Salt Adds Time

4:00AM was quite a rude awakening.  I’m up and out of the hotel by 4:45 to get to the only open gate at the Akasaka-Mitsuke line which is right below the Bic Camera.  First train is right on time at 5:09.  There are several people sleeping on benches and propped up against walls having missed the last train at 11:00PM the night before.  Tokyo is safe for practically anyone, as long as it isn’t snowing.

There are maybe about a dozen people in my car.  This bodes well for our chances of getting a pair of the 350 tickets that will go on sale at 8:00.  The stop before I meet my co-worker, about 60 people cram in.  Now it is packed.  My co-worker sees the “sea of humanity” as he put it and is flabbergasted.  Well, it wasn’t so bad that they need to press people in with sticks.  Two stops later a majority of them pile out to join one of the other trains.  We hop onto the JR line at Ueno-okachimachi and continue to the Ryogoku station where it is about a 4 minute walk to the front of the Ryogoku Kokugikan.  We get to the line at about 5:50 and there are about 60 people ahead of us.  Things are looking up and as long as they’re not all waiting for 6 friends, we should be good.

The cold wind and the sun hiding behind the kokugikan keep us awake with little problem through sheer cold.  By about 7:00 we have maybe 70 in front of us as friends join groups, and maybe 80 behind us.  Around 7:30, a girl comes by and heads towards us and explains that they will be handing out numbers soon and you must have that number and stay in line.  Also, only one ticket can be purchased per person.  This is really good news.

Then a couple of guys start moving down the line handing out numbers.  We’re #81 and #82.  We’re in!  The rest of the line waiting time was alternating standing in the sun and marveling at the length of the line.  We took some perverse pleasure in watching some foreigners running to try to make it in time to get in line.  They were unsuccessful.

Breakfast needed to be quick so we could get inside and reserve our general admission seats.  Crap.  So we ate at McDonald’s.  Same food, different looking menu.

We get inside the kokugikan and head inside and grab the best seats we can, place our match schedule sheets on the seat and head down to the museums and shops to look around.  No photos were allowed in the museum.  Lots of cool things down there.  There were block paintings and photographs of all the yokozuna (there have only been 71 in the history of sumo).  There is such a rich and colorful history to this martial art and the tournaments.  If you ever have the chance to go to a sumo tournament, do it.  It is very cool.

The bouts started around 10:30 with the younger, unranked rikishi (wrestler).  Bouts last about five seconds to maybe one minute, and they occur every about two minutes.  They’re very efficient.  That is until you get to the Juryo division and they start being able to practice the salt purification rituals.  It’s a bowl of salt that the rikishi will scoop out some and toss in the air to land on the Dohyo and to keep the bad spirits away.  Some rikishi do this several times.  So the usual two minutes between bouts becomes about five or eight minutes.

I’ll share a couple of photos at the end of this post to show some of the bouts.  Dinner of baby clam, squid, octopus, and onion over rice with miso soup was had in Akihabara, an electronic Mecca.  If you’ve been to Comic Con and seen booths of figurines and Japanese style dolls, manga, etc., imagine 3-story floors of that instead of just booths.  Insanity.

So tired, and I just want to crash now so I’ll end this post early with some sumo pictures.