn't. Midorifuji and Terutsuyoshi were the deputees from Isegahama when Hakuho needed attendants after Terunofuji's return; not that a yokozuna dohyo-iri has been a common occurrence since July of last year! To be precise, Enho and Ishiura were still in makuuchi for the July basho last year, when Terunofuji made his return. After that, Hakuho was out till the last basho, where Midorifuji and Terutsuyoshi were his attendants.

It is fairly rare, but not completely unused - read as sho(u), sei, or masa (so it could be Goshoryu rather than Goseiryu, which sounds a bit better IMO), the most prominent bearer of that character outside the top division is Tamashoho, Tamawashi's brother in law who joined him relatively recently at Kataonami-beya (and changed his shikona from Kyokusoten). Here's some other shikona that use them: Oginosho, Kiyomasayama, Takamasaki (just retired last year), Seiryuyama, Seigozan, Seiryudo, and Shozuyama. There's also one more fella Shoki, but that looks like a family name.