Sumo--The Times They Are A-changing

It's sumo season in Japan.

Sumo is the sport in which incredibly pudgy--but a muscled kind of pudgy--men try to trip each other up and shove each other out of the ring. First, they face each other and go through ritual motions, stomping and glaring, rather like tomcats hissing and spitting before they get down to brass tacks. They throw a handful of salt into the air to appease the spirits, and then they grapple.

Or try to. Getting one's arms around a very fat fellow is not an easy thing to accomplish.

A round ends when one wrestler steps outside the ring or takes a fall. The spectators show true grit by never flinching, even when 300 or more pounds of sumo wrestler fly out of the ring and land on someone's lap.

The fall sumo tournament just ended.

The giant silver trophy--so big one has to be of sumo wrestler's dimensions to even lift it--goes to the grand champion, or yokozuna. For this most Japanese of sports, the new yokozuna, is not Japanese. The wrestler, who fights under the name Hakuho, was born and raised in Mongolia.

Why not? Shouldn't sports, of all places, have a level playing field and welcome all comers?

There was a time not so long ago when the sumo world went into a hissy fit because the wrestler who earned the yokozuna title came from Hawaii. If Japan's Ichiro can be the cat's pajamas in American baseball, isn't it fitting to give other nationalities a chance to sit in the catbird's seat of Japanese sumo?