Latest stock exchange news - kabu, Oyakata transfers, etc.

[Asashosakari 20,134]

Ajigawa Oyakata (ex-Koubou) who rebelled against his Ichimon and voted for the Takanohana Renegade Brigade last elections, has started the procedure to change his Miyoseki. His initial application was turned down for having a procedural mistake. "I don't know the details, so I cannot comment on this at this time,", said Takanohana Oyakata.

Now, can anyone who understands what I just wrote explain please??

Sponichi has more (with further holes in the story filled in by me, so any inaccuracies are my doing):

The plan is to have ex-Kobo move to Otake-beya and change to the Nishikijima share, currently held as a loan by ex-Zaonishiki (who will presumably switch to Ajigawa in turn). That kabu is owned by Shimotori, but was embroiled in the Tokitsukaze succession a few years ago. Tokitsuumi owned Nishikijima at that time, and in order to take over the stable and the Tokitsukaze share he had to rid himself of Nishikijima because of the prohibition on dual ownership. The official story was that Tokitsuumi sold the share to Shimotori and took over the Tokitsukaze name at the same time, but the actual procession of events was (I think) an initial swap between him and the disgraced then-Tokitsukaze to expedite the takeover, the latter then being more or less forced to sell Nishikijima on to Shimotori. Here's the kicker - apparently the physical certificate was never handed over to either Shimotori or the Kyokai, and as such they're unable to process the change involving Kobo now. This is the first time the issue has had a chance to come up, as Zaonishiki had been using the name all the way through.

[Kuroyama 715]

At least they're finally admitting that it's destined for Takamisakari.

I don't think I can think of a worse oyakata than Robo.

I think he'll make an excellent one. As Asashosakari says, maybe not as a shisho, but attached as a coach.

Sponichi has more (with further holes in the story filled in by me, so any inaccuracies are my doing):

And I think my head just asploded.

Edited April 14, 2010 by Kuroyama

[Asashosakari 20,134]

And while I was still mulling the question of why ex-Zaonishiki would want to move onto the ejection seat that Ajigawa may well be (Asofuji...), Daily Sports makes things a whole lot more complicated:

1) Apparently it's ex-Shikishima (current Tanigawa-oyakata) who is set to take over the Ajigawa share.

2) Lest you think that means Zaonishiki is in turn simply moving into the Tanigawa share, Daily Sports claims that Kobo's move could be sending him to retirement.

That would seem to indicate that Shikishima's move may be the first domino here, not actually Kobo's. Kaiho intai looming? Left unanswered for now is how Zaonishiki managed to find himself at the bottom of that pile so suddenly, if the above scenario is correct.

Edit: Context I neglected to mention - Tanigawa-kabu is officially owned by a retired Hakkaku-beya oyakata, former Shiratayama, though there are persistent rumours that it's really owned by (or at least definitely promised to) Hokutoriki already. Either way, it's a natural target for Kaiho.

Edited April 14, 2010 by Asashosakari

[Washuyama 658]

How is it possible that ex-Shiratayama still owns a kabu as he turned 65 a couple years ago? Wouldn't he have been forced to sell it back in '08?

[ilovesumo 12]

I have heard Kaiho "has" one already.......but that could mean a promised as well as a bought one...

As usual, there are so many things we don't know.

[Orion 431]

How is it possible that ex-Shiratayama still owns a kabu as he turned 65 a couple years ago? Wouldn't he have been forced to sell it back in '08?

No. A retired oyakata (or his heirs) can hold onto a myoseki as long as they want. The Sakaigawa one was vacant for years until the former oyakata's widow decided who she wanted to have it. She was looking for someone she could regard as family, and she eventually settled on Washuyama.

Orion

[Raishu 215]

No. A retired oyakata (or his heirs) can hold onto a myoseki as long as they want. The Sakaigawa one was vacant for years until the former oyakata's widow decided who she wanted to have it. She was looking for someone she could regard as family, and she eventually settled on Washuyama.

Orion

The NSK established a rule in 2008 that retired oyakatas have to sell their share within 3 years.

So Ex-Shiratayama has the opportunity to wait until 2011 when he will be forced to come up with an official succesor.

Reason for EDIT: 2008=Year Shiratayama retired :-(

Edited April 14, 2010 by Raishu

[Asashosakari 20,134]

How is it possible that ex-Shiratayama still owns a kabu as he turned 65 a couple years ago? Wouldn't he have been forced to sell it back in '08?

No. A retired oyakata (or his heirs) can hold onto a myoseki as long as they want.

