London koen- October 2025

[Morning 99]

The awards including the trophy had Sakura petals in a wheel shape

Edited Monday at 09:42 by Morning

[ViscountessNivlac 35]

I was in the Royal Albert Hall for the last two days. Up in the nosebleeds on Saturday (I still had a pretty good view) and then in the stalls on the southwest corner of the dohyo on Sunday (which was a phenomonal view).

 

I have to concede that the inaugural two tsuridashis on Wednesday shattered some illusions I had regarding what I was going to see, but once I was there in-person it didn't matter. That was probably one of the greatest weekends of my life so far. Onosato's speech was a personal highlight. I had no idea what was coming when the 'Yokozuna Onosato will now address the audience' announcement was made, but I thought whatever it was was going to be spectacular and it was.

 

I wonder if they'll have Hoshoryu read some French in Paris - or will it just be the Y1E at the time rather than a rotation?

[Heather82Cs 15]

33 minutes ago, ViscountessNivlac said:

I was in the Royal Albert Hall for the last two days. Up in the nosebleeds on Saturday (I still had a pretty good view) and then in the stalls on the southwest corner of the dohyo on Sunday (which was a phenomonal view).

 

I have to concede that the inaugural two tsuridashis on Wednesday shattered some illusions I had regarding what I was going to see, but once I was there in-person it didn't matter. That was probably one of the greatest weekends of my life so far. Onosato's speech was a personal highlight. I had no idea what was coming when the 'Yokozuna Onosato will now address the audience' announcement was made, but I thought whatever it was was going to be spectacular and it was.

 

I wonder if they'll have Hoshoryu read some French in Paris - or will it just be the Y1E at the time rather than a rotation?

I was low key worried he was gonna ask for a rematch...

[Kintamayama 47,222]

3 hours ago, RabidJohn said:

However, I do believe that the majority of attendees this time were sumo fans rather than first-time gawkers, simply because of the votes for Ura.

 

I would vote for Ura without ever hearing about him before. He's alive, more than the others, and going by that tsutaezori alone, I would give him the nod. All his bouts had a certain twist to them. And he has a pink diaper. Judging by what I have seen on social media (and I've seen quite a lot), there were a ton of new fans who never saw sumo before, but that's just an impression, no facts to rely on. I'd say 70% of the spectators were newbies. I also say no more than 60,000 to 80,000 foreign fans who are really into sumo (based on a hunch, and exaggerated) , worldwide at present. Maybe 5000 of them made the journey or attended. 

[Leoben 174]

Regardless of the quality of the bouts, it's amazing that Sumo sold 27,000 tickets in London. Maybe this will finally force the Kyokai to take notice of the potential of the international market.

[Reonito 1,781]

9 hours ago, Asashosakari said:

Where's that data from? Yobimodoshi? Nodowa?!

Oh my. I copied your daily results into google sheets, made a histogram, and the asked it to convert it to a list. I checked the ones near the top and they looked fine, but apparently Gemini artificial "intelligence" exercised some creative license further down the list. Lesson learned, but now I am terrified—people are using it as a routine business tool and not thinking hallucinations can creep in just like they do with chatbots.

Here's doing it right (I hope!):

yorikiri	33
uwatenage	14
tsuridashi	7
tsukiotoshi	6
oshidashi	6
shitatenage	5
okuridashi	5
tsukidashi	4
sukuinage	3
hikiotoshi	3
kainahineri	2
uwatedashinage	1
utchari	1
uchimuso	1
tsutaezori	1
tsuriotoshi	1
shitatehineri	1
shitatedashinage	1
okuritsuridashi	1
okurinage	1
kotenage	1
kirikaeshi	1
hatakikomi	1

[Reonito 1,781]

6 hours ago, RabidJohn said:

Ura's tsutaezori is missing from the list.

Corrected (with explanation) above.

[Yamanashi 4,076]

6 hours ago, Bunbukuchagama said:

Hiro didn't keep insisting on it being real while it was clearly scripted puroresu-style

Get a WWE crowd and they would think it's just fine [though they'd be suspicious that the kimarite list didn't include any Piledrivers].

[Reonito 1,781]

3 minutes ago, Yamanashi said:

Get a WWE crowd and they would think it's just fine [though they'd be suspicious that the kimarite list didn't include any Piledrivers].

Tsuriotoshi is probably the closest.

[Yarimotsu 642]

2 hours ago, Reonito said:

apparently Gemini artificial "intelligence" exercised some creative license further down the list. Lesson learned, but now I am terrified—people are using it as a routine business tool and not thinking hallucinations can creep in just like they do with chatbots.

