SUMO Wrestling - YAKUZA Ties, ILLEGAL Bets and MATCH-FIXING

the sport of sumo is more than just two overweight guys trying to push each other out of a ring I mean in essence that is exactly what it is but more than anything it is an incredibly exciting Showcase of strength technique and tradition sumo wrestlers are expected to uphold certain values representative of Japan and the sport of sumo itself even outside of the Ring a sumo wrestler is supposed to represent dignity honor discipline and of course strength however these values seem to have been forgotten by many competitors especially over the last 20 to 30 years rumors and scandals involving match fixing illegal betting violence and criminal ties to the Yakuza have severely damaged the graceful image of Sumo in the eyes of the public in turn causing huge problems for the sport as a whole today we will explore the Dark Side of Japan's national sport from controversial deaths to ringside seats reserved for the country's top gang members this is the story of sumo wrestling Japan's controversial national sport [Music] foreign using the word dishonor in a thumbnail and introduction might rightfully be brushed off as hyperbole or click bait in many many cases but since we are talking about the sport of sumo wrestling here I would like to think that it's the only word that can accurately describe what's been going on behind the scenes of the sport recently in order to understand why that is the case we have to understand Sumo and his history at least on a basic level if you would like to see me do a more in-depth analysis of the history of Sumo in the future let me know in the comments first and foremost sumo wrestling is old and I mean very old the Nihon Shoki one of the two oldest books about Japanese history dates the first Sumo match to the year 23 BC Sumo became an actual competitive Sport with ranks and all that good stuff around the late 17th century with its ranking system evolving over time and slowly shaping into the system that is still in use to this day it's quite complicated though so for now I won't dive any deeper into how it actually works what's much more important for now is the Sports close connection to Japan's Shinto religion Sumo involves countless rituals and traditions some of which come directly from Shinto itself like the salt throwing and rinsing your mouth with water before entering the ring speaking of which even the dohyo or the ring is filled with traditional tools and techniques for me personally that might actually be the most exciting part about Sumo the fights are obviously incredibly exciting and Technical but watching sumo wrestling is also kind of like stepping into a time machine ignore the crowd the phones and the cameras surrounding the ring and what you see is a competition that is held exactly like it was hundreds of years ago it's truly fascinating obviously I am not alone in thinking this way which is exactly why Japanese Sumo fans who are much closer than I am to both the sport and also Shinto religion are especially shocked by controversies that go against the traditional values of Zuma [Music] match fixing in Sumo is almost as old as the professional sport itself 400 years ago many sumo wrestlers had a close relationship to the feudal Lords of Japan also known as daimil these daimyo led their wrestlers compete against those under the ownership of another warlord occasionally in order to strengthen an alliance with another daimyo sumo wrestlers were told to lose on purpose however this was before Sumo was an actual competitive Sport with a ranking system serious allegations of match fixing in professional Sumo took quite a long time to come out tabloids often had new stories of Rick matches in the sports but it wasn't until 1996 that some serious allegations from a real Sumo Insider came to light Suga konoshin was a pretty successful sumo wrestler for 18 years after his retirement in 1975 he founded the onaruto stable a stable bigger place where wrestlers eat sleep and train on Naruto was able to produce two notable Rikishi or wrestlers in particular one of them a wrestler by the name itai reached the top division of sumo and will become very important to this story later on in 1994 Suga closed down the onaruto's table and decided to leave the JSA the Japan Sumo Association then in 1996 Suga came out with a book called yaocho which is also a term used to describe match fixing in his book he accused former wrestler kitanohuchi of match fixing and questionable Behavior around women he also claimed that multiple sumo wrestlers including himself were guilty of drug use illegal gambling and connections to Yakuza gangs such accusations were at this point incredibly rare in the world of sumo especially from former high-ranking members of the sport not only that but the accused kitanohuchi was actually quite a significant figure of the sport himself reaching the Sport's highest rank of Yokozuna ayokozuna even more so than a regular Rikishi is expected