Sumo and the Olympics

[Benevolance 2,462]

I think the steps were supposed to be...

1. Sumo at the Olympics!

2.  ....mumble mumble...

3.  Sumo is now available on TV for international audiences for FREE! And sumo forum members get free tickets to every basho, airfare included!! 

[Seiyashi 4,068]

4 hours ago, Kaminariyuki said:

No offense to Seiyashi, and I suppose we all have our perspectives, but I don't find the irony delicious. I find it utterly distasteful. Sumo should have gotten a lot more coverage out of the Olympics, and Hakuho should have been a part of that, IMO.

I think my misspent youth studying literature and Greek tragedies is showing through - it would have been called a self-fulfilling prophecy back in those days. That's sort of what I meant by delicious because it was just so classic in a way you don't get much nowadays. Take a surgery to avoid retiring before the Olympics? Great! Now you're laid up because of the recovery anyway so you can't participate. But if you didn't take the surgery you'd be retiring early. Use ugly sumo to win and stay active? Ok, but the YDC's still going to be on your case and pressuring you to retire for lack of hinkaku. I could go on, but it's almost as if Hakuho was predestined not to win no matter how he chose to approach the problem coming into the Olympics - and of course, predestiny is another great theme in Greek tragedy.

The resultant run ins with the NSK, YDC, and scheduling clashes with the Olympic committee I would class under "fallout", considering how it seems to be adding to the cloud hovering over Hakuho's oyakata career before it's even started. (YMMV whether a nuclear analogy was intended.)

8 minutes ago, Asashosakari said:

There's nothing magic about sumo that's going to make tons of people go, "Wow, how did I never know I needed this in my life?!" just from one single exposure to a dohyo-iri or whatever the plan would have been.

Seconding this. Again, I don't speak for all sumo fans, but I found sumo easier to stomach less as a sport and more because it was a microcosm of Japanese culture in general, which is already fairly misunderstood even when popular. And culture - at least not of the bacterial type - is not something you pick up in 5 minutes.

Edited August 16, 2021 by Seiyashi

[Ichimawashi 573]

They found room in the opening ceremony for Sadaharu Oh.  They found room in the opening ceremony for a baseball manager who could hardly walk.  I didn’t get up at 4am to watch specifically a dohyo-iri, it was clear from the silence from all parties concerned that if it happened it would be a surprise.  I agree with the comments that anything formal and in keeping with sumo tradition would be slow and misinterpreted and not much of a promotion for sumo itself.  But deliberately not including him at all and making excuses that “he was kyujo when the offer came in” is just lame, especially when you do invite a baseball star with some very dubious history (three foreign players on the verge of breaking Oh’s single-season HR record were repeatedly intentionally walked in the final days of the season while playing Oh-managed teams, pitchers each time producing convenient excuses for the hero such as ‘the front office told me to’ and ‘it was the pitching coach’s orders’ — compare THAT with lining up behind the shikiri-sen and throwing a bit of an elbow against a tough opponent and tell me who should be more ashamed), who now sits on a committee looking to remove post-career benefits that have been freely given to non-foreign yokozuna with lesser career success.  That’s just insulting on a personal level.  When I saw Oh with the torch I assumed the next one in sequence would be Hakuho or maybe both current yokozuna — how much training would they need to trot 50 yards and hand it off to some other star?  Don’t tell me there was no room because the other links in the relay were already booked: you can do extra laps of the stadium or reduce the length of the path a little for everyone.  This was deliberately done to spite Hakuho and his supporters.  There is no other way to spin it.

[Yamanashi 3,687]

1) There wasn't much lasting value from the 1998 dohyo-iri.

So never try again?

2) A one-shot display of Sumo won't suddenly turn people into Sumo fans, they'll just chuckle at the guys in diapers.

People like that won't ever be interested anyway.  You send out a mass mailing hoping for a 2% return rate; wouldn't even that level of new interest be a good thing?

I'm not letting the NSK off the hook, but I will admit that, w/o COVID, an Olympic jungyo (well-planned) would have been a tremendous PR win.  They would need to package the itinerary to hit mostly the Olympic venues, where their potential new audience would be.

