On a hot day last June, near the shores of Lake Suwa, in the mountains of central Japan, hundreds of spectators gathered around an earthen stage roughly two feet high and two dozen feet wide. The spectacularly old among them sat in folding chairs beside the shaded stage, while the merely elderly stood just behind. A bit farther back, beneath a canopy that shielded them only partly from the blazing sun, those too young to retire stood shoulder to shoulder. Regardless of their vantage point, everyone present was fixated on the dohyo, the sand-covered ring atop the stage, where a pair of sumo wrestlers dressed in loincloths prepared to do battle.

The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size sprinters waiting to explode out of the starting block. They will often squat and then rise to stamp their feet or throw salt on the ground. When the referee signals the start of the match, they rush toward each other and collide with the same force that a person might absorb after falling from a height of two or three stories. From their fleshy collision, one man tends to emerge with the advantage of surer footing or a firmer grip on his opponent’s loincloth, known as a mawashi, which wrestlers can use to lift and toss each other around the ring. Whoever can force his adversary from the ring or get any part of his body other than the soles of his feet to touch the ground is the winner.

What I was watching near Lake Suwa was only a practice bout, but the wrestlers were nevertheless busy with their usual prematch rituals, pacing back and forth and tossing salt. Two apprentices accompanied the higher-ranked wrestler, tasked with holding his towel and fetching him water. Eventually, the fighting commenced with a flurry of slapping, pushing, and grasping; sumo can look like brawling or ballet, a display of brute force or a mastery of martial-arts techniques that share their origins with judo and aikido. In this case, the higher-ranked wrestler used his right hand to grab hold of the other man’s face, and his left hand to grasp his opponent’s right shoulder. He seemed to squeeze his rival, then whisked him from the ring like a dancer leading his partner across a ballroom. Like most sumo matches, it was over in a matter of seconds.

The winner of this practice bout was Hoshoryu, one of sumo’s two active yokozuna, or “grand champions,” of which there have been a mere seventy-five in recorded history. To reach sumo’s highest and only permanent rank, rikishi must fight their way into the top makuuchi division, then rise through its ranks as maegashira, komusubi, sekiwake, and finally ozeki. Even then, they still have to win two consecutive grand sumo tournaments or achieve an “equivalent” record before the Yokozuna Deliberation Council—a group of up to fifteen prominent sumo experts—will consider their candidacy on the basis of both their character and skill. All other rikishi are at constant risk of demotion for losing too many bouts, or for missing too many tournaments owing to illness or injury, but yokozuna carry on as grand champions for as long as they live up to the title. When they no longer can, they are expected to retire.

Woodblock prints from Transmitted from the Gods, Hokusai Sketches (Denshin kaishu Hokusai manga), volume 11, early nineteenth century, by Hokusai © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Hoshoryu had become sumo’s seventy-fourth yokozuna in January, but his promotion was not without an element of controversy. Some of the council members reportedly felt that he was not yet ready, that he had too often lost bouts to lesser fighters. Their objections were overruled, but these doubts were a problem not only for the pedants and purists, but for those invested in the bitter, long-standing rivalry between Japanese-born rikishi and Mongolian wrestlers like Hoshoryu. Since 1992, when the first of Hoshoryu’s countrymen began competing, there have been more than seventy Mongolian rikishi, many of whom have dominated sumo’s upper echelons. This was most gloriously personified by the yokozuna Hakuho, who became a grand champion in 2007, at just twenty-two years old, and went on to shatter records that had been held by Japanese-born yokozuna for centuries. Hakuho retired in 2021, but the relegation of Japanese rikishi to second-class status remains a statistical fact: of the eight yokozuna to have earned the title in the past quarter century, six have come from Mongolia.

