Late, Slow - It's All the Same (In Japanese)

It really is - 遅い
But that aside, I realize I had never posted about sumo back in November. So here you go.
Last year when I was in Shimonoseki, I arrived just after the JET sumo event ended. Like same-day just after. I don't know how to make that work without using tone, so imagine that sentence made sense.
Anyway, so this year I really wanted to go. At the time, I was dating a JET, and unfortunately, the JET dishing out tickets was my ex. So I thought it'd be a bit awkward to ask for two tickets, but it worked out fine.
So we walk around Fukuoka for a bit. See some temples and stuff. Then we find some large dudes in sumoy-looking outfits. So we ask to take pictures with them. They looked confused so probably they were just trainees or something.
We go into the building and there are all kinds of sumo goods. There's a fairly large crowd and they had to clear a way occasionally to let sumos through.
It took us forever to find our seats. When we did, we were pretty disappointed. We were as far back as you could get. And to make things worse, we were on our own except for the JET that was having relationship problems and likes to wear her heart on her sleeve.
The actual sumoing was really cool - when they fought. But it has that Dragon Ball Z effect. Lots of staring, not a lot of action. They spent a lot of time getting into the ring, then bowing, then posing, then staring, then getting up, then throwing salt, then posing, then staring, then getting up, more salt, more posing, more staring, more getting up, more salt, more posing, more staring, then finally it begins! and it's over. The staring was 90% of each match. And the actual fighting always only lasted a few instants. There were tons of matches at least.
There were also some hilarious spill-outs though. Some of them when they flew out of the ring, really flew. They'd land in the crowd sometimes. I saw one sumo landed his foot right into a cameraman's lap.

But all in all it was a lot of ceremony, not a lot of action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yhZ64g7sUs If only it were like this...