Sorry, that's incorrect. A 3-year grace period was instituted after the Miyagino thing blew up in their faces six years ago. Shiratayama retired in December 2008 so he still has about a year and a half.

[Washuyama 658]

That's why I love this place... You never stop learning!! :-(

[Orion 431]

How is it possible that ex-Shiratayama still owns a kabu as he turned 65 a couple years ago? Wouldn't he have been forced to sell it back in '08?

No. A retired oyakata (or his heirs) can hold onto a myoseki as long as they want.

Sorry, that's incorrect. A 3-year grace period was instituted after the Miyagino thing blew up in their faces six years ago. Shiratayama retired in December 2008 so he still has about a year and a half.

Thanks for the update. I must have overlooked that one -- it makes perfect sense, of course. The widow hanging onto the Sakaigawa myoseki had no harmful effects at all -- whereas the Miyagino widow's using the myoseki to marry off her daughter to the present holder caused a lot of eyebrows to rise.

[ilovesumo 12]

It's surprizing to me that they still do this stuff...am so old already, but too young to understand what the heck is the benefit...such a marriage is doomed.

[Yubinhaad 11,927]

Sorry, that's incorrect. A 3-year grace period was instituted after the Miyagino thing blew up in their faces six years ago. Shiratayama retired in December 2008 so he still has about a year and a half.

Is this rule retroactive? I'm just wondering about the ownership of the Nakagawa toshiyori. I haven't seen anything about a change of ownership, so I assumed it was still owned by former Oiteyama and borrowed by former Asahisato. Does Asahisato now own the toshiyori, or is Oiteyama - who retired at 65 in June 2003 - exempt from the three-year ownership rule?

[Raishu 215]

Is this rule retroactive? I'm just wondering about the ownership of the Nakagawa toshiyori. I haven't seen anything about a change of ownership, so I assumed it was still owned by former Oiteyama and borrowed by former Asahisato. Does Asahisato now own the toshiyori, or is Oiteyama - who retired at 65 in June 2003 - exempt from the three-year ownership rule?

That's one of these closet kabu arrangements which have been mentionend on the forum before. That means ex-Asahisato is listed as the "official" owner on the Oyakata banzuke but sources indicate that ex-Oiteyama might still control the share.

But that's just my personal understanding.

Asashosakari or Tamanaogijima probably can explain this to you in detail. :-(

[Asashosakari 20,134]

Is this rule retroactive? I'm just wondering about the ownership of the Nakagawa toshiyori. I haven't seen anything about a change of ownership, so I assumed it was still owned by former Oiteyama and borrowed by former Asahisato. Does Asahisato now own the toshiyori, or is Oiteyama - who retired at 65 in June 2003 - exempt from the three-year ownership rule?

That's one of these closet kabu arrangements which have been mentionend on the forum before. That means ex-Asahisato is listed as the "official" owner on the Oyakata banzuke but sources indicate that ex-Oiteyama might still control the share.

But that's just my personal understanding.

Hmm, that may have been one of the topics I dug into around Christmas but never got around to submit to Tamanaogijima and Doitsuyama...brb.

...

Okay, unsurprisingly after four months I'm even struggling to make sense of my own notes anymore. (Procrastination is bad, mmmkay?) My notes on Asahisato et al. read like this:

cf. Kumagatani

"obtained from Daishoyama/Oitekaze"?

related: Oiteyama/Daishoyama transferring to Tomozuna-beya after 02/19/98 swap (date? same as CF? 1997??)

The latter part is about the fact that the Oite/Dai pair of father and son-in-law are currently listed as Tatsunami-beya oyakata until the branchout that established Oitekaze-beya, but they actually branched from Tomozuna so there's a missing oyakata transfer entry (Tatsunami->Tomozuna for both). Maybe somebody here knows when that happened? All three alternatives I'm mentioning up there are complete speculation on my part.

As for the "obtained from Daishoyama/Oitekaze?" part - I think that was based on something I (seemed to) read between the lines of their ja.wiki entries. My interpretation was something like this: After Oiteyama had his mandatory retirement and vacated the Nakagawa share, he basically let his son-in-law Daishoyama/Oitekaze do as he wished with the kabu. Keep in mind that this was at a time when a) the "no more borrowing" phase happened, and b) the "no ownership of multiple kabu" rule wasn't on the books yet, so it didn't really matter whether the kabu was still owned by the retired Oiteyama or by Daishoyama.