In the town of Shimosuwa, where I’d gone to see Hoshoryu at a summer training camp, he looked a bit tired, and his right elbow was bandaged. Still, he put on a show for the locals. Before his first match, he warmed up at the edge of the ring by striking a debarked log with his palms as if slapping an imagined opponent; the crowd looked on with reverence. Hoshoryu, at six foot two and around 330 pounds, dispatched his first adversary handily, squeezing him like an accordion and dancing him out of the ring. He offered the man a rematch, and won again. This was followed by another rematch and yet another, until the lower-ranked wrestler was covered in sand from his repeated falls. Hoshoryu then proceeded to fight every other rikishi in turn. He won all but a few of these bouts, scarcely breaking a sweat.

The following month, Hoshoryu would be competing in the grand sumo tournament in Nagoya, where he would face one of the first serious threats to his supremacy. That challenge would come from a Japanese rikishi named Onosato, who had been made sumo’s seventy-fifth yokozuna that May, just three weeks before my trip to Shimosuwa. His promotion provided Hoshoryu with a worthy adversary, and it gave fans, for the first time in almost seven years, the chance to see Mongolian and Japanese yokozuna enact the defining cultural rivalry of twenty-first-century sumo. This is an itch that needs scratching every so often. Decades of Mongolian dominance have revealed a peculiar strain of ethnonationalism among sumo fans, one defined less by an explicitly nativist derision of foreign-born rikishi than by an enthusiasm for Japanese-born yokozuna that sometimes feels a bit too unbound.

The prospect of a showdown between a Japanese and a Mongolian yokozuna was particularly loaded with political significance. At the time of Onosato’s promotion, the discourse leading up to Japan’s summer parliamentary elections had been hijacked by Sanseito, a far-right political party intent on reversing immigration reforms that have alleviated crushing labor shortages by allowing record numbers of foreign residents into the country. Meanwhile, the unprecedented forty million tourists who visited Japan last year made the problems associated with overtourism a defining theme of the campaign, giving the nation’s far right yet another cudgel to wield against what it sees as malign foreign influence. The line between patriotism and racism in Japan had grown increasingly fuzzy.

I couldn’t help but think of America’s first black heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, and the racist yearning for a “great white hope” that might come along to dethrone him. But even this was a poor comparison for sumo’s place in the racial politics of Japan today; boxing, after all, was brought to America from England, while sumo, like Kabuki, is one of Japan’s few expressive institutions whose folklore betrays little trace of outside influence. The sumo fans in Shimosuwa confirmed my sense of the yokozuna as a uniquely Japanese symbol of excellence even when the wrestlers themselves are not Japanese. What remained to be seen, and what I hoped to discover in Nagoya, was whether this would hold true at a grand sumo tournament where, as with the upcoming parliamentary elections, the people would be presented with a choice—one between nativism and multiculturalism, but also between two competing ideas of what it really means to be Japanese.

The Kojiki, an eighth-century “record of ancient matters” and Japan’s oldest extant text, contains an account of what many consider to be the first sumo match. Two deities wrestle to determine ownership of the Japanese islands: Takemikazuchi, the god of thunder, prevails by crushing the arm of Takeminakata, a rival god, who retreats to Lake Suwa and vows never to leave. The legendary founder of mortal sumo was a man called Nomi no Sukune, who, according to the nation’s second-oldest text, the Nihon Shoki, won a fight to the death before Emperor Suinin in 23 bc. Today, Sukune is regarded as the sport’s patron deity; sumo has deep historic ties to Japan’s animistic Shinto religion, whose pantheon includes supernatural creators as well as people and places of significance. Its rituals are observed in the ring each time a rikishi throws salt on the ground or stamps his feet, traditions intended to drive away evil spirits.

A woodblock print from the album Mirror of Sumo Past and Present,
1855, by Utagawa Kunisada © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

In medieval Japan, sumo became more practical, as much a form of martial-arts training as a sport. Its popularity among samurai led to some of sumo’s most enduring innovations, including the use of shikona, or ring names, to hide the identities of masterless ronin. The use of a dohyo, according to some scholars, dates back to a 1578 tournament. Its creation was deemed necessary for containing the spectacular violence of some fifteen hundred combatants who took part, but the real value of the dohyo, the anthropologist R. Kenji Tierney writes in his study of the sport, was to transform sumo

from a form of hand-to-hand combat where opponents could be kicked to death to a display of skill and technique, granting victories to those who push their opponents out of the ring, rather than kill them.

