ALIENS! INVASION! (Japanese sumo overun with foreigners)
I just noticed the Kyodo News on their “live” news ticker is bemoaning that the number of ALIEN sumo wrestlers in the top rank of wresters is now 16—the most in the history of sumo.
You gotta feel sorry for the Japanese. They just simply are too small to succeed in their own national sport, sumo. However, foreign-born sumo wrestlers from the United States are no longer doing very well in Japanese sumo either. Sumo is like boxing, you have to “stay hungry” and be willing to suffer. Basically competitive athletes from a comfortable, middle-class background ( whether they are Japanese or American) don’t succeed in fighting sports.
Nowadays it’s young, hungry guys from Russia and other former communist countries who are providing the majority of the new foreign sumo wrestlers. They’re the only athletes who are motivated and “hungry” enough to succeed in rising from the lower ranks of sumo (where the pay is low and the life is not fun because of the strict–some say torturous–discipline/abuse).
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