Also, they were so worried about catching COVID (and maybe rightly so) that they never sent anybody out to be seen at the venues: no Yokozuna, no former greats, no star rikishi, and then hassle Hakuho for attending an event with a pass.  Maybe when they saw the reaction to that disaster, they realized what a mistake they made.

[Asashosakari 18,669]

18 minutes ago, Yamanashi said:

1) There wasn't much lasting value from the 1998 dohyo-iri.

So never try again?

Who was supposed to "try"? In all the years of run-up to the Olympics, it never appeared that the organizers were all that interested in giving sumo a prominent spot again, some fans just assumed they would/should be. It's hardly like the Kyokai was going to force their way into something they weren't particularly wanted to be at.
 

18 minutes ago, Yamanashi said:

2) A one-shot display of Sumo won't suddenly turn people into Sumo fans, they'll just chuckle at the guys in diapers.

People like that won't ever be interested anyway.  You send out a mass mailing hoping for a 2% return rate; wouldn't even that level of new interest be a good thing?

You'd be lucky to get one-thousandth of 2% with the limited kind of exposure that was at least somewhat realistic to expect.
 

18 minutes ago, Yamanashi said:

I'm not letting the NSK off the hook, but I will admit that, w/o COVID, an Olympic jungyo (well-planned) would have been a tremendous PR win.  They would need to package the itinerary to hit mostly the Olympic venues, where their potential new audience would be.

I'm not sure what you're actually suggesting here - something like sending up the jungyo trek to Sapporo a couple of days after the race walking and marathon events? I highly doubt a significant enough number of international fans were going to stick around those places long enough after the events they were actually travelling for. There's a reason the Kyokai was going to have their sole event at their homebase, and quite frankly the whole notion of going after Olympic visitors with something staged after the Olympics were already over struck me as silly even for that one event when it was announced. They probably would have managed to achieve more outreach simply by keeping the sumo museum open while the boxing was going on at the Kokugikan. How many international visitors not already interested in sumo would have bothered to dedicate extra time to it as part of a trip that was going to be expensive already?
 

18 minutes ago, Yamanashi said:

Also, they were so worried about catching COVID (and maybe rightly so) that they never sent anybody out to be seen at the venues: no Yokozuna, no former greats, no star rikishi, and then hassle Hakuho for attending an event with a pass.  Maybe when they saw the reaction to that disaster, they realized what a mistake they made.

You make it sound as though it would have been trivial to "send out" anybody. You remember the part about no public spectating being allowed, right? Which other Ozumo-affiliated person besides Hakuho would have had any credible reason for requesting accreditation? What would the organizers have gained from handing out such accreditations, other than fostering an impression that you just need to be enough of a celebrity and the spectating ban doesn't apply to you?

[Asashosakari 18,669]

On a side note, the last line from John's recent article:

Quote

[Hakuho's] absence from both Olympic ceremonies was keenly felt.

struck me as more than a little reminiscent of Homer Simpson's idea that "whenever Poochie's not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, 'Where's Poochie?'" I'm finding it hard to believe that Hakuho - or sumo as a whole - was seriously missed by anyone who isn't already initiated into sumo fandom. Perhaps domestically for vague reasons of supposed cultural significance, but certainly not internationally.

If anything, a big difference to 1998 is that sumo has arguably been relegated down the list of "typically Japanese" things that Western people will first think of when prompted. Both manga / anime and Japanese computer / video games were still firmly in the "for kids only" niche two and a half decades ago, J-pop was a complete non-entity in the West, Japanese baseball was on almost nobody's radar before Ichiro came to MLB (2001, to save you the looking-up), Japanese pro wrestling has gone from something only a handful of tape trading fans obsessed over to having a TV deal in the US, etc. etc..

Edited August 17, 2021 by Asashosakari

[Tsuchinoninjin 1,244]

1 hour ago, Asashosakari said:

FeOn a side note, the last line from John's recent article:

struck me as more than a little reminiscent of Homer Simpson's idea that "whenever Poochie's not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, 'Where's Poochie?'" I'm finding it hard to believe that Hakuho - or sumo as a whole - was seriously missed by anyone who isn't already initiated into sumo fandom. Perhaps domestically for vague reasons of supposed cultural significance, but certainly not internationally.