During the Edo period, an era of artistic and commercial renaissance lasting from 1603 to 1868, sumo’s shift from a kind of feudal death match to popular entertainment gave rise to such permutations as topless all-female tournaments, whose competitors sometimes performed feats of strength as well as what Tierney suggestively calls “erotic displays.” Male tournaments ran the gamut from Toughman-style competitions, in which rikishi took on any and all challengers, to more organized forms of tsuji-zumo, or “street-corner wrestling,” in which wrestlers fought in the streets, in fields, or along dry riverbeds in exchange for tips from the audience. The gaudiness of such displays, and the immense popularity they enjoyed among ordinary citizens, fueled a backlash during the early decades of the Meiji period, after American pressure had forced Japan to open its borders to the outside world. Military and diplomatic representatives from the United States and Britain derided sumo as “athletically suspect” and compared its practitioners to “well-shaven baboons,” which in turn fomented domestic criticism from Japanese intellectuals advocating a rejection of cultural traditions like sumo and Kabuki in favor of the trappings of Western-style modernity. “Sumo is inescapably an ugly, barbarian custom notwithstanding its popularity among large numbers of our countrymen,” wrote Kanda Kohei, who was among the first to introduce Western economic thought to Japan. “It is not becoming demeanor for men to enjoy watching other men perform like beasts.”

Japan’s Meiji-era modernization was so swift, so encompassing, and so prolonged that it gave rise to a particularly intense nostalgia during the twentieth century. To capitalize on this yearning for tradition, and to bind sumo’s fortunes to the state, the sport’s governing body aligned itself with the rising tide of nationalism that took hold of Japan after its victories in wars against the Chinese and the Russians. These efforts arguably began with the opening, in 1909, of a new sumo arena in Tokyo, whose name, for a time, was to be Shobukan, or “military spirit hall.” This idea was eventually discarded in favor of the name Kokugikan, which was chosen after an official from the sport’s governing body read an essay in which sumo was referred to as kokugi, Japan’s “national skill.” It was an inspired choice; the arena would forever link sumo to the very concept of national identity in Japan. Its architecture and interior design likewise reinforced sumo’s connection to religion through aesthetic nods to the Shinto shrines where some tournaments had previously been held. The sport’s formal connection to the state, meanwhile, culminated in 1926, when Hirohito, a financial backer of the Japan Sumo Association, ascended to the Japanese throne and rechristened sumo’s highest trophy the Emperor’s Cup.

After the Second World War, sumo was the first of Japan’s traditional cultural institutions to stage a comeback, probably because its connections to the empire were poorly understood by the Allied forces. Kabuki, for example, was strictly censored by Allied officials for the first few years of the occupation, owing to its characteristic themes of loyalty, vengeance, and honor. Although sumo tournaments were permitted, teaching the sport in schools was forbidden, and occupation troops repurposed the Kokugikan as a skating rink. Some Americans took a casual interest in the sport, but it was the Japanese diaspora rather than the occupation that led to its internationalization. The first outsiders came from Hawaii, starting with Takamiyama, who learned about sumo from Japanese Americans and took it up as training while playing high school football. In 1968, he became the first foreign-born rikishi to reach sumo’s top division. Konishiki and Akebono, two other Hawaiians, were the first foreigners to reach the rank of ozeki and yokozuna, respectively, in 1987 and 1993.