Off topic, but I saw one last week where some guy asked ChatGPT if it "made up" some results after he requested it parse a CSV file and write up conclusions about the data. He was only a little suspicious because the numbers seemed really good - ChatGPT's reply was that it hadn't actually managed to open the file.

Of course the term "AI" is the buzzword here, and should be ignored - these are ultimately Large Language Models (LLMs) with ever-changing and really unknowable parameters applied to give a realistic-sounding reply - ultimately they are searching for the most likely next word, not thinking about a problem and creating a logical pathway to a resolution. Use at your own risk.

EDIT: I am trying to be careful with my wording here. What I also wanted to make clear is that I really don't think the term "hallucinations" is appropriate; to me it implies logical thought is the norm for an LLM and the results that don't go well are some kind of hiccup. 

Edited Monday at 17:41 by Yarimotsu

[Reonito 1,781]

1 minute ago, Yarimotsu said:

Of course the term "AI" is the buzzword here, and should be ignored - these are ultimately Large Language Models (LLMs) with ever-changing and really unknowable parameters applied to give a realistic-sounding reply - ultimately they are searching for the most likely next word, not thinking about a problem and creating a logical pathway to a resolution. Use at your own risk.

Absolutely, I just didn't realize this is what happened in google sheets when you ask for assistance.

[nagora 89]

2 hours ago, Reonito said:

Oh my. I copied your daily results into google sheets, made a histogram, and the asked it to convert it to a list. I checked the ones near the top and they looked fine, but apparently Gemini artificial "intelligence" exercised some creative license further down the list. Lesson learned, but now I am terrified—people are using it as a routine business tool and not thinking hallucinations can creep in just like they do with chatbots.

They're all the same - from GPT down. They're not intelligent and the way they work is by guessing what the answer is. That's it - they guess. The trick is that they make very, very good guesses most of the time. But if they don't know, they keep on guessing instead of saying "I don't know". 

They speed your work up if you already know the answer and need an assistant who can type faster and only needs some correction afterwards but you should never ever use them if you don't have some way to check the output.

Anyway. The Basho was fun; much of it was obviously staged or at least not serious. A 15 day international event, though, is simply impossible, sadly for all sorts of reasons so I don't know where they go from this unless it's to license the coverage more widely. Which would be nice too.

Edited Monday at 17:43 by nagora
Typo

[Reonito 1,781]

7 minutes ago, nagora said:

They're all the same - from GPT down. They're not intelligent and the way they work is by guessing what the answer is. That's it - they guess. The trick is that they make very, very good guesses most of the time. But if they don't know, they keep on guessing instead of saying "I don't know". 

I'm fully aware of this, and I still got led astray because it's built into sheets in such a subtle way.

[Yarimotsu 642]

I don't see it talked about all that much, definitely it was mentioned by the regular information collators here as jungyo started up again after covid, but the sumo calendar is really already completely booked. If they want to appeal to overseas fans (in person) even more, there would have to be unacceptable cancellations or changes back home. You can see this with things like Real Madrid playing exhibitions all over the globe, with sports teams from each brand of football I can think of constantly trying to play games overseas and reach some new market - the sacrifices involved for the individual team are not a great compromise in the long term and the only way such things really take off are if local clubs are founded and get immensely popular.

I of course appreciate that sumo is more than a sport (I'd also argue that particularly in the case of soccer, this is also true) and that increased commercialisation and global professionalisation could only taint and inevitably reduce any real cultural impact in favour of somewhat empty symbolism. I'd also posit that the American minders post-WW2 and their facilitation of sumo in such a direction has already had that same effect on (the NSK and) Ozumo we all already enjoy. I'd definitely concede that the road to a semi-professional sumo league of any kind outside of Japan is a long and rocky one. At the same time, along with global viewership of Ozumo increasing, so too is participation in amateur sumo and presumably the level of competition is also increasing. Maybe it won't be too long until there can be travelling teams of sumo wrestlers who provide fairly authentic sumo to the masses on various continents. That starts to sound like the beginnings of professional baseball to me.

[Octofuji 431]

10 hours ago, Kintamayama said:

The sumo fans know this is a tournament only in name, so no letdown there.

Some sumo fans knew :)

I think the risk of injury is being overstated a bit. Quite apart from the serious bouts that these guys do in training and at degeiko, I've seen moshiai at jungyos that have a lot of bite to them, and the lower rankers doing moshiai beforehand on Saturday were really going for it.

