Would you like to link to
this website? Please use
one of the buttons below. Thank you!
Webdesign & contents
by ClaireWorks.
Copyright 2000-2001
Beverly Claire L. Fangonon.
All rights reserved.
All graphics & photographs
by ClaireWorks,
unless otherwise indicated.
Grand Sumo
Face to Face with a Legend: My Chiyonofuji Story 06 June 2001
I have a story to tell you. It's about this rikishi, a sumo guy named Chiyonofuji. For us die-hard fans, he was the greatest sumo guy to walk the face of the earth. I mean, the greatest ever. He won 31 championships and 1,045 wins in the top division, and 53 continuous wins in a row. He's considered a living legend, and is currently heading a sumo stable called Kokonoe-beya. Despite the fact that he retired long before I came to Japan, I've managed to see videos of the guy and read about him in books and magazines.
What was Chiyonofuji like? Hard for me to explain. Maybe it's because I have never seen him play live. Maybe it's because I'm no good at describing men in general. You know how some guys just give a wolf whistle in reaction to a certain actress's name? Well, the name "Chiyonofuji" would elicit girlish sighs from Japanese women aged anywhere between 20 to 120. Writer David Benjamin has come up with a wonderful description of Chiyonofuji, and thank goodness for that, because this woman here (me) is too awe-struck to put her own thoughts into words. Below is how Benjamin--also a die-hard Chiyo fan--paints a portrait of the immortal sumo idol (Excerpt from The Joy of Sumo by David Benjamin. Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle, 1991. pp 40-41).
Chiyonofuji gets his hair done. The long hair is put up in a topknot, called "chonmage", resembling a ginko leaf.
Chiyo, or "the Wolf" as the press liked to call him, retired in May of 1991. He was a wrestler who bore the unmistakable mark of immortality, like Pele or Julius Erving. He quietly forced the entire sumo galaxy to revolve around him. Other sumo wrestlers have recently begun to emulate his regimen, physique and style, but when I began to succumb to the pleasures of sumo back in 1987 there was no one even close to Chiyonofuji. For one thing, he looked different. He had, f'rinstance, no boobs--just a smooth, granite slab of pectoral muscle. No jellied blankets of suet rippled beneath his skin. His belly, a small hard bulge above his belt, did not bounce like a cantaloupe in a nylon bag. His arms were not the elbowless sausages with baby-fists that seem obligatory among sumo wrestlers. His arms, really, were the striking feature of Chiyonofuji's aspect. They reminded me of the coal miners with whom I onced worked, round-shouldered mountain men whose arms were a paradox of mass and dexterity. Such arms are not huge and distended like those on the denizens of Gold's Gym. But they are heavy--too heavy, certainly, to lift with a normal human shoulder--with bulges at forearm and bicep that never seem to relax, as though they've been artfully packed with riverbed stones. Yet, such arms--coal-miner, Chiyonofuji arms--swing and flex with feathery lightness. Chiyonofuji carried truncheons, but moved them like wings. Chiyo, even without the usual indulgence one grants to the swollen face of the large athlete, was handsome. Not matinee-idol beautiful, but handsome. He affected none of the theatricality of lesser wrestlers; he was almost trancelike in his demeanor from the moment he entered the arena and bowed...to the instant of his victory when--suddenly--he betrayed himself as perhaps sumo's most expressive, emotional competitor. One noticed Chiyonofuji, irresistably, because in his face, his body, his skill, one could see the art and discipline of sumo.
At the Osaka tournament on March 17, 1990, Chiyo throws down Hananokuni for an historic, record-breaking 1000th win.
A great sketch of what the man was like. I'd say Chiyonofuji would have easily been a hero in those unrealistic paperback romance novels. He had the looks, the talent, the skill, that complicated combination of charm and dangerous air. At the peak of his career, Chiyo was adored by millions, and even when he kept on winning and winning and winning, he was never easy to hate. There was something to his legend, certain facts that wrote his life like a novel.
Chiyo was the son of a fisherman up in snowy Hokkaido, and since childhood he sailed with his dad and learned to haul in the nets--this, his dad claimed later, was the reason why he was able to develop arms so strong. The boy was a born athlete, all grace and balance, but he never considered joining the cloistered world of sumo, until the sumo scout offered him a plane ride to Tokyo. At 15, Mitsugu (Chiyo's real name), like many a young boy, wanted to go high up in the skies by aeroplane. When he entered the sumo-beya, his ascend was far from easy. For one thing, he was relatively skinny. Fighting at the salaried level, he dislocated his left shoulder repeatedly because his best technique, the nage (arm throw), required him to take down men more than twice his weight. His left shoulder took the brunt of it all, and the guy became prone to injury. Again and again his arm and shoulder got wrapped in a sling. Some people thought he'd just turn his back and cut off the mage, the top knot that identified a sumo guy. It was this fact--that he was so vulnerable--that made him the perfect hero. When he had enough of getting constantly broken up, Chiyo turned into a keiko no oni (training devil). He sculpted his upper body with grim determination. While his peers napped after a hard morning's training, Chiyo remained in the practice ring, doing 500 push-ups everyday. He lifted weights like there was no tomorrow. He practiced until he collapsed. And it worked. He packed in pure meat. His shoulder stopped getting dislocated. He started to beat everyone. He became the strongest, most sculpted sumo guy ever, and it was all through constant effort, the unwillingness to give up. Chiyo may have been blessed with an innate fighter's instict, but he was not born an invincible athlete. So he made himself into one.
There are many more Chiyo stories that I could share with you. For the guy was simply incredible. Off the dohyo, he was all boyish charm and humor and serious analyses of his own strengths and weaknesses. The press loved him. The sumo association loved him. The fans threw themselves at his feet. He didn't go for an arranged marriage like men of his status were prone to do. One time he went to a Japanese restaurant, saw a girl, fell in love, and went after her and married her. He wept unabashedly when his third daughter died of SID syndrome. He cried in front of the cameras after a difficult championship. He patiently signed millions of autographs both in Japan and abroad, and took it upon himself--as the sumo world's representative hero--to live a blameless, gossip-free life.
One of the greatest sumo guys to walk the face of the earth weeps at his retirement ceremony or "dampatsushiki". Cutting off the topknot is his stable master, former Yokozuna Kitanofuji.
He was the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky of sumo. And so, you could not blame me for running after him, nearly a decade after he retired.
Note: The above black-and-white photographs were taken from Chiyonofuji's autobiography, Worufo to Yobareta Otoka (The Man They Called Wolf), Tokyo: Yomiuri Shimbun Press, 1993, pp. 9, 89 & 205.