In contrast to the gradual arrival of the Hawaiian rikishi, the Mongolians came all at once, on the heels of the collapse of their country’s Communist government in 1990. The first six Mongolian wrestlers made their debut in 1992, prompting a racial panic that led to a de facto ban on all foreign recruitment. The ban was lifted in 1998, but with an effective limit of two foreign-born recruits per stable—the groups of up to several dozen wrestlers who live and train together. Four years later, the limit was reduced to just one foreign recruit. The tendency to look to Mongolia to fill this quota owed as much to that country’s own folk-wrestling traditions as to an abundance of eager young candidates willing to endure years of grueling apprenticeship and language study. In 1996, when Kyokushuzan became the first Mongolian rikishi to reach the sport’s makuuchi division, his success and celebrity inspired even more of his countrymen to follow his example. Among them was Asashoryu, who, in 2003, became the first Mongolian yokozuna. In 2005, he became the first rikishi ever to win each of the six grand sumo tournaments in the same year.

Asashoryu is also remembered as the first yokozuna to be suspended from competition, a consequence of his taking part in a charity soccer match in Mongolia after withdrawing from a sumo tournament because of an injury, a decision seen as unbecoming of a wrestler of his stature. The tabloid press routinely singled him out for failing to model the decorum expected of a yokozuna; his retirement in 2010 followed press reports alleging he’d assaulted a man outside a Tokyo nightclub. Asashoryu was also criticized, like other Mongolian rikishi, for expressing emotion in the dohyo, which undermines sumo’s concept of hinkaku, or “dignity,” which requires impassiveness in the ring whether one wins or loses. Hakuho, who many regard as the greatest yokozuna of all time, had an end-of-match habit of waving his hand ever so slightly after receiving the envelope of prize money. This was likewise interpreted by some as an indecorous gesture of thanks aimed at corporate sponsors. Late in his career, Hakuho partook in the last tournament of the Heisei era, which ended in 2019 with the abdication of Emperor Akihito. After securing victory on the final day, the wrestler induced the audience to clap during his post-match interview, thereby prematurely releasing the Heisei deities from service, according to Shinto beliefs. It was widely regarded as a once-in-a-generation gaffe.

A two-panel screen depicting wrestlers engaging in practice bouts, seventeenth century, artist unknown. Courtesy the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington

In 2011, a match-fixing scandal had forced almost two dozen top rikishi and stablemasters out of the sport. Hakuho was one of the few wrestlers not implicated, and his reign during this period was not only absolute but redefining. Watching arguably the greatest rikishi in history at the peak of his powers was all that kept many fans from abandoning the scandal-plagued sport, though some still struggled with the fact that he wasn’t Japanese. Instead of arguing over who was the best rikishi, a question whose answer was glaringly obvious, sumo enthusiasts tended to limit their debates to the relative prowess of native-born wrestlers. In September 2010, when Hakuho broke the decades-old record for most consecutive victories, the weekly tabloid Shukan Shincho compared the lack of media fanfare to the dismissive attitude the American press took toward Ichiro Suzuki’s milestone of 3,500 hits across his baseball career in Japan and North America. Hakuho’s treatment, according to the article, was nothing short of “racism.”

Five weeks after the training camp in Shimosuwa, I arrived in Nagoya for the last three days of July’s grand sumo tournament. Rikishi in the upper divisions must fight for fifteen consecutive days during these tournaments, which take place every other month, making injury and fatigue constant risks. This sometimes affects the proceedings, as it did this summer. By the time I got to Nagoya, the showdown I’d hoped to see was no longer possible—an injury had forced Hoshoryu to abandon the contest in its first week. Onosato, the great Japanese hope, was still competing, but his debut as a yokozuna had gone poorly. Over the tournament’s first twelve days, he’d lost three matches—enough to put the trophy, in all likelihood, beyond his reach. Perhaps this was for the best—the timing was less than ideal for a clash between sumo’s Mongolian and Japanese yokozuna. Just days earlier, Sanseito, the far-right party, had successfully leveraged anti-immigrant sentiment to win fourteen seats in the upper house of Japan’s parliament. In the thirteen years I’d spent living between Japan and the United States, there had never before been such open discussion about who belonged in Japan and who didn’t. Sumo’s cross-cultural rivalry could surely wait for a calmer moment.

