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| Intriguing post-breakfast drink. Bought it solely because it looked carbonated but it told me I should shake it? |
On day 3 we decided that our punishing schedule had been enough to keep jet lag at bay a little longer, and took a slightly more relaxed day out. We went to check out the
sumo as there's only a handful of official tournaments in Japan each year, and even fewer are in Tokyo. So the fact that one happened to coincide with the dates of our trip was quite serendipitous indeed.
We headed off to Ryogoku, home of the Ryogoku Kokugikan (try saying that 5 times fast) bright and early to get ourselves some day tickets, the cheapest but also the most likely to sell out.
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| The whole station seems to have been dedicated to sumo. |
Once we were through the ticket barrier, we could see all kinds of old paintings of sumo tournaments, as well as what we later found out were probably photos of the current yokozuna or 'Grand Champions'. To become Grand Champion you have to win 2 tournaments in a row. There are a lot of stages to each tournament and a lot of participants, so to win once, let alone twice, is an intense feat in itself. Testament to this is the fact that there are currently only 2 or 3 Grand Champions still competing and only 71 have been named in the last 300 years!
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| Yokozuna handprints. They are HUGE. Interesting to see how they get bigger over time. |
There's also a cute homemade height chart, so you can see how you measure up to previous
yokozuna. Annoyingly, I'm taller than all but one of them. Sigh. Again, it was interesting to see how obviously genetics, diet and environment have made increasingly bigger contenders.
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| 67th yokozuna Musashimaru Koyo and Ann-Marie. 6'3", 518lb vs a kitten. Beast. |
