Sumo

2023-02-24 00:00:00 / episode: 39

0:00

Script

Sumo, you know, I've lived in Japan for over 20 years and I still haven't seen a sumo competition.

I haven't seen one professionally.

I haven't seen even a volunteer or amateur sumo, although I'm sure people still like to fight the sumo sort of recreational E it's kind of a hallmark of Japanese tradition.

Today, I'd like to talk a little bit about the history, the techniques and the culture of sumo, but not too deeply.

I guess sumo goes back a couple of 1000 years close to the origin of Japan and there were two guys know Minoso and Toma and I'm not sure if I said that with a good pronunciation, but these were two big powerful guys and they wanted to prove which one was better.

So they had a big fight in front of the emperor at the time and that was the start of sumo or so they say, other people say sumo starts as a way to purify things to appease the gods.

Anyway, some of the techniques of sumo, there's lots of them.

I did a little search on sumo techniques and there's tons of techniques so I can't talk about them all.

But one of the simplest ones is something called Iori kitty and that seems very straightforward.

You just push your opponent straight out of the ring, you know, the sumo has a ring and when the other guy goes out you win.

So that was one, another one was Oshi Dashi.

Now that's a little bit different because you're gonna smash into your opponent with great shocking force and then you're gonna knock him off balance and that will lead to a victory for you.

The next one was, was kind of interesting because it doesn't involve the smashing and pushing.

It involves grabbing the belt and flipping your opponent.

So kind of a different technique altogether, wow, I've been talking for almost a full two minutes and I haven't even started to talk about the culture.

There's all sorts of interesting things like the stepping that the sumo wrestlers do chicana stepping is what I found and the drinking the water before they actually do the fight that was called, What did they say, Shikata Mizzou And then the salt, that's the most famous or iconic, iconic symbol of sumo wrestling when they're throwing the salt around.

Salt has very special properties in the sumo wrestling tradition.

I'd like to tell you more, but I'm afraid that my time has come to an end.

However, if you want go and do a little bit of research about sumo for yourself, it's really interesting