The banzuke is sumo’s official ranking sheet: the ordered list of every wrestler in the sport, published before each grand tournament and arranged from the champions at the top to the lowest entrants at the bottom. It tells you who is ranked where, who sits on the East side and who sits on the West, and—because position is the only currency that matters in sumo—it is the single document that decides a wrestler’s pay, prestige and who he must face. Its master is brushed by hand by a gyoji in sumo’s own calligraphic script, with higher ranks written in larger characters. This guide explains how the banzuke is built, how the divisions and ranks stack up, and how a wrestler’s results move him up or down it.
One sheet, the whole sport. The banzuke ranks every professional wrestler from yokozuna at the top to jonokuchi at the bottom, split into an East and a West column, and is released about two weeks before each tournament.
Results rewrite it every time. A winning record (kachikoshi) moves a wrestler up the next banzuke; a losing record (makekoshi) moves him down—with the top ranks judged by stricter standards and yokozuna never demoted.
Pay tracks position. Reaching juryo makes a wrestler a salaried sekitori, and from there pay rises strictly with rank—so where you are printed on the sheet is, quite literally, what you earn.
It is hand-brushed. A gyoji writes the master sheet by hand in a dense calligraphic style, with name size shrinking as rank falls.
What the banzuke is, and when it appears
Strip away the ceremony and sumo is built on one idea: ranking. Every wrestler in professional sumo occupies a precise rung, and the banzuke is the chart of those rungs. It is not a seeding bracket or a pundit’s power ranking—it is the formal register issued by the Japan Sumo Association, and a wrestler’s place on it governs almost everything about his life, from his salary and sleeping quarters to whether he is allowed to wear silk and be waited on by juniors. The sheet lists more than wrestlers, too: gyoji (referees), toshiyori (elders) and yobidashi (ushers) all appear on it, set down in the same vertical columns.
A new banzuke is compiled for each of the year’s grand tournaments and made public roughly two weeks beforehand. The release is itself an event: fans pore over the freshly printed sheet to see who has climbed, who has slipped, and who has crossed the thresholds that change a career. Until it is unveiled the placements are kept under wraps—the committee that decides them meets in private—and read top to bottom, the finished sheet is a map of the entire sport on a single page.
The divisions, from the bottom up
Professional sumo is stacked into divisions, and a wrestler’s first job is simply to climb out of the lower ones. New entrants begin at the very bottom and work upward as results allow. From the foot of the ladder, the order runs: jonokuchi, the entry level; then jonidan; then sandanme; then makushita. These are the unsalaried tiers, where wrestlers are effectively apprentices—paid only a modest allowance, doing chores for their elders, and fighting to earn promotion.
The great dividing line sits above makushita. Cross it and you reach juryo, the second-highest division and the first rung of the salaried ranks. Reaching juryo transforms a wrestler’s status overnight: he becomes a sekitori, draws a real salary, earns a more elaborate silk belt for the ring-entering ceremony, and has junior wrestlers assigned to attend to him. It is the moment a hopeful becomes a pro in the fullest sense.
That salary is not a token. Under sumo’s monthly-pay system, the wrestlers who reach juryo and above are paid members of the sport alongside the gyoji, toshiyori and yobidashi, and the pay is tiered strictly by rank—highest at yokozuna and descending step by step down to juryo, the lowest salaried tier. The banzuke is therefore also a pay scale: move up the sheet and your monthly income moves with you, which is part of why every placement is fought over so hard.
Above juryo sits the summit division, makuuchi—the top flight, home to the champions, the headline bouts and the wrestlers whose names casual fans recognise. It is where the sport’s marquee competition happens and where the titled ranks live. Everything below it is, in a sense, the long apprenticeship that leads here.
Inside makuuchi: the titled ranks and the rank-and-file
Makuuchi itself is layered, and it is capped: the top division holds 42 wrestlers. The bulk of them are the maegashira—the rank-and-file. They are numbered, with the lower numbers sitting higher: Maegashira 1 outranks Maegashira 2, and so on down the line. These are full top-division wrestlers, but they carry no special title; their job each tournament is to win enough to climb toward the named ranks above them.
Those named ranks are collectively the sanyaku, the titled positions that crown the sheet. From the top maegashira upward they run komusubi, then sekiwake, then ozeki, and finally yokozuna, the grand champion. Komusubi and sekiwake are both sanyaku ranks, with sekiwake the senior of the two and komusubi sitting just above the top maegashira; together they are the proving ground where a wrestler shows he can hold his own against the very best. For most who reach makuuchi, the next goals are precisely these—promotion to komusubi and then sekiwake. Ozeki is the senior champion rank, second only to the summit, and reaching it takes something beyond a single winning record. Yokozuna stands alone at the apex—a rank a wrestler keeps for the rest of his career and that, uniquely, he can never be demoted from, only retire from when he can no longer perform to its standard.
East, West, and why placement matters
The banzuke is split down the middle into two columns: East and West. Every rank exists on both sides—an East ozeki and a West ozeki, an East Maegashira 3 and a West Maegashira 3, and so on. Of any matched pair, the East placement is the senior, slightly more prestigious seat, so standings within a rank run East first, then West, before stepping down to the next rank.
