The Sumo is the English edition of Dohyo no Mokugekisha, a Japanese sumo site written and photographed by Michihiro Taguchi. This page sets out where our facts come from, what we refuse to publish, and what we do when we cannot confirm something.
Every article starts from a Japanese source article
Taguchi has written more than 4,300 articles about sumo in Japanese, most of them filed from the venue on the day. Before an English article is written, we identify which of those articles it is built on. If we cannot point to a source article in the Japanese archive, we do not publish the piece.
That rule was adopted after this site had already been running, so we are auditing the pieces published before it. Where a page turns out to rest on general knowledge rather than on the archive, we rewrite it from a source article or we take it down. Until that audit is finished, we are not claiming every page here already meets the rule — we are saying this is the standard we hold ourselves to, and that the gap is ours to close.
That rule exists because it is the only thing that makes this site worth reading. Anyone can restate what is already on an encyclopedia page. What we can add is what one reporter saw, over and over, across thirteen years of tournaments — the queue outside the hall in the rain, the referee who called a halt to refasten a belt, the rule that quietly changed and nobody wrote down in English.
We rewrite. We do not machine-translate
A Japanese article written for Japanese readers assumes things an English reader has no reason to know. So we restructure: the answer goes in the first two sentences, technical words are given in romaji with a short definition the first time they appear, and eras are written in Western years rather than Japanese regnal years. What we never do is run the Japanese through a translator and change the headings.
Numbers come from the reporting or from the Japan Sumo Association
Records, rankings, salaries and dates are taken either from Taguchi’s own reporting or from what the Japan Sumo Association publishes, and we note the date we last checked. Two rules follow from that.
- We only write “according to the Association” when the Association actually publishes it. Some things that look official are not. Which stable belongs to which ichimon faction, for example, is not published by the Association, so we attribute it to the sources we actually used.
- Bout-by-bout official records begin with the January 2013 tournament. That is as far back as the Association’s published results go. For tournaments before that we use Taguchi’s own records and say so, rather than presenting older numbers as official.
When we count something ourselves, we say so and show the rule
Some of our tables do not exist anywhere else because we built them by hand. When a figure is our own count rather than a published one, we label it, and we state the counting rule: which tournaments are in scope, whether championship playoffs are included, and how forfeits and withdrawals are treated. A ranking without its counting rule is an opinion wearing a number, and we would rather you could check our arithmetic.
Cells we could not verify stay empty
Sumo’s oldest records are incomplete. Where the Association’s own historical tables leave a column blank, ours stays blank too. We do not fill a gap by estimating, by averaging, or by copying a figure from a site that does not say where it got it. If a photograph of an old ranking sheet is too faint to read a number, that number does not appear on this site.
The same applies when two sources disagree. If Taguchi’s contemporaneous account and a later table say different things, we publish both and note the difference rather than quietly picking the tidier one.
We take positions, and we say whose they are
This is not a neutral reference site and it does not try to be one. Taguchi has been arguing about sumo in print for over a decade — that a promotion was undeserved, that a punishment was inconsistent, that a wrestler who keeps winning ten bouts a tournament is not doing the job the rank requires. Those arguments are the reason to read him rather than an encyclopedia, and we carry them into English rather than sanding them off.
What we hold ourselves to is the line between the two kinds of statement. A judgement can be as blunt as it likes. A number cannot. So when we run a verdict we say whose it is and when it was made, and we put the record it rests on next to it, sourced, so you can reach the opposite conclusion from the same figures. Where a wrestler is still active and the argument is still live, we say that too.
We do not invent first-person experience
“I watched him from the second row” appears on this site only when Taguchi actually watched him from the second row. Firsthand detail is never reconstructed from research, and we do not write invented quotes or staged anecdotes to make a page feel closer to the ring than it is.
Photographs are shot ringside. Artwork is labelled as artwork
Every photograph on this site was taken by Taguchi at the venue, and it carries the credit Photo by Michihiro Taguchi — shot ringside. We do not use stock or wire pictures.
A small number of pages — mostly explainers about ideas rather than people — carry an ink-style illustration instead of a photograph, because no photograph in the archive fits the subject. Those illustrations are computer-generated. Some are purely abstract; others show a place or an object, such as a hall, a lantern or a banner. They are never presented as photographs, they never depict a real wrestler, and they never carry a photography credit. We do not generate images of real people, living or dead.
Rankings go stale, so we date them
Sumo issues a new ranking sheet six times a year, which means a wrestler’s rank can be wrong within weeks of publication. Pages that quote a rank name the tournament it belongs to. Every article shows its publication date, and articles we have revisited show a modified date as well.
Corrections
If you find something wrong — a stale rank, a bad date, a figure that does not add up — please tell us through the contact form. We will check it and fix it. Corrections are the cheapest part of accuracy and the part readers are best at.
See also our About page, our disclaimer, and our privacy policy.
Published August 5, 2026.