So Anna and I decided to go check out one of Japan’s favourite traditional pastimes – sumo wrestling. The sport is over 2000 years old and is based on an ancient fighting style called sumai (meaning to struggle). The tradition is still super popular with the Japanese and it attracts huge crowds on the weekends, especially when the most popular wrestlers are competing. To the untrained eye it was a bunch of overweight men in nappies rolling around but we were still super excited.
“But, it’s not sumo season!” I hear you cry. You would be absolutely right. But this is one of the problems of being in a country where you don’t understand anyone and anything. We were informed by a reliable (or so we thought) source that sumo season was on (we later found out it was – but in Osaka) so we made our way to the stadium where the crowds had gathered in their masses. We assumed it was a good match we had chosen and by now we were really excited. We made our way to the ticket office and undertook the usual ritual of being talked at in Japanese by the lady behind the counter while smiling and nodding and arigatoing in return.
Only once the show had begun we realised this was not sumo. We had just bought tickets for Japanese style pro-wrestling. A bit like WWF, but more Japanese. Everything was a bit cuter, a bit weirder and the audience was full or overexcited middle-aged men.
The upside was we got to see the Ryōgoku Kokugikan Sumō Stadium- which is really nice and we had another “cultural” event to add to our list. However we really didn’t understand the humour (this was more a cultural thing- our fellow audience members loved it), and once the novelty wore off we decided it was time to leave for our next adventure. We will have to leave the real sumo for next time.
sumo advertising- very misleading
we were so excited 🙁
in our defense this is what we had to work with
we still got to hang out with our favourite wrestlers 
we did get to see one sumo looking guy in action
our presenter was a hottie