Grand Sumo Breakdown - John Gunning Interview

[Monnodo 60]

9 minutes ago, Seiyashi said:

I wonder whether this has anything to do with the average experience of the fandom in each form of media. Mailing lists and forums are much older than Reddit, Discord, and YouTube, and would tend to be populated by more seasoned fans who have followed sumo since before the advent of the Internet. Reddit and Discord I would imagine are more populated by relative newcomers to sumo fandom, and I would also imagine that there would be more overlap between these newer media channels than with mailing lists and forums.

I think that is a part of it and another aspect would be that you can just happen to get into sumo by "accident" via reddit and youtube for example because of some cross post or recommendation etc. so the fans tend to be newer. If you found the sumo forum you have at least some further interest in sumo.

[Jejima 1,415]

4 hours ago, Inside Sport Japan said:

These takes strike us as interesting. When it comes to sport based podcasts, that morning talk show radio type atmosphere is exactly why many listen to them etc....

You make good points, and I listen to podcasts mostly for entertainment, rather than education.

However, I fear that my quotes above look a little out of context.

They were....

 

 I don't think that I learnt that much.

This was in regards to the near hour long discussion of someone mostly comparing his version of GTB entry with the real banzuke, rikishi by rikishi.   My own entry to the GTB got a similar score to his - which was average among all entrants. I wonder if anybody would be interested in hearing me explain rikishi-by-rikishi where I was correct, and where I went wrong? 

 My main gripe with this one is that I think I am more knowledgeable than the hosts in regards to sumo as a whole 

Let us imagine that it had been John Gunning and Murray Johnson speculating on a TV broadcast over which of the two Yokozunas would be given the honour of the first Yokozuna dohyo-iri of the basho - or on which the day the two brothers were likely to be fighting against each other. It would not happen because they would either know the answer automatically (as I did), or they would have researched prior to recording. Or if they had made a speculation, later found to be incorrect, I am sure that they would correct at the earliest opportunity, perhaps on a subsequent show? With a podcast, one can even check speculation prior to release, and edit accordingly. 

I realise that these are fan-made podcasts, and I do think that they do a very good job as such (better than what I could do, that's for certain). But it seems to me that all of them are trying to be as professional as possible. Tighter editing, additions of 'stings' to break up segments, a little more research prior to recording would make something already good into something that could be even better. Those are my honest opinions, as somebody who listens to several podcasts every day 

I would be interested to hear what others on this forum think of the three podcasts mentioned? Am I being over-harsh?

Anyway, I will certainly be listening to each of the podcasts offerings over the upcoming basho. 

[Kaminariyuki 500]

5 hours ago, Inside Sport Japan said:

Perhaps we presented them in the wrong way in the initial post.

I should have added that I was glad to give them a go. Maybe in a different mood, I might be more receptive. My post also looks a little too honest. Folks appreciate all sorts of different angles and I often find myself outside the norm. It is not unusual that I find wildly popular televisions series to be completely unpalatable.

[Seiyashi 4,108]

Maybe it goes back to what Monnodo said: if you find this forum, you're quite a ways down the sumo knowledge rabbit hole, so podcasts aimed at more casual members of the sumo fandom will be relatively less well received among us. It's not too far a stretch to say that some senior members of this forum probably have more experience following sumo than the podcast hosts.

That's not to say that the podcast isn't great as a podcast, but to take it to a very extreme comparison, content-wise it's like showing The Count's segments on Sesame Street to career accountants.

Edited September 3, 2021 by Seiyashi

[ryafuji 815]

1 hour ago, Seiyashi said:

I wonder whether this has anything to do with the average experience of the fandom in each form of media. Mailing lists and forums are much older than Reddit, Discord, and YouTube, and would tend to be populated by more seasoned fans who have followed sumo since before the advent of the Internet. Reddit and Discord I would imagine are more populated by relative newcomers to sumo fandom, and I would also imagine that there would be more overlap between these newer media channels than with mailing lists and forums.

When discussion forums come up in Grand Sumo Breakdown they always refer to Reddit sumo rather than this forum, which seems weird to me, but then I think I am about 15 years older than these guys... they know about Kintamayama, but probably more because of his YouTube videos than his posts here. 