But of course serious bouts will be far less of a spectacle, and I think that's the primary reason for the choreography.

(As an aside, it's interesting how protective the kyokai are suddenly perceived to be when it comes to wrestlers getting injured  ).

All this has made me wonder about e.g. the Fuji TV tournament and whether that's equally scripted too. In which case I feel even sadder for Takayasu...

All in all though, it was a fantastic night out and the Royal Albert Hall was just perfect as a venue.

[Asashosakari 20,243]

I think something needs to be clarified. Nobody was "scripting" an entire tournament here - I was really hoping people don't believe that the board of directors somehow cares who finishes 3-2 and who gets a 2-3, but I've seen the sentiment often enough in various places now that it looks to be in need of debunking. Obviously there's some sort of broad expectation of where the event as a whole "should" be going, and some individual rikishi - say, the ones facing a yokozuna - are likely expected to understand what their role is. But clearly nobody's telling the two rikishi in a random undercard bout who's winning and losing or how they're supposed to go about it, and that explains the highly uneven amount of "exhibition-ness" on display from one bout to the next. For most bouts it's almost definitely each pair of rikishi who decide for themselves what they want to show. (As an aside, obviously nobody who's "holding the book" would have ordered those two credibility-straining tsuridashi to happen right off the bat...that was as clear an indication as anything that there's no grand plan to the proceedings.)

[Kintamayama 47,222]

8 minutes ago, Octofuji said:

Some sumo fans knew :)

I think the risk of injury is being overstated a bit. Quite apart from the serious bouts that these guys do in training and at degeiko, I've seen moshiai at jungyos that have a lot of bite to them, and the lower rankers doing moshiai beforehand on Saturday were really going for it.

(As an aside, it's interesting how protective the kyokai are suddenly perceived to be when it comes to wrestlers getting injured  ).

All this has made me wonder about e.g. the Fuji TV tournament and whether that's equally scripted too. In which case I feel even sadder for Takayasu...

All in all though, it was a fantastic night out and the Royal Albert Hall was just perfect as a venue.

When I say jungyo, I mean the torikumi at the end of each day, when nobody goes all out. Moshiai is a different animal-that is serious keiko.

As for protective, they are assets, any injury to any top guys is not good for business. Getting injured during a basho is something totally different.

The one-day knockout tournaments are usually for real, as they usually have  substantial money prizes but the jury is out on that.

I'm pretty sure it was fantastic- just seeing them out of their  comfort zone walking around London and smiling like little kids in Disneyland for the first time was worth it. Tobizaru cycling in the streets of London after missing his bus was priceless.

[Gurowake 4,151]

24 minutes ago, Octofuji said:

All this has made me wonder about e.g. the Fuji TV tournament

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.

Edited Monday at 18:32 by Gurowake

[Koorifuu 1,120]

1 hour ago, Asashosakari said:

(As an aside, obviously nobody who's "holding the book" would have ordered those two credibility-straining tsuridashi to happen right off the bat...that was as clear an indication as anything that there's no grand plan to the proceedings.)

I feel very strongly that it's the opposite. To me, if anything served as evidence of scripting, it clearly was the opening bout.

An (apparent) incredible display of power to wow the unsuspecting curious visitors off the bat and raise the hype for the rest of the event - much like pro wrestling's events usually got their opener as the second most anticipated match of the card, after the main event. Grab your spectators from the start.

...Which they couldn't do here without compromising basic torikumi principles, that I assume goes beyond what they are willing to do.

Much like @Kintamayama's latest reply to me - which I'm yet to reply to - I feel that many people in this forum substantially overestimate how much understanding the average event attendant has on what ozumo is and what was going on. I'm absolutely certain at least 90% of the crowd was amazed and looking forward for more, whilst only 10% recognised it as exaggerated.

You can't lose credibility if your target audience isn't aware of what you're doing. Now if they went for full blown shokkiri, that'd be another story.

Edited Monday at 19:52 by Koorifuu

[Kajiyanosho 66]

It will take me some time to properly recover from the crazy week. I shared some thoughts in a few lines here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/articles/cy7egpe5jg1o

I was there every night and interviewed a lot of people, from travelling super-fans who read this forum to showbiz VIPs who were just learning what sumo was. There were hundreds and hundreds of Japanese people every night. Thousands of sumo fans. I obviously have no idea about actual proportions, but I certainly had the impression that the majority of people in the auditorium had seen sumo before (in some form). I might be wrong, of course. 

