Sumo wrestles with identity crisis
Chicago Tribune
Japan's national sport has been overtaken by foreign competitors, such as champion Asashoryu, and some say it has lost its luster
TOKYO -- At a mere 308 pounds, Asashoryu is not the biggest of the big-bellied men waddling around the dirt ring of this chilly sumo training stable, looking for someone to slam up against.
But he is definitely the baddest.
His opponents look as though they were carved from mountains. But Asashoryu cuffs them in the ear and drops them to their knees. He drives his palm into their throats and they recoil. He picks them up by their belts and flings them, their legs flailing, out of the ring.
He toys with fellow wrestlers like a cat playing with a beach ball.
Asashoryu's cream-colored, almost unblemished body is now the sun around which Japan's national sport revolves. Just 24 and still a bit baby-faced, he has won six of the last seven major tournaments since 2003, dominating sumo the way Tiger Woods once did golf. He is sumo's only reigning yokozuna, top-ranked in a sport that never has more than four yokozuna at a time, a wrestler many call the best Japan has seen in the postwar era.
And he isn't even Japanese.
Asashoryu's real name is Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj, and he is Mongolian. Born into a family of wrestlers in the Central Asian country's capital, Ulan Bator, he came to Japan after high school nearly eight years ago, a strong kid with a mean streak and dreams of sumo stardom. He adopted the name Asashoryu, which means Blue Dragon of the Morning, just as a wave of foreigners began shattering the cultural barrier that had long made sumo the most Japanese of sports....the rest...
