A while back, I explored the athletic means by which American prisoners-of-war coped with confinement in North Korea. That story popped to mind when I recently came across Bill Manbo’s color photographs of life in Japanese-American internment camps, which depict the unfortunate inmates’ efforts to inject some sense of normalcy into their daily lives. Sports […]
Tags:Japan·prisons·sports·sumo·World War II
In response to our recent post about Japanese tackle football, a commenter asked a salient question: I’ve always wondered if some of the high-ranking sumo wrestlers could make it in the NFL as blitzing specialists. There’s been a long history of association between football and wrestling in the US, with a lot of highschool wrestling […]
Tags:football·Japan·Masaru Hanada·sports·sumo
This morning’s sumo-related post stirred up memories of another Hawaiian-born legend of the sport: Konishiki, aka “The Dump Truck.” Though he never attained the exalted rank of yokozuna—perhaps due to anti-foreigner prejudice among sumo’s elite—Konishiki never let the disappointment get in the way of his artistic ambitions. As evidenced by the above video, the truly […]
The sumo world is saddened by the passing of Larry Loyes Kukahiko Aweau, the man most responsible for the sport’s “Hawaiian invasion.” A judo black belt whose cousin was among the first Americans to wrestle in Japan, Aweau spent decades combing the 50th state in search of sumo talent. His greatest scouting find was an […]
These are somewhat dark days for sumo, with a celebrated trainer about to serve six years in prison for the bizarrely violent hazing death of one of his pupils. (It involved beer bottles, metal bats, and rubber hoses.) And the sport’s still reeling from a drug scandal, albeit one that would cause little outrage in […]
Tags:Harumafuji·Mongolia·sports·sumo