Even so, having seen Hoshoryu up close and in person, I was eager to get a good look at his rival, but before seeing Onosato for myself, I decided to spend the early hours of the tournament’s thirteenth day stalking the mostly empty halls encircling IG Arena, asking other sumo fans what they thought of the first homegrown yokozuna to be promoted to the rank in eight years. While eating takoyaki—ping-pong-ball-size globs of battered octopus chunks and pickled ginger—I met a thirtysomething office worker and his ten-year-old son, both dressed in matching Onosato fan club T-shirts. “As a Japanese person, and as a fan, I think it’s really nice to see a Japanese yokozuna,” the man told me. His son added that Onosato is “super strong.” Then the father issued a caveat that I would hear again and again at the tournament, always with an air of exasperation that bordered on embarrassment: “His performance so far is regrettable.” Another fan I spoke to summed up these frustrations by saying that it looks bad for a rikishi to perform so well, for so long, as he strives toward becoming a yokozuna, only to falter in the first tournament after his promotion. Then again, he added, as if the thought had only just occurred to him, “It could be that they destroy their body and their health just getting to this point.”

When I came across especially voluble fans, I asked what they thought about the recent election results. Those few who did have something to say proved adept at politely saying as little as possible. A tour guide named Naomi told me that Sanseito’s nativist rhetoric doesn’t represent the way most Japanese people feel. What especially concerned her about the party, she said, was how effective it had been at courting Japan’s long-disaffected cohort of younger voters. “For years the LDP has failed to get young people to come out and vote,” she explained, referring to the incumbent conservative Liberal Democratic Party. “Now they are voting, but it’s for this strange new party that has figured out how to reach them through social media.”

Yokohama Sumo Wrestler Defeating a Foreigner, 1861, a woodblock print, by Utagawa Yoshifuji © The National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Pearl and Seymour Moskowitz Collection

This “strange new party” was founded in 2020 by a disparate group of political outsiders who found common cause with a conservative YouTube influencer named Kazuya, whose videos range from criticisms of Chinese tourists to unfavorable reviews of Korean snack foods that “rip off” similar Japanese products. In the beginning, Sanseito advanced a platform that focused almost entirely on vaccine skepticism and opposition to COVID-19 countermeasures. The party won its first seat in the upper house of Japan’s parliament in 2022 and then gained a hundred seats in local assemblies the next year. By late 2024, its small but highly motivated and extremely online base had also helped the party pick up three seats in the lower house of parliament. Now their new electoral gains, combined with the recent losses suffered by the LDP and its coalition partners, meant that Sanseito had a real chance of turning its agenda into policy.

While remaining steadfast in its promotion of vaccine skepticism, the party has, since its inception, broadened its platform to include more typical conservative causes, such as opposing same-sex marriage and championing revisionist history textbooks that downplay atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in China and Korea during the Second World War. The core of Sanseito’s agenda, however, has come to concern its “anti-globalist” and anti-immigration grievances. In June, when I stumbled upon one of the party’s rallies not far from my own neighborhood in Tokyo, a candidate speaking through a megaphone from the roof of a van railed against the flow of foreign workers into the country and warned against the dangers of allowing Chinese elites to buy up property in the city.

It was an especially opportune moment for pushing this kind of xenophobia. Between 2023 and 2025, the cost of rice, Japan’s staple food, doubled, even as the persistently weak yen attracted record numbers of foreign tourists whose spending power has increased to the same degree that locals’ has decreased. Meanwhile, the number of foreign residents, many of them from China, Indonesia, and Nepal, has doubled since 2010, and if they keep coming, Sanseito claims, it will be Japanese taxpayers who foot the bill for their health care and other social services they take advantage of. The message is the same one that has worked so well for far-right nativists elsewhere: our beautiful country is becoming a place for others to enjoy and for us to endure.

Whether ordinary voters will be persuaded by such messaging remains to be seen. At the grand sumo tournament, very few people were willing to pass judgment on Sanseito. Instead of calling the party’s electoral victory “regrettable,” as they had Onosato’s performance, most simply said they were surprised. A number of people used the word fukuzatsu to describe their feelings about the party, which can either mean that something is too complicated to put into words or that they are of two minds about it. Many seemed to find it equally difficult to explain the nuances of sumo’s ethnic politics, but in Nagoya I started to get the sense that I was looking at the issue backward—that the longing for the great Japanese hope had less to do with a sense of national superiority than an anxiety over whether the country’s best days were behind it.

