Big Men in Thongs

We wanted to put another check on our "Japan Bucket List" so this weekend we finally went to a sumo tournament. There are 5 tournaments a year in Japan, 2 of which are held in Tokyo.

My first impression: Its so quick! Most of the guys were able to push the other out of the ring (or have them fall over) within 30 seconds. And that's it. That's all their work for the day. The get their respective checks in the win or loss column and they come back the next day. A tournament lasts about 15 days.

Other fun facts:

• Each guy has a personal hairdresser to create and attend to the "top knot" hairdo
• Their ceremonial aprons they originally walk out in (like in the photo above) can run about $20,000 each - they were very beautiful but that's a lot of money for a glorified loin cloth!
• For some of the bigger matches, sponsors will walk around the ring with banners before the match starts as an offering for bonus money. Each banner is worth about $600, so if 5 advertisers walk around the ring for a match, the winner will pocket an extra $3000. Not bad for 30 seconds of work.
• The referee (dressed in kimono) only refs for 2 matches a day. And yes, the wrestlers can "challenge" any ref or judging calls.
• ...and much more. Talk to us about it sometime :)
  

Below is a video of one of the more "higher up" matches of the day. The wrestlers can step out of the ring a couple times before the match begins to get more salt, pump themselves up, etc. Kind of like stepping away from the plate in baseball, I suppose! The salt is used to "purify" the ring (the platform itself is made of packed dirt with sand spread on top).



We had a great time and had way more fun than we expected. I think this is because we started some friendly betting on the matches. It turns out my plan to consistently pick the smaller guys and older guys worked out well as I won in the end versus Erik! No wager, though. Darn.

Visiting Taiwan

While Erik was home between his summer and fall deployments, we visited Taiwan for 5 days in early September. Admittedly, our first choice was to visit Beijing and The Great Wall but we had some visa obstacles with that plan. So! How about Taiwan? It has Chinese culture and is a 3 hour flight from Tokyo - fits the bill!

It ended up being a lovely place and the people were very friendly. The country has a really interesting history - a neat blend of Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, aborginal, etc kind of thing going on. It became clear there are different opinions surrounding this (as with most pages of history) and has essentially left me with the question who does like China? Besides Mother Russia, of course. Moving on from awkward political thoughts...

Our journeys were mainly based around Taipei and a couple days in the central counties of the sub tropic country. The south of the island offers many beaches and resorts, however they are still dealing with the effects of the devastating Typhoon Morokat last month.

Here is a slideshow with some pictures set to music from our adventure!

If you'd like to view it in a larger format, click on the arrows on the lower right corner of the video. Once the screen expands, click on the upper right hand corner where it says "scaling is on" to change it to "scaling is off" to make it a reasonable, clearer size.