If anything, a big difference to 1998 is that sumo has arguably been relegated down the list of "typically Japanese" things that Western people will first think of when prompted. Both manga / anime and Japanese computer / video games were still firmly in the "for kids only" niche two and a half decades ago, J-pop was a complete non-entity in the West, Japanese baseball was on almost nobody's radar before Ichiro came to MLB (2001, to save you the looking-up), Japanese pro wrestling has gone from something only a handful of tape trading fans obsessed over to having a TV deal in the US, etc. etc..

Excuse me but you have made a great folly here. Cecil Fielder transferred from Hanshin to Detroit in 1990 and people still wear Hanshin tiger jerseys to Detroit tiger games. Ichiwho???

[Asashosakari 18,669]

7 minutes ago, Tsuchinoninjin said:

Excuse me but you have made a great folly here. Cecil Fielder transferred from Hanshin to Detroit in 1990 and people still wear Hanshin tiger jerseys to Detroit tiger games. Ichiwho???

I was talking about society at large, not dedicated baseball fans.

[Tsuchinoninjin 1,244]

Are you really part of society if you don’t follow baseball??

[Sue 475]

17 hours ago, Benevolance said:

I think the steps were supposed to be...

1. Sumo at the Olympics!

2.  ....mumble mumble...

3.  Sumo is now available on TV for international audiences for FREE! And sumo forum members get free tickets to every basho, airfare included!! 

I thought it was

1. Steal mawashis

2. ???

3. Profit!

[Benevolance 2,462]

What ever happened to that guy's mawashi? Was it recovered? Or his preserved rabbit bits, at least? 

[Asojima 2,870]

2 hours ago, Tsuchinoninjin said:

Are you really part of society if you don’t follow baseball??

or Tiddlywinks?

Edited August 17, 2021 by Asojima

[Kaminariyuki 497]

Well, the press certainly can't be counted on to get it right in matters related to sumo (among others), but some of what I did see was perhaps better than average. It was a global stage without question, and naivete aside, it would have been difficult for sumo to have had a more marginal appearance than it had.

I don't think more exposure during the Olympics would have brought throngs of international fans to the sport, probably not even a blip. But this quintessentially Japanese sport could have gotten a little play in the fringes of the spotlight, a little air time, and possibly a little more understanding and interest. 

[Kaminariyuki 497]

4 hours ago, Sue said:

I thought it was

1. Steal mawashis

2. ???

3. Profit!

Steal mawashi or steel mawashi?

[Churaumi 725]

6 hours ago, Sue said:

I thought it was

1. Steal mawashis

2. ???

3. Profit!

Find that dude who stole Terasawa's mawashi. I doubt he made a fortune, buy I doubt he'd dare show his face with it in public.

[Yamanashi 3,687]

5 hours ago, Kaminariyuki said:

Well, the press certainly can't be counted on to get it right in matters related to sumo (among others), but some of what I did see was perhaps better than average. It was a global stage without question, and naivete aside, it would have been difficult for sumo to have had a more marginal appearance than it had.

I don't think more exposure during the Olympics would have brought throngs of international fans to the sport, probably not even a blip. But this quintessentially Japanese sport could have gotten a little play in the fringes of the spotlight, a little air time, and possibly a little more understanding and interest. 

Remember how cool it was when the France TV pre-Olympics commercial featured the animated Sumo wrestler?  That was the high-water mark of Sumo at the Tokyo Olympics.

[Seiyashi 4,068]

1 hour ago, Yamanashi said:

Remember how cool it was when the France TV pre-Olympics commercial featured the animated Sumo wrestler?  That was the high-water mark of Sumo at the Tokyo Olympics.

To play devil's advocate, it was definitely cool to us, but would it have been cool to a wider audience instead of just, idk, "random Japanese things"?

[Yamanashi 3,687]

2 hours ago, Seiyashi said:

To play devil's advocate, it was definitely cool to us, but would it have been cool to a wider audience instead of just, idk, "random Japanese things"?