“It’s very important for Japanese people when there is a Japanese-born yokozuna,” Naomi, the tour guide, told me. “Recently Mongolian wrestlers have been so strong, and I think it has become the basis for a kind of inferiority complex.” She paused for a while and then paraphrased the same words that had inspired the name of the Kokugikan in Tokyo: “After all, sumo is the national sport of Japan.”

Later that evening, when Onosato stepped into the ring for the night’s final match, against a wrestler named Kotoshoho, the response from the crowd was muted. The yokozuna drew the sort of applause that suggested respect for his title along with a measure of disappointment in how he was representing it. There were still cheers when he threw a big fistful of salt on the ground to purify the ring, and when he performed his dramatic foot-stomping ritual, dozens of young women excitedly called out his name. There were gasps, too, at the sight of how many corporate sponsors had bought kensho banners for display. A modern equivalent of the Edo-era tradition of throwing cash into the ring for one’s favorite wrestler, these brightly colored banners advertise products ranging from ramen and manga to pharmaceuticals, and they are paraded around the ring by a procession of men who encircle the wrestlers before they square off.

Winning in sumo can be a matter of sheer size; it can also come down to speed, cunning, or mastery of technique. The sport’s range of fighting styles—there are eighty-two official “winning techniques” in sumo, broadly categorized as either pushing, thrusting, throwing, or leverage maneuvers—owes something to its surprising diversity of body types. In sumo’s top division, the average weight is around 350 pounds, but celebrated rikishi have been as heavy as 625 pounds and as light as 200. The legendary sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji, who retired in 1991, was nicknamed “the Wolf” owing to his lean, muscular build, reportedly carrying just 11 percent body fat on his 270-pound frame. One of the most popular ozeki of the Twenties, who also used the shikona Onosato, was called “the Mouse” for his diminutive stature, standing just over five feet four inches tall with a weight of 214 pounds.

At six foot four inches and weighing 415 pounds, the contemporary Onosato is more in line with the average Westerner’s conception of a sumo wrestler. But size did him no good against the smaller Kotoshoho, who took control of the match early on by reaching around Onosato’s arm to grab his mawashi, thereby pinning the limb to his body. Onosato used his free arm to reach for Kotoshoho’s loincloth, but by stepping to the side, the smaller wrestler created an empty space for Onosato to fall into. Applying the slightest pressure to the trapped elbow then allowed Kotoshoho to force his opponent into the empty space and out of the ring. It was Onosato’s fourth loss of the tournament.

The crowd’s reaction, like so much collective behavior in Japan, could easily be misunderstood by outsiders. From the ground-level seating on all four sides of the ring, dozens of fans grabbed the purple cushions they had been sitting on and hurled them toward the ring. It looked a lot like disappointment. But the real meaning of this gesture helps explain why even the most nativist sumo fans choose to celebrate Japanese-born yokozuna rather than openly defaming their foreign rivals: the pillows landing atop footprints left behind in the ring, I later learned, were not an expression of ire, but rather a traditional way of celebrating an underdog’s victory over a yokozuna.

The first six or seven rows of floor-level seating around a sumo ring are so close to the action that they are sometimes called sunakaburi, or “covered in sand.” They are also close enough that when rikishi tumble from the ring they sometimes land among the spectators. The next set of rows consists of masu-seki, 1.4-square-meter boxes, in which up to four people can lounge on pillows normally used for sitting on traditional tatami flooring. Fans eat out of bento boxes and drink beer in a picniclike atmosphere that makes it easy to imagine that one is experiencing sumo much as people did in its golden age in the late eighteenth century. On the penultimate day of the Nagoya tournament, I had an entire square to myself, in row fourteen, putting me just a bit above eye level with the wrestlers in the ring.