[Kaminariyuki 500]

17 minutes ago, ryafuji said:

When discussion forums come up in Grand Sumo Breakdown they always refer to Reddit sumo rather than this forum, which seems weird to me, but then I think I am about 15 years older than these guys... they know about Kintamayama, but probably more because of his YouTube videos than his posts here. 

Well, everyone knows O-Moti-sama... He even has a symphony back up band now.

When I've occasionally read tachiai or the comments on Chris Gould's YouTubes, I find myself ever so grateful for sumo forum. You folks entertain me, educate me and only rarely disappoint in a major way or absolutely piss me off.

[Yamanashi 3,904]

Personally, I got interested the way (I suspect) many English-speaking fans do nowadays: through the Makuuchi highlights on NHK, featuring Murray, John, Hiro, etc.  I didn't find much help on the internet until I ran across tachiai.org.  It was there that I heard about Sumo Forum.

Like a couple of others have mentioned, I get irritated by most reddit-type sites: too much bloviating without much apparent knowledge (this is the average; there are lots of diamonds in that rough).  Also, I've never been able to give a block of time over to a podcast (video or not); just my preference, but it's too much like listening to a Let's Play of watching sumo.

Sumo Forum was intimidating at first, but it has allowed me to interact with a variety of nice people, most of whom know much more than I do.

[Octofuji 369]

I agree a lot of it is probably down to age. I do listen to a few podcasts but they are fairly serious discussions between people who really know their stuff.

I don't really understand the appeal of listening to all the banter between people who I don't even know. It feels a bit like going to the pub on your own and listening to someone else's conversation. Similarly with product reviews on YouTube I just wish they would get on with it!

Jason's videos on YouTube hit the sweet spot for me and if I wanted to consume sure light-hearted sumo media I would probably go there rather than a podcast.

[themistyseas 242]

On 03/09/2021 at 06:58, Jejima said:

But it seems to me that all of them are trying to be as professional as possible. Tighter editing, additions of 'stings' to break up segments, a little more research prior to recording would make something already good into something that could be even better. Those are my honest opinions, as somebody who listens to several podcasts every day 

 I would be interested to hear what others on this forum think of the three podcasts mentioned? Am I being over-harsh?

I don't think you're being over-harsh, but there are some tough realities with this stuff, especially in the last couple of years. The first one is that, at least for the one I'm on (which is not one of those three), we all record from vastly different locations, which means we've had to hone how it can work over the course of the past few years. Since we're not in the room together, we don't really shoot the shit once we start recording. So I think it takes time for it to improve.

For Tachiai, the idea was to make a companion piece to the written site content which some people like and some people don't, it's a different format but when we haven't done them, people will say "oh my god where did they go." I personally contribute a lot less written content than I used to, simply because a lot of my content (interviews, keiko, stuff happening at basho, etc) came from being in Japan - which isn't currently possible - which I think makes it harder to then deviate from the standard talking points when you're then doing a podcast. When you're there 4-5 basho a year, it makes it easier to discuss things that don't get covered elsewhere, and to make that interesting. So in the absence of that, I personally tried to at least develop as an analyst, so that I could give my opinions, because if you're not doing that, you're just regurgitating news stories or someone's scores in the previous basho, and I don't know how interesting that is. I listen to a lot of professionally done sports podcasts and they're done by people whose business it is to make them and have years of experience, so it's a hard to compare that to a fan made product - I think with experience everyone will improve, but all these folks presumably also have day jobs which limits how much they can necessarily put into it.

That leads to my second point, which is kind of more of a thought based on some of the other comments here. I come at it from a different angle than most because I work in (digital) entertainment, but I think the biggest reason currently for the fragmentation of the fanbase across different digital platforms is that no one's really been able to attack the sumo fan community with a business model. Even the NSK doesn't, which we all usually loathe to some degree. There was an explosion of online interest probably 2-3 years ago which has died down a bit for obvious reasons, but I do think that if you're able to build something and feed it with content people want, you'll attract a pretty decent audience regardless of the level of knowledge of the various fans. I think the reason it's fragmented as much as it is is definitely as a result of the variation in what the dominant platforms were when fans discovered sumo, but equally if someone really goes for it, I think that can be surmounted.