I'll have to defer to Tamanaogijima on one thing - Asahisato is officially not considered a borrower, but I'm not sure if that goes back to his time as Kumagatani[14] or only dates to the Nakagawa[15] phase. Either way, I think the problem is that three different rule changes have kind of exhausted the number of possible legal owners of the share: First you have Asahisato who's the "for the books" owner because his kabu career dates back to the "no borrowing" phase. Some of those arrangements were later acknowledged as loans once "no borrowing" ended, but that's impossible with Nakagawa - Daishoyama can't be the owner now because he can't own two anymore, and Oiteyama can't be the owner because he's been retired for too long.

Long story short: Asahisato should likely be considered the "for real" owner now (and probably since late 2004 already), having received the official rights to it from Daishoyama at some point, as that's the only arrangement that's legal under current Kyokai rules. Nevertheless, my understanding is that the (no scarequotes here) real owner is still Daishoyama...one anonymous guy at the 2ch kabu thread claimed that Asahisato is paying 300k yen per month. But there are obviously several such under-the-table deals where unacknowledged - or rather, unacknowledgable - loans are going on, Magaki/Gojoro/Hamakaze being the most obvious one. (The ex-Daikirin/Oshiogawa/Wakatoba change of ownership is another one that nobody really seems to believe is completely real.)

Did any of that make any sense whatsoever? Long day here, and the ancientness of my notes isn't helping...

Edit: Just to add one missing puzzle piece - of course there was never any announcement of Asahisato buying the share, because he was never officially acknowledged as not-the-owner in the first place and so there was nothing to announce.

Edited April 15, 2010 by Asashosakari

[Yubinhaad 11,927]

I'll have to defer to Tamanaogijima on one thing - Asahisato is officially not considered a borrower, but I'm not sure if that goes back to his time as Kumagatani[14] or only dates to the Nakagawa[15] phase.

As I understood it, Asahisato acquired Kumagatani on loan when he retired as a rikishi in 1998. He then moved (as Kumagatani-oyakata) from Oshima-beya to Oitekaze-beya in February or March 2004, by which time ex-Oiteyama had been retired for around nine or ten months and ex-Zaonishiki (who else?) had landed on the Nakagawa toshiyori. When the whole Miyagino/Kumagatani thing erupted, Asahisato was able to slide straight into Nakagawa since he was now an oyakata at Oitekaze-beya and, as you point out, the toshiyori was under Daishoyama's control.

Either way, I think the problem is that three different rule changes have kind of exhausted the number of possible legal owners of the share: First you have Asahisato who's the "for the books" owner because his kabu career dates back to the "no borrowing" phase. Some of those arrangements were later acknowledged as loans once "no borrowing" ended, but that's impossible with Nakagawa - Daishoyama can't be the owner now because he can't own two anymore, and Oiteyama can't be the owner because he's been retired for too long.

Under the current rules, yes he has been retired too long, which is why I wondered whether he might be exempt from the three-year rule as his mandatory retirement pre-dated the introduction of that rule. I had no idea at all that Daishoyama was his son-in-law, it's so obvious now that the control of the toshiyori (albeit not the official ownership) passed to Daishoyama.

Did any of that make any sense whatsoever? Long day here, and the ancientness of my notes isn't helping...

It was excellent, thank you very much. It sounds like you have quite a treasure trove in those notes. :-)

Edited April 16, 2010 by Yubinhaad

[Asashosakari 20,134]

I'll have to defer to Tamanaogijima on one thing - Asahisato is officially not considered a borrower, but I'm not sure if that goes back to his time as Kumagatani[14] or only dates to the Nakagawa[15] phase.

As I understood it, Asahisato acquired Kumagatani on loan when he retired as a rikishi in 1998. He then moved (as Kumagatani-oyakata) from Oshima-beya to Oitekaze-beya in February or March 2004, by which time ex-Oiteyama had been retired for around nine or ten months and ex-Zaonishiki (who else?) had landed on the Nakagawa toshiyori. When the whole Miyagino/Kumagatani thing erupted, Asahisato was able to slide straight into Nakagawa since he was now an oyakata at Oitekaze-beya and, as you point out, the toshiyori was under Daishoyama's control.

The sticking point here is that Asahisato is currently treated as an owner, but there was no announced change as you pointed out. Hence he must have been an owner for the books for quite a while already, and that implies that it's dating back to the time when borrowing was officially prohibited. I think that means we're talking about the Kumagatani acquisition in that context - in other words, he was officially an owner even in 1998, and considering it a loan is "only" the common sense view, not the official one.

