Go West: A tale of Pork bones and Mongolians (part 2)

Waking up in our well furnished, but not-quite-large-enough-for-four-people hotel room I endeavoured to have the shower that I was sorely missing having not had a chance to do so in the Net Cafe. They had showers there, but I stupidly put my phone on silent meaning I overslept by 20 minutes whilst the vibrations from the phone frantically told me to get out of bed. Being a white western man, I consider shower time to be an entirely private affair; you go in and take a shower alone. This is not the case with the Japanese; family members often wash each other’s backs before taking a shower, and as in this case, sometimes girls will barge in whilst you are standing, naked as the day you were born, desperately clinging to the shower curtain in order to provide a modicum of protection, and insist that there’s no time to wait for you to finish. With my trauma still fresh in my memory, we left to hotel and travelled to our raison de voyage; the final day of the Fukuoka Basho - the grand sumo tournament.

The outside of the venue was decorated in all manner of colourful flags, each with the name of one of the more well-known of the wrestlers emblazoned on them. My friends and I had a box seat whilst the girl who performed shower interuptus on me had splashed out for a ringside seat. A box seat at sumo largely consists of four cushions with enough space for you to sit and have a picnic/build a fort/put on a gymnastics show. Generally speaking, they are the medium priced seats, coming in at 10,000 yen per day, the ringside seats costing 15,000 yen and the seats at the back 5000 yen. We got there quite early, only a small handful of people came to watch, as tournaments are set up so the the lowest ranked and least famous fight first and the wrestlers get increasingly more prestigious until the last match in which the grand champion fights.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but I eventually got the gist of it. First the name caller (so called because he calls people’s names) comes on stage and sings on the names of the wrestlers in a high pitched, nasal drone. The wrestlers then enter the ring and start their warm-up dance. First they point to the sky, put their hands on their knees and crouch down. Then keeping the knees bent at the same angle they lift one leg up in the air as high as they can and bring it down on the ground in a stomping motion, repeating the process for the other leg. The wrestlers then crouch down, touch the ground with their knuckles and promptly stand up to repeat the process again, the higher-ups also leave the ring to throw salt on it. This whole process took up most of the day I spent watching sumo, and considering most matches only last a few seconds, the result ends up being that there is a huge build-up of tension. The fact that the match takes a lot less time than the very ritualised build-up must be why the Japanese take sumo so seriously, because the actual fighting comical to the point of being farcical.

Sumo consists of two overweight men slapping each other’s jelly rolls and trying to make them either fall over or step out of the ring. Since they’re are not allowed to strike with the fist, the matches often resemble a cross between a cat-fight outside an Essex nightclub at 2.00am and the fight scene between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’ Diary. However, as the day wore on something changed. I don’t know whether it was the alcohol, the over-exposure or the hypnotising effect of jiggling blubber, but I began to find sumo less ridiculous. It probably helped as well that by the end of the day the fighters were of a higher quality, but sumo was starting to make sense. There are no weight classes in sumo, so wresters are almost forced to be as heavy as they can to survive, and there was real skill and technique being displayed by the wrestlers.

Aran...I think

The most surprising thing, however, was that the majority of the top-ranked sumo players – the champions and grand champions, are foreigners. Yes, in a land in which the Japanese make up 99% of the population, one of their most cherished cultural items is dominated by foreign gentlemen. The foreigner sumo wrestler comes in two flavours; ex-soviet and Mongol. Two of the four current champions, Baruto and Aran, come from Estonia and Russia respectively, whilst another champion, Harumafuji (who suffered an injury early in the tournament and thus was not there) as well as the current grand champion, Baruto, and his successor, Asashoryu are all Monoglian. I must say, I was very pleased, as watching a fat white man waddling around with nothing to protect his dignity but a strip of cloth reminded me very much of home; in particular, beach season in Poole. In the end, Hakuho proved why he was the grand champion by stomping the upstart Toyonoumi into the ground with the force of 1000 Genghis Khans, which was a shame, because apparently if Toyonoumi had one everyone would jump up and throw their cushions at each other and the wrestlers.

The day ended in a hour long party with the sumo wrestlers, of which about half was taken up with a long presentation during which I drank all the wine I was suppose to save for the toast. An unfortunate miscalculation meant that by the time we arrived at the station to get the bullet train, we had only 10 minutes to find the platform, buy all the souvenirs and board the train. So I transformed into super present buying mode and managed to accomplish all my goals within 5 minutes, although many Fukuokans were no doubt entertained by the sight of me desperately grabbing things from the shelves like a forgetful parent on Christmas Eve. If you are considering coming to Japan to watch the sumo, then I highly recommend bringing alcohol with you, repetitive, ridiculous and yet highly entertaining...as long as you’re just a little bit drunk.

