Unlikely candidates carry weight of sumo legacy
06/02/2005
The Asahi Shimbun
HIROSHIMA–Dubbed the ``master of X-rated films,‘’ director Toshiki Sato is refocusing his efforts on another subject involving flesh: the centuries-old sport of sumo.
Or more precisely, how a university’s once-famed sumo club was revived by the most unlikely bunch of candidates-two lightweight foreign residents and Japanese women.
Considering the history of Japan’s more than 1,000-year-old signature sport, which still bans women from entering the dohyo, or ring, the story may seem fanciful.
But a visit to a sumo training session at Hiroshima University quickly puts matters in perspective.
The university’s sumo club was founded in 1985.
A decade later it was still going strong, picking up third place in the national and public university sumo tournament in 1996 and again in 1998.
But by the spring of 2001, the club was without members and on the verge of having to close when an unlikely cluster of two men, one from Brazil and the other from the Netherlands, and two Japanese women, all students of the university, decided to step up to the dohyo.
The club soon became even more of a melting pot when a Moroccan student and another from Mexico signed up.
After learning of this unusual story, a movie production company decided it was worthy of the big screen.
``I am interested that it was foreigners and (Japanese) women who protected the Japanese national sport,‘’ says Sato, who is known both here and overseas for his adult films.
The ``Chanko’’ crew started shooting the roughly 100-million-yen movie on the university’s campus in Higashi-Hiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, last month.
Named for sumo wrestlers’ food of choice, chanko-nabe, the film starts off with a scene of the Brazilian student, the sole member of the club at the time, working the campus in an effort to recruit fellow wrestlers.
Some of the club’s current members feature in the film, performing alongside popular actor Atsuro Watabe, who plays the team’s coach, and four Americans and an African who play the foreign students. Hiroshima University President Taizo Muta also appears.
And as the cameras roll, the club, now with five members, including a Spanish captain and one woman wrestler, can be found in the gym twice a week practicing their sport of choice.
All members tackle sumo seriously,'' says 21-year-old Chie Shimizu, a third-year student of the university's Faculty of Medicine and the club's only female.
I hope the movie crew is able to capture how seriously we have grappled with sumo.‘’
The film will be released nationwide in mid-October.(IHT/Asahi: June 2,2005)