« Breather | Main | Whatever Day of the Week Food: Asian Quesadillas »
October 24, 2005
Confession: I Hold Sumo Dear to My Heart
A recent article in the Times combined two dearly cherished things (food and sumo) and reanimated my inexplicable delight in this odd and ancient sport.
Wait, I take that back. It's not inexplicable.
Growing up, sumo was a *big deal* (pun unavoidably intended). The large Japanese population in Hawaii and the success of a string of Hawaii-bred wrestlers, combined to form the perfect atmosphere for sumo to be taken quite seriously indeed. So it had a touch of the bizarre: men with rolling, flopping stomachs, drooping pectorals, and corpulent thighs, wearing nothing but a top knot and an elaborate thong, lunging at each other with fearsome momentum. We knew that. But our island hearts still warmed towards these ponderous giants. Highlights from sumo tournaments slipped into the local sportscast between baseball and football results. Recaps or human interest stories were a regular sports page feature. We even had Hawaiian music superstars like Bruddah Iz (Kamakawiwo'ole) writing tribute songs to our local sumo wrestlers, Konishiki, Akebono, and Musashimaru.
The Hawaii-bred sumotori were both the "us" and the "other." Those jiggling biceps could partly be at least partly attributed to Zippy's incredibly fattening curry and chicken katsu. But, on an island filled primarily with petite citizens of Filipino, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ancestry, their generous girth set them apart. Their distinguishing size was almost mesmerizing. Then, too, even though they themselves were not Japanese, they somehow connected the Japanese-American and traditional Japanese experiences for us. Even when each of the wrestlers became Japanese citizens, Hawaii still stubbornly claimed them as their own. They were local boys who "made good" by succeeding in another nation and culture's sport.
And, sometimes, I miss it. Mawashi loinclothes and all.
Confession , Hawaii , Woeful Tales of Cultural Integration | By elissa | 05:17 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://chattablogs.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/26810
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Confession: I Hold Sumo Dear to My Heart:
Comments
: )
Yup. That's what you brought to my face. I hope you're doing well! I'm glad to hear the the trip to VA went well. I'd love to hear more about the grad school adventure as you and Noel hack it! I'll be hacking it myself sometime... hopefully not too long from now.
Have a great evening, Elissa! God's peace to you.
Posted by: becky at October 24, 2005 10:42 PM
