Wrestle with the giants

For all its booming industry, Japan is still a land where traditions have an ancestral power. Some, such as judo, flower arrangement and the Japanese garden, have spread all over the world. Others, like the arts of the geisha and the extraordinary ritual of the sumo wrestlers, have so far been too Japanese for transplantation.

The two great fat elephants of men came together with a resounding thud. The public cheered and shout: Smash him! Murder him! At him!

Could these be the same people as those who sit and look at the moon for hours, reciting lyric poetry the while? Were these the people who with infinite patience will produce dwarf trees, who will go in ecstasies over the ‘violin-playing’ of grasshoppers and who dilate their nostrils to snuff the spicy smell of incense while munching lotus seed? They could and were. But they were Japanese, and you realize that just as you do not understand a thing.

The normal Japanese is short, has a slender frame, delicate hands, small feet, and is graceful in his movements. There are many types of them, mixtures of emigrants from Polynesia, the Malay Island, China, Korea and Mongolia, to say nothing of the Caucasian Ainu of Hokkaido. Some are round-headed and big-jawed, and have high cheekbones. Other have narrow, strongly-marked features more Indian than Asiatic. Some have flat, small nose; others have aquiline noses. The slant of their eyes varies considerably.

Sumo wrestlers are something apart. They are giant, who would attract attention in any country. They are giants, who would attract attention in any country. They are what one would imagine the fruit of an affair between a phlegmatic, somnolent hippo and an aggressive, heavy-limbed gorilla to be like.

They are so fat that they cannot even tie their own shoelaces, and many of them would have difficulty in clasping their hands over their stomachs. Like most Orientals they have little hair except on their heads, where it is allowed to grow unchecked until it can be knotted on top, as the old samurai used to wear it. When they throw off their elegant kimonos and stand there in the ring, as good as naked – for they only have a narrow strip of cloth between their quivering fat thighs – the hairlessness of the rest of their bodies is emphasized. The G-string is fastened fore and aft to a stout leather belt, covered with material which has a fringe in front to act as an apron.

Japanese wrestlers weigh from sixteen to twenty-six stone and most are between six feet and six feet four inches tall; though one record giant was seven feet eight inches and weighed twenty-eight stone eleven pounds.

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