"Why do foreign rikishi speak fluent Japanese?"

[Mulboyne]

Japan Times: Past the pain and language barriers
Even for a sumo wrestler, Kaido Hoovelson looks big. The 20-year-old Estonian, who goes by the ring name of "Baruto," stands 197-cm tall, making him one of sumo's tallest wrestlers...Becoming a novice sumo wrestler is signing up to a crash course in Japanese language. He arrived with only an Estonian Japanese dictionary and two words of Japanese: "geisha" and "sayonara" -- and no one in his stable knew more than a handful of English words. But a year later his Japanese is fluent enough to follow training instructions and hang out with his stablemates. Becoming a sumo wrestler is an exceptional form of total immersion language learning, says Satoshi Miyazaki, linguist and author of "Why do foreign sumo wrestlers speak fluent Japanese?" Not only do foreign sumo wrestlers have to learn Japanese, they have to learn how "to become Japanese," says Miyazaki...more...