I get your point, but 1) the people at France TV thought the French people would find it cool, too; 2) they assumed that Sumo wrestlers were among the "random Japanese things" their viewers would recognize without saying "Quoi??"  Notice the Sumo wrestler didn't act like a "fat guy in diapers"; they played against the stereotype, which is what made it cool.

[nagora 88]

On 17/08/2021 at 03:07, Asashosakari said:

If anything, a big difference to 1998 is that sumo has arguably been relegated down the list of "typically Japanese" things that Western people will first think of when prompted. 

All the more reason to put it in the opening ceremony, which is a statement of what is special about the host country.

[Kaminariyuki 497]

12 hours ago, Yamanashi said:

Remember how cool it was when the France TV pre-Olympics commercial featured the animated Sumo wrestler?  That was the high-water mark of Sumo at the Tokyo Olympics.

I mostly watched NBC coverage in the US and recorded it so that I could skip the commercials. You don't recall what they were advertising, do you? Could be on Youtube or the company site. I'll watch anything sumo between basho.  

[Onibushou 61]

9 hours ago, Kaminariyuki said:

I mostly watched NBC coverage in the US and recorded it so that I could skip the commercials. You don't recall what they were advertising, do you? Could be on Youtube or the company site. I'll watch anything sumo between basho.  

I think this Twitter post has the commercial referenced-

[Kaminariyuki 497]

16 hours ago, Onibushou said:

I think this Twitter post has the commercial referenced-

That was awesome, thanks!

While not officially linked to the Olympics, this is a good example of what we could have seen more of, with a little savvy preparation, a cultural footprint for the sport we hold dear.

Viva la France!

Edited August 19, 2021 by Kaminariyuki

[nelimw 80]

18 hours ago, Onibushou said:

I think this Twitter post has the commercial referenced-

Bruh, that sumo wrestler sprinting across the rice field was dope. And then he hit the fade away with the cabbage?!? *mind blown* I wish we had this commercial in the states! 

[Kaminariyuki 497]

On 17/08/2021 at 23:33, Yamanashi said:

I get your point, but 1) the people at France TV thought the French people would find it cool, too; 2) they assumed that Sumo wrestlers were among the "random Japanese things" their viewers would recognize without saying "Quoi??"  Notice the Sumo wrestler didn't act like a "fat guy in diapers"; they played against the stereotype, which is what made it cool.

 

3 hours ago, nelimw said:

Bruh, that sumo wrestler sprinting across the rice field was dope. And then he hit the fade away with the cabbage?!? *mind blown* I wish we had this commercial in the states! 

It was all super cool, the whole theme of woodblock prints. I liked the rock climber reaching back into his mawashi for chalk, LOL. All of the scenes were well done and inspiring, and a super athlete rikishi as the star. Très bien!

[Eikokurai 3,433]

On 17/08/2021 at 10:07, Asashosakari said:

If anything, a big difference to 1998 is that sumo has arguably been relegated down the list of "typically Japanese" things that Western people will first think of when prompted. Both manga / anime and Japanese computer / video games were still firmly in the "for kids only" niche two and a half decades ago, J-pop was a complete non-entity in the West, Japanese baseball was on almost nobody's radar before Ichiro came to MLB (2001, to save you the looking-up), Japanese pro wrestling has gone from something only a handful of tape trading fans obsessed over to having a TV deal in the US, etc. etc..

Japanese football too, with several Japanese players signing for Premier League clubs in England (to varying degrees of success), bringing more attention to the J-League quality. Across Asia, Japanese teams are known as some of the strongest in the Champion’s League.

Japan has also emerged as a nation of note in rugby, having its best ever tournaments at the last two World Cups (including hosting the 2019 edition) and its domestic Top League is now one of the best attended and highest paying domestic leagues in the world, drawing in star players from New Zealand and Australia.

Sumo as a sport rather than cultural heritage probably ranks fourth for many people. Arguably even fifth, as Japanese judoka dominate judo.

Then there’s Japanese films. What Westerner hasn’t heard of Battle Royale, The Ring, Audition, etc? Japanese horror has made its mark on world cinema. Japanese detective literature is also popular, with many titles now translated into English and other languages, and of course who can forget Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto?

Edited August 19, 2021 by Eikokurai