[Eikokurai 3,437]

On 03/09/2021 at 22:36, Seiyashi said:

Maybe it goes back to what Monnodo said: if you find this forum, you're quite a ways down the sumo knowledge rabbit hole, so podcasts aimed at more casual members of the sumo fandom will be relatively less well received among us. It's not too far a stretch to say that some senior members of this forum probably have more experience following sumo than the podcast hosts.

That's not to say that the podcast isn't great as a podcast, but to take it to a very extreme comparison, content-wise it's like showing The Count's segments on Sesame Street to career accountants.

This is a perennial ‘problem’ in sumo fandom. We’ve talked about it before on this forum. I have to switch off the chat on live-streams because it’s almost entirely people who have discovered the stream by accident and have no idea what they’re watching or relative newcomers asking the same questions over and over. Most content is pitched at these fans, whether it’s books, articles, YT videos, etc. They generally aim at teaching sumo to the uninitiated. It’s all good – we were there ourselves once – but I do feel that to better retain fans in the long term you need more advanced content that they can turn to once they’ve outgrown the Sumo 101 stuff. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a blog that would assume readers know sumo already, and even got as far as building the basic site, but committing to writing something takes the joy out of it. I know I spend as much time writing on here as it would take me to blog during a basho, but as I say, this is more free and I’m not obligated to contribute. 

[Seiyashi 4,108]

6 hours ago, Eikokurai said:

This is a perennial ‘problem’ in sumo fandom. We’ve talked about it before on this forum. I have to switch off the chat on live-streams because it’s almost entirely people who have discovered the stream by accident and have no idea what they’re watching or relative newcomers asking the same questions over and over. Most content is pitched at these fans, whether it’s books, articles, YT videos, etc. They generally aim at teaching sumo to the uninitiated. It’s all good – we were there ourselves once – but I do feel that to better retain fans in the long term you need more advanced content that they can turn to once they’ve outgrown the Sumo 101 stuff. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a blog that would assume readers know sumo already, and even got as far as building the basic site, but committing to writing something takes the joy out of it. I know I spend as much time writing on here as it would take me to blog during a basho, but as I say, this is more free and I’m not obligated to contribute. 

There's already a wealth of information on this forum, just that as a forum, it's not a very conducive medium to the easy organisation and cataloguing of information. A lot of information passes to new members by osmosis, as it were. I wonder whether pinned threads that serve as content indexes is a partial solution around this problem - something like that already sort of exists in the Sumo Information Pond but is far from being a one-stop shop for intermediate fans (and doesn't really catalogue the posts in the forum).

That said, the "intermediate knowledge" problem isn't unique to sumo fandom. It's relatively easy to get the 101s on things, but after that it gets much harder to look for appropriately-pitched material on any subject.

Edited September 6, 2021 by Seiyashi

[Seiyashi 4,108]

On 03/09/2021 at 22:41, ryafuji said:

When discussion forums come up in Grand Sumo Breakdown they always refer to Reddit sumo rather than this forum, which seems weird to me, but then I think I am about 15 years older than these guys... they know about Kintamayama, but probably more because of his YouTube videos than his posts here. 

It's a matter of growth. We can count on hands the number of days that go by before new members join, and we rarely get floods of members. On the other hand, our rate of retention, or at least significant engagement, is probably stronger than Reddit's.

Reddit on the other hand has various means to get the sumo sub to turn up on other people's feeds if they're already interested in related content (like MMA, Japanese culture, etc), but the chances that people stay and listen over time are a lot lower. If you were running a podcast and wanted/needed to drive traffic to your sites for the revenue, you pretty much have no choice but to cater to modern social media simply because of the numbers.

[Eikokurai 3,437]

On 06/09/2021 at 14:06, Seiyashi said:

That said, the "intermediate knowledge" problem isn't unique to sumo fandom. It's relatively easy to get the 101s on things, but after that it gets much harder to look for appropriately-pitched material on any subject.

Depends on how popular the sport is I think. If you follow a major sports league like the Premier League in England or NBA in the US, it’s very easy to find content ranging from 101 stuff up to pretty advanced game analysis, plus of course behind-the-scenes news fills all the airtime and column inches between games. Arguably, it’s over saturated. Sumo is probably like this for Japanese fans.