The two sides are not always evenly filled. Because makuuchi’s 42 places do not split into a tidy 21 and 21 every time—one side may carry 22 men and the other 20—yet both columns are allotted the same physical width, the gyoji who brushes the sheet quietly compresses his characters on the busier side to make everyone fit. The balance of the page is preserved by hand, name by name.
Placement is not cosmetic. The higher a wrestler sits, the more he earns, the more deference he commands inside his stable, and the more favourable his early-tournament matchmaking tends to be—the men at the top are generally paired against fellow upper-rankers rather than thrown straight at one another on day one. There is one prize that runs the other way: when a rank-and-file maegashira beats a reigning yokozuna, the upset is recorded as a kinboshi, a “gold star” that adds permanently to the winner’s reward money. The same win by a sekiwake or komusubi does not count as a kinboshi—the honour is reserved for the unranked challenger toppling the champion. In sumo, where you are printed on the banzuke is, quite literally, who you are.
How results move you up or down
The banzuke is redrawn for every tournament, and what redraws it is performance. The mechanism turns on two words every fan learns early. Kachikoshi is a winning record—more wins than losses across a tournament—and it pushes a wrestler up the sheet. Makekoshi is a losing record, and it drags him down. Finish on the right side of the ledger and the next banzuke rewards you; finish on the wrong side and you slip, sometimes out of a division entirely.
The size of the move usually tracks the margin: a comfortable winning record climbs further than one that just scrapes over the line, and a heavy losing tournament costs more ground than a narrow one. The exact arithmetic is not published as a fixed formula—the ranking committee weighs each case—but the principle is consistent and unforgiving. There is no resting on reputation in the lower and middle ranks. Each tournament you are judged again, and the sheet is rewritten to match.
The named ranks add their own wrinkles. Ozeki sits at the point where the rules harden. An ozeki who posts a losing record in two tournaments in a row is demoted to sekiwake—but he is given a route straight back: win ten or more bouts in the very next tournament and he is restored to ozeki at once. That safety net has been part of the rules since the July 1969 tournament. Promotion to the very top is governed by stricter expectations still. The bar for yokozuna is not a codified number but a custom—broadly, two consecutive championships or equivalent results—judged by the Yokozuna Deliberation Council rather than awarded automatically. And the yokozuna rank then sits outside the up-and-down churn altogether: a grand champion is never demoted for a poor showing; unlike an ozeki, he has no relegation, and one who can no longer compete at the rank’s standard is expected to retire instead. To follow how this plays out, it helps to understand the honbasho—the official grand tournaments whose results feed straight back into the next sheet.
A document brushed by hand
For all that it functions as an administrative register, the banzuke is also a piece of craft. The master is written out by hand by a gyoji—a sumo referee, whose duties extend well beyond the ring—in the sport’s own thick, deliberately crowded calligraphic script. The density is intentional: folklore around the sheet holds that a packed, gap-free page signifies a sport packed with spectators, so the brushwork fills the space tightly, leaving little white.
That master is large—about 109cm tall by 79cm wide—and it is then photographically reduced and printed onto washi, the traditional Japanese paper, to make the copies fans buy and frame. The visual hierarchy does the same work as the rankings. Names at the top are brushed large and bold; as the eye moves down through the divisions the characters shrink, until the entrants at the very bottom appear in tiny, tightly packed strokes. You can read a wrestler’s standing from the size of his name alone, before you parse a single character. That fusion of bureaucracy and brush is part of why the banzuke endures as an object fans collect, frame and study—not just a list, but a hand-made portrait of the sport at one moment in time.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “banzuke” actually mean?
It is the name for sumo’s official ranked listing of wrestlers, issued before each grand tournament. In everyday use, “the banzuke” means both the abstract ranking—where everyone stands relative to everyone else—and the physical printed sheet that records it. The sheet also lists the gyoji, toshiyori and yobidashi alongside the wrestlers.
When is the banzuke released?
The Japan Sumo Association publishes a new banzuke ahead of each grand tournament, roughly two weeks before the action begins. The placements are decided in advance by a ranking committee and kept confidential until the official announcement.
What is the difference between the East and West sides?
The sheet is divided into two columns, East and West, and each rank appears on both. Within a given rank the East placement is treated as the senior, marginally more prestigious of the pair, so standings run East before West before dropping to the rank below. The two sides need not hold equal numbers—when one carries more men than the other, the gyoji compresses his brushwork to fit both into the same column width.
How do the makuuchi ranks stack up?
From the bottom of the top division up, the order is maegashira (the numbered rank-and-file), then the titled sanyaku ranks: komusubi, then sekiwake, then ozeki, and finally yokozuna at the summit. Sekiwake outranks komusubi, and komusubi sits just above the highest-ranked maegashira.
Can an ozeki be demoted?
Yes. An ozeki who records a losing tournament twice in a row drops to sekiwake. He can win the rank straight back, though: ten or more victories in the very next tournament restores him to ozeki immediately. This rule has applied since the July 1969 tournament.
Can a wrestler ever be demoted from yokozuna?
No. Yokozuna is the one rank immune to the banzuke’s usual up-and-down movement; unlike an ozeki, a grand champion has no relegation and is never demoted for a losing tournament. The expectation instead is that a yokozuna who can no longer perform to the rank’s standard will retire.