This was closer to the dohyo than I’d ever been—close enough to fully appreciate the strength of the wrestlers and the furious abandon with which they fight. Halfway through the juryo division matches, a rikishi named Mita scored a spectacular win using hatakikomi, a technique that involves slapping down an opponent as he charges at your legs. At the start of the match, the wrestler Daiseizan, who hails from an ethnic Mongolian region of China, had rushed Mita, who sidestepped him like a matador avoiding a charging bull, then slapped the back of his head hard enough to send Daiseizan flying face-first into the sand at the edge of the ring.

In the masu-seki to my left was a middle-aged man named Akira Arai, who had come from nearby Kasugai with his father and two of his father’s friends. The three elderly men had an air of mischief about them, as if they’d narrowly escaped whatever it was they were meant to be doing on a Saturday night. When I insisted that they store their backpacks on one of my section’s unused seats, the oldest of the men pulled two cans of beer from a small cooler and handed one to me. The five of us chatted idly as we sipped cold Kirin Ichibans and ate the bento-box lunches we’d brought. Yes, they said, it’s rare these days to see a Japanese-born yokozuna. Yes, it’s too bad he’s not performing well. Yes, it’s a real shame Hoshoryu was injured so early in the tournament.

Sumo is both sport and spectacle, a pageantry of difference celebrating novelties like Ozora Buzaemon, who competed in just one tournament in March 1827 but became a national sensation owing to his extraordinary height of more than seven feet. Today, sumo’s most anomalous competitors are white wrestlers like Aonishiki, a blue-eyed twenty-one-year-old rikishi from Ukraine. Throughout the makuuchi division matches, Arai and his elder companions had been thoroughly game, as engaged as any average sumo fan. But as Aonishiki stretched ringside, they grew more excited than I’d seen them all night. At just shy of six feet tall and weighing 310 pounds, he’s small for sumo’s top division, but he’s fast, with a reputation for attacking low. The Ukrainian, Arai told me, “is a strong, skilled sumo wrestler, which is what we Japanese appreciate most as fans.” And, he said, fans also respected Aonishiki “because he was a victim of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.”

Aonishiki’s life story is the rare sort of immigrant narrative that the Japanese media likes to celebrate. In 2022, he fled the war in Ukraine and settled in Kobe, where he was taken in by the family of a friend he’d met at the Junior Sumo World Championships a few years earlier. His full shikona—Aonishiki Arata—pays tribute to both his Ukrainian roots and his adoptive Japanese family: Arata is the name of a member of the family that took him in, and the “ao” in Aonishiki means “blue,” in reference to the flag of Ukraine. Aonishiki undoubtedly benefits from the relative novelty of being a white sumo wrestler, as well as from his vague resemblance to two popular retired rikishi: the Georgian wrestler Gagamaru and the Estonian wrestler Baruto. White rikishi, like the Hawaiians before them, effectively represent a minority within a minority, one that is both less dominant than the contingent of Mongolian wrestlers and less likely to inspire the sort of cognitive dissonance that can arise when a foreign rikishi seems almost Japanese but behaves in some profoundly un-Japanese manner.

Aonishiki struggled from the outset of his match with Kusano, his Japanese opponent, whose wild pushing and slapping kept the Ukrainian from grabbing hold of him. Kusano gained the upper hand by getting a firm grip on Aonishiki’s mawashi, which he used to drag him to the edge of the ring. Then the Japanese rikishi slipped his right arm underneath Aonishiki’s left arm, planted his right leg firmly in front of the Ukrainian, and tossed him from the ring using the “beltless arm throw” technique called sukuinage. I realized only later, after inspecting the rankings on the final day of the tournament, that had he won, Aonishiki could have brought home the Emperor’s Cup, which instead went to Kotoshoho, the wrestler who had defeated Onosato on my first day in Nagoya.