to represent the values of sumo as big of a new story as these claims were an even bigger story was what happened a month after the book's release in April of 1996 just before he was scheduled to speak to the foreign correspondence club for international journalists Suga passed away in a hospital at the age of 53. the official cause of death being pneumonia and heart failure only 15 hours after suga's death the book's co-author Hashimoto seichiro who was also scheduled to speak to journalists passed away his cause of death was also listed as unexplained breathing problems as well as Cardiac Arrest according to the police no foul play was involved in the deaths of both Suga and Hashimoto however many people were quite suspicious of these claims including suga's own son as well as former sumo wrestler itaí who trained under Suga for many years four years after Suga and Hashimoto's death itai started talking to newspapers bringing forward even more shocking information than his former stable Master he claimed that during his time in the 1980s around 80 percent of all fights were fixed but that match fixing had also become way less common by the time that the interview was conducted in the year 2000 according to his own testimony itaí was personally responsible for overseeing the match fixing himself for five years leading up to his retirement in 1991. apparently he even received the nickname bookmaker for this exact reason there were even stories circulating about an alleged 17-minute videotape of a 1989 JSA meeting in the possession of itai proving the top officials of the organization were definitely aware of match fixing in Sumo the elected tape however was never shown to the public he spoke out about suga's controversial death as well stating that his former stable master was entangled with a big Yakuza crime syndicate itai also stated that a rightist group by the name kominto was after Suga around the time of his death and that this exact group was now offered around 300 million yen to silence itai himself a reporter of the shukang gandai on the other hand claimed that the kodokai an organization inside the famous yamaguchikumi Yakuza gang was offered 50 million yen to take out itaí all of these claims surely make for a good story which is exactly why many people grew quite suspicious of itai suddenly speaking out so publicly exposing not only other wrestlers but even himself in addition itai himself admitted to having a struggling restaurant business at the time reporting such headline worthy stories could definitely earn him a quick Buck I don't doubt that at least some parts of itai's story are indeed true but generally I would take his claims with a slight grain of salt true or not the claims presented by both itae and Suga surely made some waves in the Sumo community however Sumo wouldn't get into real trouble until the late 2000s when the waves created years earlier turned into a full-blown tsunami of scandals and allegations foreign [Music] 2010 Japanese broadcaster NHK released a statement announcing that they would not broadcast one of the six annual Sumo tournaments for the first time since 1953. this historic decision was a response to a string of controversies connected to Sumo that led to a public outcry never before seen in the history of the sport in 2007 a young sumo wrestler by the name of Saito Takashi attempted to run away from his stable the tokitsukasa stable when a stable Master Yamamoto tsunichi found out he ordered three other wrestlers of the stable to punish Saito by beating him with beer bottles and baseball bats Saito collapsed and was rushed to the hospital where he soon passed away from his injuries he was only 17 years old the public reaction to this incident was so strong that even the Japanese prime minister at the time hukuda Yasuo called on a Japan Sumo Association to make sure that cases like this will never happen again stable Master Yamato denied any wrongdoing in the case but was ultimately charged with six years in prison then in February of 2010 wrestler ASA shoryu got into a fight that will cost him his Sumo career the big problem was that instead of inside a dokyo this fight took place outside of a nightclub in Tokyo after a night of heavy drinking and resulted in assassorio Breaking the victim's nose as I assure you at that point had long been known for bringing a bad boy image to the sport of sumo that was something rarely seen before in the sport for example there were stories about him starting a fight with a rival wrestler inside a communal bath one time he pretended to have an injury just to put on a replica Wayne Rooney Jersey and playing a charity football match while I personally can't blame assassor you forget getting excited about pretending to be one of the greatest attacking footballers of all time the negative reaction to his behavior was only Amplified by his ranking Sumo asashorio was a Yokozuna the highest rank in Sumo as I mentioned earlier ayokozuna is expected to represent the