Professional sumo in Japan is probably most closely akin to baseball in America in that nationalistic nerds take immense pride in the history of the sport and dedicate far more mental matter to over-analyzing it than is probably necessary. They only hold six tournaments a year, basically every other month, and I've always kind of been fascinated by it, as a kid when it still came on NBC sports on weekends from time to time. I guess it got retriggered a few years back when the Necro Butcher was on his first extended working trip of Japan and he sent me an email talking about how he was playing fantasy sumo online a lot. I looked for sumo shit then, but not much was going on.
For some reason though, I started looking it up a month or so ago, and found assorted online forums and places to keep up with the shit and learn about it. I remember a few years back when Akebono was the big shit in Japanese sumo that it was a big controversy, the Polynesian sumos as opposed to traditional Japanese sumos. Well, that argument's gone now, as the top couple stars (Asashoryu and Hakuho) are from Mongolia, and catch the same flack to an extent for not being Japs. But what caught my interest more than anything was this dude Kotooshu, who is a white dude, from Bulgaria, who I guess you could rank as probably the #3 dude in sumo right now.
First off, online sumo forums are like any online thing with message boards and internet fans - sad, depressing places with ridiculous nerd projects involving formulas and ratios to mathematically calculate who is more awesome than who else. I'm not sure what it is about the internet that attracts these types to physical things they could never hope to imitate in real life, but it does.
But as for Kotooshu, he's like the pre-eminent player in an influx of eastern Europeans starting to infiltrate the sumo sport's upper echelon. Kotooshu - white dude name Kaloyan Mahlyanov - was an old school style wrestler who was a national amateur wrestling star, and had hoped to compete for Bulgaria in the 2000 Olympics, but he got bigger than the highest weight limit for the sport, so he turned to sumo. Shady sumo Japs (the sport is mad hooked up with the yellow mafia) funneled money to Bulgaria to get the kid into a certain stable of sumos, where Kotooshu ("koto" is his stable name, and "osho" means Europe) flew through the lower five classes of sumo, getting to the top rank in 11 tournaments, or just under two years - the fastest ascent ever. Only eight tournaments later, he was promoted to ozeki class, which is the second highest rank of sumo possible. The highest - yokozuna - is rarely handed out and only given to dudes who are expected to contend for the championship every tournament. In the sense of sumo, contending means if you finish below say the top three or four guys, you bring shame to your yokozuna status. Anyways, Kotooshu was the first Euro to ever attain ozeki class, and he actually won a grand sumo tourney in the summer of 2008. Just last month, while I was actually looking up results every day of the Nagoya tournament, he came in second behind Hakuho, but he had a questionable loss during the tournament that put him one loss behind Hakuho.
Since that tournament ended, he flew back to Bulgaria to get some high ass national awards, and be considered a hero and source of pride for Bulgarians everywhere. Plus, with his hair done up in standard sumo style and his hairy ass chest, he reminds me of John Belushi's samurai cook character. But also, knowing sumo's yakuza connections, and also knowing how wide open and mafioso eastern Europe has been since the fall of the Soviet Union, the emergence of eastern Euro sumo wrestlers is really intriguing to me. I'm sure there's insane stories galore behind it all, when you mash two insane sub-cultures together like sumo and mafia, and then spike it with the environmental psychology of some eastern Europeans. August is a down month, but September will bring back the last Tokyo tournament of the year, and I'm sure I'll again be following closely Kotooshu's white dude dominance of a sport where giant dudes use sheer girth and strength to move each other around. It's such a simple assed sport, yet ridiculously overloaded with mysterious traditions that go back to things half the people who see it have little idea what it means, that it's hard not to love. It's like alpha-male religious extremism that allows and even encourages drunkenness and womanizing.
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