estrangeiro

My experience was much like Oshirokita. I was working in Japan and would come across sumo, but didn't know anything about it. But I enjoy martial arts and sports in general, so I didn't have to understand it to find it interesting. At the time I first went to the local bookstore, the other books looked like books you find on coffeetables , lots of pretty pictures but not necessarily something you sit down and read. So I bought 'The Joy of Sumo' and enjoyed it for what it was, a light-hearted, quick read that introduced sumo to curious (US) sports fans. If you fall in that category, you'd likely enjoy reading this book before devling into meatier tomes.

First, my thanks to the participants of this board. I'm a casual fan that tries to keep up with the current basho broadcast on NHK and drop by these forums on occassion for more perspective and insight, which can be found in abundance. Thank you. From what I can tell, ozumo is similar to most martial arts. I'm in a martial arts now and have been involved with others at different points throughout my life. There are adherents and fans that believe deeply and put a lot of stock in the spiritual/art side of martial arts. People for whom martial arts is very much of a way of life. And for others it tends to be more a means to an ends, whether that be being a better fighter, getting in better shape, more self confidence, having authority, making friends, making money, fame, etc. All of the professional martial artists that I have talked to claim to 'buy into' the spiritual/art side of their martial art. But as they climb the ladder within their respective martial art realize that it is at heart a business. And because they themselves love their martial art and want to make it their livelihood, find some way to conform to their industry while trying to retain what they love about it. (You could cynically of course argue that the spiritual/art side is attracitive to many of their students or their students' parents, so this is good for business, but I belive the people I've talked to are sincere as well) The interesting thing about sports is that to some degree or another you can find this phenomenon in all of them, I think. You talk to most coaches and they will preach that their sport is more than just winning and losing, that it is about doing things a certain way, about learning to be sucessful at life. To listen to golfers talk about golf sometimes, you'd think that if everyone could develop a good golf game, then the whole world would be ethical, disciplined and successful. I would argue that many martial arts have a more robust spritual/art side than most sports and that ozumo in particlar may have the most robust of all. But at the end of the day ozumo, like the rest, is first and foremost a business. You could say that the pressure on Asa that caused him to retire would in the short term hurt the ozumo industry. Yet in the NFL (the most dominant sports league in the US) the comissioner has begun to be quite strict in discipling players for repeated off the field conduct. He started doing this not out of some great sense of morality, but because he was savy enough to realize that off the field incidences were begining to damage the NFL brand. How much more so in spiritually heavy ozumo where there appear to be many adherents/fans/consumers of ozumo who do so not for the sport itself, but for the cultural and artisitic resonance. I look forward to others' comments.