Edited September 7, 2021 by Eikokurai

[themistyseas 242]

5 hours ago, Eikokurai said:

If you follow a major sports league like the Premier League in England or NBA in the US, it’s very easy to find content ranging from 101 stuff up to pretty advanced game analysis, plus of course behind-the-scenes news fills all the airtime and column inches between games. Arguably, it’s over saturated. 

I'm sad it isn't just the case for sumo unfortunately, but across the board. I've put in years and many many miles studying sumo to understand it as best I can, but I still struggle with my NPB knowledge (and that's even after doing my best Kaisei impression and importing Purosupi for PS4 in Japanese!). But to your point, I'm a subscriber to the Athletic and the level of analysis on baseball or the premier league is just insane. I wish they would be able to incorporate global leagues that sometimes feed players into MLB like NPB, because it's all good writing about Ohtani, but you get more understanding about the achievement when you understand the league where he's come from, and how that league works, and it gives you a more full appreciation of the sport.

Hopefully they are able to take on this kind of feedback, but - bringing it back on topic - I think that broader sports media paying attention to leagues like NPB or the J-League when they're covering MLB or the premier/champions league could act as a gateway for folks to discover more of Japanese sport, like sumo. Both of those leagues are really unique experiences and if I had been a newcomer to Japanese sport when I discovered them I'd definitely want to know what else was out there.

[Tsuchinoninjin 1,276]

Its kind of tough to do bout by bout analysis in Sumo. For a 3 hour baseball game it makes sense to read a 5 minute article about it, discussing decisions made and key plays of those 3 hours. But, it is pretty impossible to write an analysis piece for a single Sumo bout that is shorter than the bout itself. At that point, why not just watch the bout 3 or 4 times? Nobody knows whats going through the rikishi heads, you can't really extract anything from the dosukoi soup interviews after the bout. Something like StatTrak would be cool for getting past dohyou positioning and COG calculations by computer vision but that's A LOT of work.

I'm not even sure you could fill a bingo card with the stereotypical analysis. Lets see: Needed to do more keiko, sumo is through the legs, accidentally pulled, inside grip, did his own sumo, didn't do his own sumo, turned the tables, ballet, errrm.

At least the English analysis is in good faith and generally tries to ascertain the real situation like in tachiai or grand sumo breakdown. Some of the Japanese analysis just doesn't make sense, like when Kisenosato was having his yokozuna troubles, there were pieces that blamed him not doing enough shiko or something else blatantly unrelated to the real reason.

[Yamanashi 3,904]

7 hours ago, Eikokurai said:

Depends on how popular the sport is I think. If you follow a major sports league like the Premier League in England or NBA in the US, it’s very easy to find content ranging from 101 stuff up to pretty advanced game analysis, plus of course behind-the-scenes news fills all the airtime and column inches between games. Arguably, it’s over saturated. Sumo is probably like this for Japanese fans.

Sumo has some Catch-22 scenarios wrt getting a significant fan base.  First, it seems to be waning in popularity even among Japanese viewers, but that's the core of their audience.  For foreigners, you may never get more than a niche audience of martial arts fans and Japanophiles.  All the big draw sports have kid's leagues and books for kids and kid sites, etc.  It appears Sumo is losing its kids appeal to other sports, as well.  Also, sumo as a sport is almost nonexistent outside of Japan, so there is very little chance of a sustaining foreign interest because of successful compatriots in the sport (Mongolia excepted, of course).

These are probably surmountable problems, but here's the Catch-22: they don't have the money.  Soccer (international football), football (American football), baseball, basketball all have contracts with private media groups that generate squidillions of (dollars, yens, Euros, ... ) for whatever they want to keep their sport popular.  They don't rely on ticket prices to keep themselves rich.  All Ozumo has is a contract with the NHK; imagine if tennis had to make do with broadcast rights from the BBC, or professional golf made its bread by relying on the PBS .

This all touches on the problem of online content.  The big sports have millions of fans, so there is a spectrum of knowledge levels with enough people in each subset to make content for that subset monetizeable.  Essentially all knowledgeable fans started out as noobies, though, so the place to start is with sources of low-level, informative, non-condescending content for people who don't know anything about Sumo, or have misconceptions about the sport, or who have an interest but can't get through the language and jargon barriers.