Now, as I mentioned after the rules had been changed back to allow loans again some of those hidden loans were later acknowledged, usually on the next kabu change (wasn't Zaonishiki one of those who dropped back from iin to toshiyori?), but that didn't happen when Asahisato switched to Nakagawa in 2004. I think that alone implies that he continued to be an official owner even under the new framework - and keep in mind that the 3-year rule wasn't even on the books yet at the time as this whole thing was the very event that led to its introduction. So I think Oiteyama's status is kind of a red herring here...I think he was already out of the picture completely and the main issue was that Daishoyama couldn't own a second kabu any longer. I don't recall exactly when that rule was introduced, 2002? And I believe there was a temporary grace period for that, too, so it's possible that this was in the process of expiring for Daishoyama right around that time.

I'm not sure how the Sumo DB kabu data is set up regarding that no-loans phase...IMHO ideally all cases that became "obvious" at some later point (rikishi officially became a borrower again, rikishi had an otherwise unexplainable retirement, etc.) should be credited as loans, while all others such as Asahisato should be credited as ownership, simply because every other approach enters the realm of guesswork as the Hamakaze and Oshiogawa issues demonstrate. IIRC the actual state of the data is pretty close to that, but there are probably one or two cases besides Asahisato that could use some rethinking.

It sounds like you have quite a treasure trove in those notes. :-)

Not really, it was just an incomplete attempt at debugging the SDB kabu data a bit further. Basically, everything in this post and my previous one is stuff I'd been meaning to send off to Tamanaogijima (the real owner of the treasure troves) and Doitsuyama a while ago. (Insert self-flagellation smiley here.) Perhaps time to finally write up the two or three other issues I ran into as well...

Edited April 16, 2010 by Asashosakari

[Kintamayama 46,753]

The rijikai held a special meeting today to discuss the qualifications for acquiring/inheriting a toshiyori miyoseki. New guidelines will be announced at the regular riji meeting in May. Today, you have to be a Yokozuna or an Ozeki, or have at least one basho at sanyaku, or have at least 30 sekitori bashos under your belt to qualify. "Results Of A Hon-basho", "Jungyo and Hanazumo Contributions", and "Show of Leadership" are the lesser known requirements as well. The rijikai wants to make it more difficult now. "Attitude On the Dohyo While Active", "Way of Life" will be deliberated as well. "If these new requirements will be activated, not just anyone will be entitled..," said a rijikai- attending Oyakata.

[ilovesumo 12]

Great.......so it will depend on who hid problems from the press and who showed up at Jungyous.........

Oyakata are teachers, it should depend on their ability to teach and how they can hadle the differences between generations.

As Cuyler wrote in the 1970s already, high rank doesn't make one a good Oyakata or Riji. The fact that the licese can be bought is the first mistake. IMHO

[Kintamayama 46,753]

A Tatsunami Ichimon Oyakata is saying that Isegahama Oyakata, whose deshi Aminishiki owns the Ajigawa name currently held by renegade ex-Koubou, is demanding he return the kabu immediately and without delay. As the acquisition of an alternative kabu is hitting some snags, current Ajigawa may have to leave the Kyokai unless he comes up with a creative solution fast, says the reporter.

[Kintamayama 46,753]

Futagoyama Oyakata has formally applied for the Ootake kabu change. That's all I have.

[Orion 431]

Futagoyama Oyakata has formally applied for the Ootake kabu change. That's all I have.

I wonder if he'll change the pronunciation back to Oodake?

Orion

[Kintamayama 46,753]

Futagoyama Oyakata has formally applied for the Ootake kabu change. That's all I have.

Apparently, the rijikai has confirmed this and the heya will not close.

[Muhomatsu 246]

I hear that the newly vacant Futagoyama kabu is no longer vacant.

The former Kobo (not the disgraced gambler Kobo) can now also be called former Ajigawa oyakata.

That will settle the dispute from earlier.

Also, the winds are whispering about his move from an Oyakata attached to Miyagino-beya to an Oyakata attached to Takanohana-beya...

[Asashosakari 20,134]

I don't think it's official yet.

Edit: On the other recent topic - ex-Dairyu's assumption of the Otake name has become official as of June 6, but has been back-dated to the 4th, which I guess means they're also retroactively throwing out Takatoriki per Saturday the 3rd already (even though the meeting was on Sunday). In any case, Dairyu has "acquired" the Otake share, wink nudge.

Edited July 7, 2010 by Asashosakari

[Asashosakari 20,134]

I don't think it's official yet.

Quicker than I thought. Announced today (edit: the kabu change, that is, no move yet), back-dated to the 7th, borrowing from Takanohana. Good for Kobo.

Edited July 8, 2010 by Asashosakari