When Fat Worlds Collide

Tuesday and Wednesday this week were the evenings of the Takinouchi Festival in Kusu's Kitayamada neighborhood, where the sumo tournament was conducted. For me, the first night of the tournament did not go well, while the second was much better.



Both nights of the festival though were fantastically fun. A ton of my students came out for the night and while sumo matches were going on, in general, everyone over the age of twenty was huddled around steel drum fires watching them, leaving the long alley of festival food stalls inhabited only by nogoodnick teens. It was like Japanese Lord of the Flies. In fact, I should make a movie, no, anime out of that idea.

Back to sumo, the scope of this tournament and what it means for certain Kusu residents wasn't made entirely clear to me until Tuesday. Practicing with the town hall team last week was fun despite the ring rash and bruises--we batted light-hearted mocks back and forth while running full bore into each other and told dirty jokes over beers afterwards. I guess the closest parallel I could draw to what I thought the event was would be to the Bay to Breakers. You know, a bunch of people get together to have a fun-run, right?



But then you remember that even at the B2B there's the fifty or so guys near the front running for the prize money. They couldn't give two shits about what the guy dressed as the Queen Mum is here for, they've got a race to run. There were a few teams like that at the festival and it sort of leeched some of the merriment from it for me, especially when I faced them.

There were a ton of entrants for the two nights and I only actually had three matches, one on Tuesday and two Wednesday. The Tuesday one was just an embarrassing disaster that was as much a result of being a greenhorn as it was with being completely outclassed. The team we faced Tuesday ended up being the tournament's first place group, consisting of men tens of pounds heavier than anyone on our team and probably each with a decade or more of sumo experience. To make matters worse, some joker had made me the taisho, or team captain, meaning that I had to face their captain. Furthermore, in practice we didn't start the match until both wrestlers were in a fighting stance and the ref yelled the Japanese equivalent of "fight!", but in reality the match starts the instant both men are in the stance. I hadn't noticed that nuance during the evening's earlier matches. So, when I was putting the finishing touches on my stance (it's a very specific way of crouching) I get a head butt to the lower lip and get pushed out, almost into the crowd. That sucked. Adding insult to injury the fucker didn't even help me up.

But you live and learn and by Wednesday I'd put a lot of thought into how I went wrong and where to improve, so when we got our marching orders I was much more confident. I was going to need it too, because our two opponent teams for the night were the Jieitai (Japanese Army) Team and the Tsukawaki Team (last year's champs). For the army match I applied what I learned Tuesday--head down at the start, charge immediately upon entering the stance and aim to grab the belt--and actually won. The next match against Tsukawaki I didn't win, but I put up a good fight. In both cases my opponent was smiling and looked to be having fun, which was a far cry from Tuesday's match.

And because I am a magnet for the surreal, there was an episode Wednesday night that gave me a good "only in Japan" chuckle. Just after the army match I was buying some food when all of the sudden a very out of place group of Filipino, Chinese and Thai women in cocktail dresses, miniskirts and 4-inch stiletto heels come striding into the shrine grounds from the train station--Kusu's very own contingent of strippers and foreign sex workers. They had come to cheer on their favorite clients, seemingly not caring for who they were outing to the townsfolk as frequenters of Kusu's bluer bars. What was even funnier was when the bar's madame came forward a few minutes later to admonish the women for being so loud and disruptive, subsequently ordering them to sit down and shut up.

And if you're wondering how I know who the sex workers of Kusu are, first off, at least two of my coworkers have confided in me how they visit these bars so often it's nearly bankrupted them. Second, c'mon, it's me--when have I ever not gone somewhere and discovered just the weirdest little minutia about it?

--Matt