Go West: A tale of pork bones and mongolians (part 1)



Hakata Bijin (they don't seem to
 wear their hair in ringlets as frequently
 as the ones in Nagoya do)

 Japan is, by in large, a relatively emaciated country. There aren’t too many fat people around, besides the occasional one you run into at the gym or in the delicatessen section in the supermarket. With this in mind，I went to the one place in the world where morbidly obese people in loincloths slap each other’s man-boobs whilst a cheering crowd bays for blood. Not celebrity fat camp, but Kyushu basho, one of the six annual sumo tournaments held in Japan. I took the bullet train at stupid o’clock on a Saturday to arrive in the city of Fukuoka/Hakata, a place so cool it has two names, after almost 3 and a half hours. In case you are wondering, food-wise Hakata is known for its tonkotsu ramen - a type of cloudy ramen made with pork bones (don’t give me that face, it’s delicious), mendaiko – spicy, marinated fish roe wrapped in a sausage-like casing, and it’s good quality gyoza, which are a little smaller than average. The city is also famous for its Hakata Bijin, or Hakata beauties, who traditionally were supposed to be so dainty and delicate they made the gyoza extra small, so the poor little creatures didn’t have to open their mouths too wide.

That's not filth encrusted on the grill,
it's delicousness

Our first day of the weekend was spent stumbling around Fukuoka sightseeing and pretending that we weren’t sleep-deprived. We visited a couple of temples first, two relatively big ones in Fukuoka, where we got our fortunes told (I was slightly lucky, although my health fortune apparently suggested I would enter into a long and painful illness), drank seawater and threw 5yen coins into a big grate - standard stuff. We also went to a museum where I tried out cloth weaving with a shuttle loom, and listened to old recordings of Japanese people speaking now dead dialects very quietly. Afterwards we went to a little roadside shanty-town style restaurant/bar where we had some of the tonkotsu ramen and grilled meats. The restaurant was a smoky little shack run by an eccentric old man who insisted on giving us ‘service’ (Japanese term for freebees). You can probably get a good idea of what the place was like if I told you that the patrons that were smoking (all of them) threw their cigarette butts on the floor instead of stubbing them out in an ashtray.



"KITTY-CHAN!
KONNICHI-WA!"

After almost falling asleep on the train, I made my way to the Yahoo! Dome. The Yahoo! Dome is the stadium for the local baseball team – The Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. In Japan, many of the professional baseball teams have companies names inserted into the middle like the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the Chiba Lotte Marines and the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. I guess since Premier league clubs are owned by Russian oligarchs and oil tycoons rather than companies, it’s doubtful we’ll see the Manchester Glazer United or the Abramovich Chelsea. Swarming around the stadium were thousands of university students all dressed in sharp suits. Apparently there was some sort of job fair being held there; well, either that or someone was giving away free vodka and suits. Passing through the horde of identically dressed Lilliputians we eventually came to a shop called RoboSquare; a shop that sold and displayed the very latest in Japanese robot technology...well sort of. The one robot that piqued my interest in particular was a Hello Kitty robot, solely because it was featured on Jonathan Ross’ Japanorama TV show. It didn’t work then and it didn’t work now: You end up shouting “Kitty-chan, Konnichi-wa” over and over again, and she just criticises your intelligibility. There were other robots there; a dog whose name I forgot, a penguin who sort of wobbled, cooed and produced an egg from its viscera, and a seal that was genuinely adorable and apparently designed for therapy with Alzheimer’s patients. I left feeling that whilst we had come a long way from furbies, it will be a while until the commercial robot market can compare to, say, iRobot.

Vegetable mountain

We made a detour to Fukuoka tower whilst we were in the area; a tower that seemed specifically designed as a dating spot. There were secluded sofas, a romantic cafe and even a lover’s retreat – an evocative name to describe an observation deck with mood lighting. For dinner we had a dish called Champon. Essentially it’s a bowl of broth with some marinated chicken gizzards in it, covered with heaps of chopped cabbage and lashings of spring onion, positioned in the middle of a table on what can best be described as a camping stove. If it doesn’t sound very appetising, that is because you are a philistine and can’t appreciate the joys of chicken intestine and cabbage soup. When all the cabbage and spring onions have been eaten, the waitress comes over and dumps two heaps of noodles in the simmering pot. This being Japan, the meal was naturally an all-you-can-drink affair and the air hung thick with the aroma of cheap cigarettes. The restaurant itself was a run-down place with a buzzing neon sign outside and delightfully old-fashioned decor, air conditioning running non-stop and a cramped seating area where two people at opposite tables would practically sit back to back. It was perhaps the most atmospheric place I’ve visited thus far in Japan.

Afterwards, we decided to take in some of the nearby yatai, or food stands. The they amounted to little more than shacks on a half-flooded, rain-soaked promenade where patrons sat around a central counter and ate things like deep-fried cod roe. Upon seeing the menu I endeavoured to try that most exotic and dangerous of fish – the fugu or blowfish. For those of you not familiar, the blowfish is a delicious albeit somewhat expensive fish that if prepared incorrectly can be poisonous – fatally so. Throwing caution into the wind and my life into the hands of the owner of this shanty-town shack I tucked in and... well, I’m here now aren’t I? The fish was delicious, and actually relatively cheap, a delicacy I’s highly recommend, although I’m still not convinced that the best way to prepare such a fish is to deep-fry it. The remainder of the evening was spent making conversation with a couple of Koreans (who incidentally couldn’t speak Japanese) about the recent attack by the North on Yeonpyeong island. Feeling the glow of the beer kicking in, we retired to our hotel for some well earned rest.