Compassionate Corruption
For a while now I’ve been fostering an interest in a sport that doesn’t see a lot of coverage here in the states. Sumo Wrestling is a sport that is often misrepresented in Western culture, often depicted as ‘a goofy sport where fat men in diapers butt heads.’ It is, in fact, a sport with a storied tradition, dating back to the Heian Period (794–1192) in Japan. Needless to say, it is an ancient game. It permeates with rituals and traditions that persist to this very day, which combined with the intricate level of expression of individual style wrestlers strive to achieve, create a sport that is extremely riveting to watch.
Understanding Sumo entails some explanation of its rules. To be fully transparent, I will be vastly oversimplifying here, so I would encourage you to check out the videos I link below that got me interested in this topic in the first place. I do not wish to be your only interaction with this sport.
Fighters, known as rikishi, enter a dohyo, a hand-made clay ring framed with straw roles with a diameter of about 4.5 meters (14.93 ft). The fighters wear only the iconic mawashi, a sort of belt that allows for a free range of movement and can be grabbed. The two fighters begin opposite of each other, only allowed to get as close as the two white lines called the shikiri-sen drawn in the center of the dohyo. The instant both of their hands touch the dohyo, the match begins, the object being to either knock the other fighter out of the circle or knock them over so a part of their body other than their feet touches the ground. There are no weight classes either, which leads to some spectacular matches, where men half the weight of their opponent flip them out of the dohyo.
Unfortunately, Sumo is a demanding sport. Not just in terms of the actual physical toll it takes on its participants (the average retired rikishi lives to be about 60) but also in terms of how much it takes to ‘make it’ as a Sumo wrestler. Wrestlers usually start young, and if they manage to meet all the height requirements and finish a training school, they still must earn their keep in a beya, a ‘Sumo stable’ run by ex-rikishi. Sumo is ruled by a hierarchy of ranking, one which few wrestlers can hope to get to the top of in their career.
It is not surprising, then, that the sport has experienced some controversy related to the subject of bout-fixing. There exists a phenomenon in Sumo known as ‘deliberate lack of effort in a Sumo bout’ in Japanese. Essentially, a Sumo wrestler may decide to go easy on an opponent without the exchange of money.
Why? How does this work? A rikishi entering their 15th match with a 7 and 7 (7 wins 7 losses) has much more to gain from a victory than an opponent with say, 8 and 6 (8 wins 6 losses). A wrestler with 8 wins is already guaranteed to advance. Studies found that an abnormally high number of bouts in this range of win-loss ratio matchups find the fighters with the 7 and 7 ratios win the bout.
What this points to is a widespread problem of match-fixing (an issue already present in the sport) where there isn’t even an exchange of money involved. Given the very traditional nature of sumo as a sport, it’s unlikely that the structure of tournaments will be changed to account for this discrepancy. Furthermore, this sort of match-fixing is also very difficult to police since fighters don't even necessarily even have to reach a verbal agreement for it to take place. Given the brutal nature of sumo, and how hard it is to ‘make it’ in the sport, can we blame its participants for deciding to ‘cut each other some slack’?
