2026– date –

Grand sumo comes to Tokyo on forty-five days a year, and only those days put ranked wrestlers on the ring at the Ryogoku Kokugikan. If your trip falls on any of the other three hundred or so days, or if the tournament you wanted is sold ...

Sumo’s current top two ranks are held by yokozuna Hoshoryu and Onosato, with Kirishima and Kotozakura at ozeki. This is the full banzuke — the ranking sheet — for every wrestler in the top two divisions, as it stood aft...

By championships won, the answer is Hakuho, with 45 — more than any wrestler in history. Rank the yokozuna instead by how often they won, how often they took the title and how often they were fit enough to be on the ring at all, an...

Sumo weight and height, ranked.

Only wrestlers ranked in juryo or above are paid a salary at all. At the top the monthly figure is ¥3,000,000 for a yokozuna and ¥1,100,000 for a juryo wrestler, with three steps in between. The four divisions below juryo — the gre...

A kesho-mawashi is the embroidered silk apron a sumo wrestler wears for the ring-entering ceremony, and the Japan Sumo Association puts the cost at upwards of approximately one million yen. It is not the belt used in bouts. Nobody grappl...

Kyujo is the word for sitting out of a grand tournament. A wrestler who withdraws, whether before the tournament starts or partway through it, is kyujo for the days he misses, and every missed day goes into the official record as a loss....

In a bout, a sumo wrestler wears exactly one thing: the mawashi, a silk or cotton belt wound around the waist and between the legs. The Japan Sumo Association describes the competition belt as heavy silk about 9 metres long and 80 centim...

A tokoyama is a professional hairdresser employed by the Japan Sumo Association to comb, oil and tie the hair of sumo wrestlers. They are salaried members of the Association, not freelancers, and each one is attached to a stable rather t...

This is a plain-English glossary of the sumo terms you actually hear. Sumo keeps its Japanese vocabulary untranslated, so a broadcast throws thirty unfamiliar words at a new viewer in twenty minutes. Below, every term is given in romaniz...