September 2022 Sumo has Started!
by meep
Today, September 11, 2022, is the start of the Aki Basho, or the Fall Grand Sumo Tournament! (Aki just means Autumn or Fall in Japanese). Tournaments are held each odd-numbered month, and every other tournament is held in Tokyo (So January, May, and September are in Tokyo).
Let’s take a look at a few things!
Top wrestler scatterplot update
The ever-helpful Sumo Memes subreddit informed me as to the data update for height and weight so I’ve redone my top-rikishi (sumo wrestler) scatterplot.
I saw someone uses the wrestlers’ faces to mark the points, but I’ve decided to remain “scientific” — for now, I’m coloring the dots with the ranking they have for the current tournament, with Yokozuna being the top ranking and M16 being the lowest ranking. I grouped together the various Maegashira rankings in 4s for simplicity.
I did mark the names of all the highest-ranked rikishi. Ichinojo, with his tournament win in July, got up to komusubi.
New sumo video series: SUMO PRIME TIME
SUMO PRIME TIME is sponsored by the official Japan Sumo Association, which runs sumo tournaments. They finally realized that hey, maybe they should try appealing to an audience outside Japan.
So they got English-speaking host Hiro Morita to do these videos.
(Rather, Hiro talked them into doing these videos, I think.)
Here is his highlights video for day 1:
He selected a handful of matches to cover for this video, so obviously it’s not all the matches. I wonder if Hiro knows that one particular guy….
Now, it’s still kind of hairy as an overseas fan trying to get access to coverage. It’s tough getting at it legitimately.
You can get Grand Sumo highlights via NHK World, which has free streaming: NHK World TV September tournament Grand Sumo preview is available until September 23 (when the tournament will be over), but for the actual matches… you had better be watching when they’re streaming it live, which is at 12:30 pm Eastern Time currently. They generally don’t have the matches available on demand.
There are loads of fans who do get the matches via a variety of feeds, and I usually go to Natto Sumo to satisfy my sumo hunger. But it’s not necessarily friendly to the newbie. Jason’s All-Sumo Channel is newbie-friendly, but sometimes misses matches.
Hiro’s videos look very approachable thus far, and I look forward to what more he will come up with.
Prior sumo posts
July 2022: Interest Rates and Sumo, Nagoya 2022 Edition
May 2022: The Sumo Giant Killers
March 2022: Sumo! Physics in Action!
Jan 2022: Happy Second Christmas: Epiphany, Data Visualization, and Sumo!
