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LGT.RAIN
Osaka Mayor Toru Hashimoto aims to retract his remark that U.S. servicemen in Okinawa should use its adult entertainment industry to avoid committing sex offenses.
Kan Yasuda's art somehow draws in the landscape, and entices in people, so that it is natural to explore the view through his structures and keyholes, to sit awhile atop a sculpture or to pose within their frames.
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
It may seem perverse to express nostalgia for a category of mental illness, but many sufferers, as well as some psychiatrists, regret the passing of “manic depression.”
Getting slapped by a a coach has always been, as far as I could see, simply another aspect of sports training in Japan.
For two months sumo has been rocked to its core by evidence of illegal gambling on baseball games, involvement with the Japanese underworld, and more recently claims by the man on the street that those in positions of power within the sumo association did ...
Sumo is once again under attack in the domestic media — this time on the back of twin allegations. First of all, there’s the one involving seniors in the sport, known as oyakata, rubbing shoulders with the Japanese underworld and supplying choice tickets to ...
Few sports fans in Japan will be unaware that yokozuna Hakuho recently walked away from the Summer Grand Sumo Tournament at the Ryogoku Kokugikan having claimed his 14th career Emperor’s Cup with his 6th perfect 15-0 finish. That he did so after having decided ...
As is often the case when a sekiwake is promoted to ozeki, talk centers on him going just that little bit further in his career and making it all the way to yokozuna. Given the current requirement for such a promotion — back-to-back yusho ...
Sumo has been around in organized form for over 250 years. As a sport in which the rankings and most of the promotion/demotion rules and regulations have remained unchanged, sumo has just turned 100. Yet, and as has been covered in Sumo Scribblings before, ...
Depending on the exact timing decided upon by the Sumo Association, sometime this week, sekiwake Baruto of Onoe Beya will receive an official visit from members of the association to advise him of his promotion to the sport’s second rank — that of ozeki. ...
With all eyes on the shenanigans surrounding Asashoryu in recent weeks, Hakuho’s elaborate wedding celebrations in various locations around the country, and a new nationality rule in sumo that essentially limits a stable to one foreign-born rikishi at a time (even if the rikishi ...
In the last issue of Sumo Scribblings following the Hatsu Basho, mention was made of Asashoryu’s self-destructive mindset in relation to the then recent allegations that he had up and punched somebody following a night on the beer in a plush neighborhood of Tokyo. ...
Asashoryu Akinori, to call him by his full Japanese name, remains as divisive as ever in the world of Japanese sumo. A brilliant yokozuna at his peak, quite likely capable of beating anyone on his day — past or present — Asashoryu now stands ...
With holiday decorations now back in the box and vacations ending for most people, the 700 men active in sumo are once again warming up the muscles, stretching the limbs and preparing for combat. That combat — officially titled the Hatsu Basho (the first ...
As 2009 draws to a close, the sport of sumo can look back on a year largely free from scandal. Pleasing perhaps for many of the conservative elements in and around the sport, but 2010, could well prove the year in which relative young ...
With the presentation of the Emperor’s Cup to yokozuna Hakuho on Sunday evening Nov. 29, the first decade of sumo in the 21st century came to a thundering close. Hakuho (15-0) had just dispatched fellow yokozuna Asashoryu with a wonderful uwatenage throwing technique to ...