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By Root 729 0

at top speed, grappling, slapping with both hands, choking, striving for a hold, or leverage, momentum. Most matches were over in seconds, the winner remaining in the ring to meet one opponent after another until he was bested. The sense of bulk in the little room was overwhelming – a sea of flesh and muscle confined in the cramped space. Occasionally, when one of the mammoth athletes was thrown over another’s leg, he’d come spinning or tumbling right toward me, threatening to crush my spine like a bag of taro chips. A huge wrestler frog-walked on bended legs in front of me, back and forth, while at the edge of the ring a young novice, still small in size, stood in a painfully bent crouch, holding a basket of salt in outstretched arms, beads of sweat sprouting on an exertion-reddened face. Punishment? Initiation? I didn’t ask. Mr Tomotsuna, the boss, to my left – and an ex-sumo wrestler himself – did not emanate approachability and looked too focused on the activity in the room to disturb him with my witless questions. He hardly gave me a glance unless I was lighting his cigarette for him. Sumo wrestlers live as a family under one roof, all under the guidance and tutelage of the oyakata, who rigorously controls every aspect of their daily schedule and training: when they exercise, when they sleep, when they eat, what they eat. They rise early along hierarchical lines: novices first, higher ranks later. (You can distinguish rank by hairstyle.) The novices, much like kitchen interns, sweep, clean, and do household chores, including assisting with the cooking.

I was here to see chanko, the food of the sumo wrestler. Typically, I had all the wrong ideas about what they eat. When I’d heard about chanko food, I’d assumed, since we’re talking about the stuff sumo wrestlers eat in order to blow up to refrigerator-sized grappling machines of fat and muscle, that daily fare would consist of vats of fatty pork and lasagna-density starches, big gulp-sized milkshakes, Cadbury bars between meals, brick-proportioned Snickers bars, whole pullets filled with lardons of bacon and cornmeal stuffing, Grand Slam breakfasts, and endless buffets. I was wrong about this, of course. As I was wrong about these wrestlers. They are not just really, really fat guys in diapers.

Sumo wrestlers are perhaps the most visible and obvious expression of all those dark, suppressed urges in the Japanese subconscious that I referred to earlier, that tiny voice inside every whipped salaryman that wants to make like Godzilla (Gojira) and stomp cities flat. They are a projection of Japanese power, and, make no mistake, they are powerful. Under all that carefully layered bulk, it’s pure muscle, baby. It’s like watching rhinos sparring as one fat bastard crashes into another, digs in low, and pushes the other guy – all six hundred pounds of him – straight back and out of the ring, or flips him onto his back. The momentum and the focus are so great that during practice sparring, when one wrestler fells another, or drives him out of the ring, the other wrestlers step in quickly, all yelling something that sounds like ‘Hesss!’ – indicating that the bout is over, settle down, cease fire – and restraining the aggressor from further assaults. You do not want to make a sumo wrestler mad at you.

In old-school chanko cuisine, four-legged creatures were rarely served, the idea being that sumo wrestlers who use all four limbs during a fight have lost the fight. Chicken – which stand on two feet, like a good wrestler – and fish were the preferred main ingredients. Mr Tomotsuna was making a soup of tuna and vegetables for lunch the day I visited – a fairly sensible choice for Calista Flockhart, I thought, but hardly the bulk-inducing pigfest I’d imagined. I’d have to wait until dinner to find out more.

The Edosawa restaurant in the sumo district is a four-story place where customers eat in private dining rooms. The walls are decorated with paintings of famous wrestlers, and the restaurant attracts a steady crowd of sumo wrestlers and former sumo wrestlers. Michiko, Shinji,