Sumo, Soccer, Sounds

This Friday I went to the oldest sumo tournament in Japan.

Glory days...

However, that initially exciting sentence should be tempered. While the Hakui tournament is indeed the oldest of its kind, it's become quite small in scale compared to its beginnings. It's more of an amateur exhibition. Still, it was pretty cool to see real sumo in person, sitting 20 feet from an the ring outdoors in the middle of the woods.

When some of the really big guys were thrown down, I could feel the vibration under me.

Something a bit odd and disappointing is that the final match, which pits the winner of the amateur competition against an ex-professional, is a set-up. At the end, the two sumo fall out of the ring at the same time, causing a "controversy" between the judges, who then declare it a tie. I guess that's because of the nature of the tournament now, but also I heard that thrown matches are pretty common in sumo--not because of gambling, but to help out other wrestlers and to maintain the ranking system. All about saving face, I guess.



Friday night I spent the night with a friend in Nanao (an hour and a half north of Kanazawa) to be up in time for soccer practice. Next weekend we'll compete in a tournament with JETs from prefectures across the country in Nagano. Apparently we get to use the same fields the US national team trained on for the World Cup in Japan. Incredible.

I just came back from a concert by a German experimental pianist named Hauschka in a temple near the Kanazawa train station. Me and a couple friends heard about it from a Japanese bartender, and it was pretty unique--there were only 100 tickets sold, and we were definitely the only non-Japanese there besides Hauschka himself. Again, the travel and cultural interchange involved to make that experience possible is striking.

Have wonderful weeks as we move into October, catch up on my Osaka pictures, and I'll check back in in a week after Nagano. I appreciate any and all news from home, so drop me a line if stuff is going on.

And use complex, nuanced, native English, I'm already losing some of mine!