Kotoshoho’s victory had already been secured by the time the tournament drew to a close, with a final match between Onosato and Kotozakura, an ozeki who had once been in contention for promotion to yokozuna before a string of losses put him behind his rivals Onosato and Hoshoryu. When Onosato swiftly and unceremoniously shoved Kotozakura from the ring, the crowd roared. The overwhelming feeling seemed not to be joy, but rather relief that the great Japanese hope hadn’t lost yet again.

In late September, I finally got to see the showdown I’d been hoping for, though I had to watch the action from a hotel room while vacationing in London. Onosato and Hoshoryu had both made it to the end of the autumn tournament with records of thirteen wins and two losses, meaning that the Emperor’s Cup would go to whichever yokozuna prevailed in a winner-take-all playoff bout. It was an unusual situation—so unusual, in fact, that nothing like it had happened since 2009, when Asashoryu defeated Hakuho. In this case, the drama was heightened by the fact that Hoshoryu had already beaten Onosato in a non-playoff match earlier that day. (Compounding the pressure for Hoshoryu was the fact that Asashoryu happens to be his uncle.)

Onosato’s size proved to be a decisive advantage. After locking arms with Hoshoryu, he was able to resist an attempted throw, then executed a yoritaoshi, a “frontal crush out” maneuver, to force his rival from the ring. This is one of sumo’s many techniques that involve sacrificing sure footing in an attempt to get one’s opponent to the ground first—sometimes just a fraction of a second earlier than oneself, which is exactly what happened in this case, as both men fell from the ring in near unison. The judges convened and then rendered their decision: the match went to Onosato.

The next tournament went to neither of sumo’s reigning grand champions but to Aonishiki, the Ukrainian. Following his victory, the press speculated about whether Japan’s newly appointed leader, the ultra-conservative head of the LDP, Sanae Takaichi, would appear in person to present the winner with the Prime Minister’s Cup. This had nothing to do with the optics of Aonishiki, a war refugee who has found fame and fortune in Japan, receiving the trophy from Takaichi, who has promised to repatriate those who “claim that they are refugees” but actually have “financial motives.” Rather, as a woman, Takaichi is prohibited from entering the sacred confines of the dohyo. In the end, the prime minister sided with Shinto tradition and chose not to present the award.

In London, after watching the sumo match I’d waited months to see, I took a stroll around a pond in Hyde Park. I was reminded of that hot summer day near Lake Suwa, where the god Takeminakata has resided since losing history’s first sumo match. The lake is also home to a strange natural phenomenon called omiwatari, which occurs in the winter, when temperatures cause the lake to freeze and contract at night, and expand during the slightly warmer day. The result is a ridge of jagged chunks of ice running from one side of the lake to the other, so that it seems to serve as a path between Shinto shrines located on opposite shores. The word omiwatari, or “god’s crossing,” dates to as early as 1397 and, according to local tradition, refers to the path cut by Takeminakata each time he crosses the frozen lake to visit the goddess Yasakatome on the other side.

Like the coronation of native-born yokozuna, omiwatari has grown scarcer in the twenty-first century, seemingly owing to the effects of climate change. It last took place eight years ago. Since I may never see it, I’d decided to visit the four shrines associated with the local Suwa deities during my visit in June. It was early afternoon by the time I reached the main shrine, on the south side of Lake Suwa. As I stepped through the traditional gateway onto the sando, a “sacred path” that leads toward areas of the shrine dedicated to purification and worship, I saw to my left a large stone statue of the fabled sumo wrestler Raiden Tameemon, who died in 1825 with a reputation so impressive that his not being named a yokozuna remains one of sumo’s enduring mysteries.

But the shrine’s most conspicuous feature was an absence: unlike most Shinto shrines, the main shrine at Lake Suwa has no honden, the building where the deity resides. Instead, Takeminakata is enshrined in a nearby mountain, to which he fled, the legend goes, after suffering his great defeat. But first, I learned, he had to drive away the indigenous deity Moreya, whose human descendants were said to be the earliest priests at Suwa Taisha. Takeminakata himself was, in other words, a kind of divine invader: sumo’s first runner-up as well as its first outsider.