All sumo fans / people with prior knowledge I spoke to (and I spoke to a lot of them) recognised the obvious difference with a 'real' basho. I appreciate that seeing it on TV would have been a completely different experience for sumo experts. But it was certainly a great experience for people there, and for the mostly completely new viewers at home. 

Hearing the yobidashi calling the 'London basho' on the first day, the final bow with all rikishi around the dohyo, Takayasu's tsuppari and Aonishiki's flip, and a million of other goose bumps moments were way more memorable to me than having too many tsuridashi. It's not my role to "defend" the event or the Kyokai, or wonder whether matches were scripted or not - just expressing what I imagine being the view of the majority of sumo fans who were there. If anything, they were more annoyed by the usual talk about rikishi's size as a comical thing, quantity of rice, reinforced toilets, etc. 

P.S. telling Hiro that I was about to do this was quite a moment too LOL https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/live/c62lp6835p1t?post=asset%3A05290e9c-a7d5-4069-8938-6027b2bf1007#post

[nagora 89]

2 hours ago, Yarimotsu said:

That starts to sound like the beginnings of professional baseball to me.

That's hardly a ringing endorsement given how few countries have any professional participation in baseball!

If the Sumo Association thinks this basho shows them something positive then they need to start making the sumo they have more accessible. Their official app doesn't work here in the UK; NHK World shows highlights but how many people have NHK World? As far as I recall that option to watch more sumo wasn't mentioned this week - although I did FF quite a bit through the talking so maybe I missed it.

But we're a long, long way from International Sumo and I don't think we'll ever get there. Even in Japan, Sumo as we know it with its strict beya system is struggling to get recruits; very few other countries have the culture to even think about that approach. Where are the International rikishi going to come from? How could an alternative system get approval from Japan without undermining the "true" Japanese sumo system?

This is a whole other argument, though.

45 minutes ago, Koorifuu said:

Much like @Kintamayama's latest reply to me - which I'm yet to reply to - I feel that many people in this forum substantially overestimate how much understanding the average event attendant has on what ozumo is and what was going on. I'm absolutely certain at least 90% of the crowd was amazed and looking forward for more, whilst only 10% recognised it as exaggerated.

You can't lose credibility if your target audience isn't aware of what you're doing. Now if they went for full blown shokkiri, that'd be another story.

The tickets were wildly expensive; at most there was 50% newbies (i.e., "I've got two tickets to the Sumo so we can go together!" "Oh, good.") I really don't see many people casually putting down that sort of money to sit for hours watching something they don't really understand or have an interest in.

[Asashosakari 20,243]

54 minutes ago, Koorifuu said:

I feel very strongly that it's the opposite. To me, if anything served as evidence of scripting, it clearly was the opening bout.

An (apparent) incredible display of power to wow the unsuspecting curious visitors off the bat and raise the hype for the rest of the event - much like pro wrestling's events usually got their opener as the second most anticipated match of the card, after the main event. Grab your spectators from the start.

To clarify, my point was specifically about doing two of them like that.

[Koorifuu 1,120]

5 minutes ago, nagora said:

The tickets were wildly expensive; at most there was 50% newbies (i.e., "I've got two tickets to the Sumo so we can go together!" "Oh, good.") I really don't see many people casually putting down that sort of money to sit for hours watching something they don't really understand or have an interest in.

You underestimate how much disposable income the average middle aged Londoner got.

I stood on the cheapest seats on Wednesday. Fair enough, based on the mood and chatter, most people in that area knew most rikishi - but still thought of it as a competitive tournament.

Yesterday, however, I was slotted in a box. The demographic was wildly different - older upper class folks who acted like they'd gone out to the latest attraction / oddity in town. Out of 20 people around me, only a couple could name a few wrestlers.

[Koorifuu 1,120]

3 minutes ago, Asashosakari said:

To clarify, my point was specifically about doing two of them like that.

Fair.

To me, it felt Kotoeiho and Oshoumi went in there with a clear assignment, but Shishi and Hitoshi just happened to go with the flow.

[Octofuji 431]

The people around us didn't know much about sumo (although they did know Ura!) and absolutely loved it. 

Conversely there four big guys in the circle below equipped with towels etc... who looked like they might even be amateur wrestlers. They must have known what they were seeing wasn't real, but were able to get psyched up for it in the way that fans of pro wrestling do.

So even if 90% of the audience were acting like it was all real, a lot of them may be playing along too.

EDIT: @Koorifu I see know you have empirical evidence from a box and weren't just observing the crowd. (We snuck into a box on Saturday before the doors opened, you got an amazing view from there!)

 

Edited Monday at 20:39 by Octofuji