values of sumo you know dignity honor discipline and strength on February 4th 2010 as a result of his anyokozuna-like behavior as I showed you held a tear-filled press conference announcing his retirement from the sport the biggest headlines regarding Sumo however were yet to come just a few months after asashuriu's retirement a wrestler of the ozeki rank sumo's second highest rank would get in big big trouble it was discovered that kotomitsuki of the sarokatake stable got involved with an illegal gambling ring connected to the Yakuza the stable master of otaki stable also admitted to being involved with the same gambling ring and claimed to have accumulated depths of more than fifty thousand dollars the gambling bets themselves were organized by furuichi sadahide achurio ranked sumo wrestler from Osaka who also extorted huge sums of money from kotomitsuki not only that but furuichi had a close relative who was apparently a member of an independent Yakuza group in Tokyo which had close ties to the yamaguchigumi Japan's biggest Yakuza gang this wasn't the first time that the yamaguchukumi was linked to Sumo in fact it seems like they might have been involved with the sport in one form or another for a very long time Yamaguchi noburu the successor and Son of the gang's founder reportedly got into the sport all the way back in the 1920s while expanding the yamaguchigumi into the entertainment business for the first time in May of 2010 it was reported that more than 50 members of the kodokai the Nagoya branch of the yamaguchigumi were given ringside seats at the 2009 Sumo tournament in Nagoya these ringside seats are apparently not sold to the public but are instead given to companies and individuals who contributed large amounts of money to the Japan Sumo Association whether or not these seats were acquired by actually sponsoring the JSA or if the korokai received these seats through inside connections is unclear their motivation behind acquiring these specific seats in the arena was reportedly the fact that they were often visible on TV it is said that the Yakuza hope to be able to show support to their fellow gang members in jail by appearing on television with sumo being one of the few programs that Japanese inmates are allowed to watch in jail and almost identical report was made not even half a year earlier when members of the Sumi yoshikai Japan's second biggest yakuzu group acquired ringside seats to the January tournament just like the kodakai gangsters they were hoping to be seen by their bodies and bosses in jail following the illegal betting Scandal both kotomitsuki and otaki's stable Master were dismissed from sumo but received no further legal punishment puroichi the wrestler who had set up the bets was charged with extortion and spent four and a half years in prison the betting Scandal also led to a bigger investigation inside the JSA which unveiled that out of the organization's 700 total members 65 of them admitted to illegally betting on baseball cards and golf in Japan except for a few specific types of race events betting on sports is generally illegal which also goes for both baseball and golf the JSA decided to install a former prosecutor murayama hiroyoshi as its acting Chief in order to clean up the organization how much that actually helped is questionable especially since the organization's links to the Yakuza only became even more interesting with murayama's appointment murayama until 2008 was an acting director of suruga Corporation a construction and real estate company the suruga corporation according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department paid over 50 million dollars to a front company run by the kotogumi an affiliate of the yamaguchigumi NHK as mentioned before refused to broadcast the 2010 Nagoya event which was scheduled to take place Mio weeks after all of these scandals came to light instead of multiple hours of live broadcasting of the event NHK provided merely a 20-minute highlight reel of each day of the event in early 2011 13 senior wrestlers were connected to match fixing as proven by a series of text messages which were discovered when a police confiscated phones in an investigation regarding the illegal bets from a year prior one of these messages allegedly even detailed how the wrestlers are supposed to attack and fall all in exchange for more than a thousand dollars the jsa's reaction to the officer problem specifically was the exclusion of non-gang members at all future Sumo events aided by new surveillance cameras at the Sport's biggest venues in addition the JSA withheld from the Tokyo Police hosted lectures informing wrestlers on how to sever their ties to the Japanese underworld installing a few cameras and holding seminars seems like a pretty mild solution to the problem to say the least however since 2011 reports regarding match fixing and Yakuza ties have become almost non-existent whether the JSA was actually able to fix the problem is a whole nother question maybe there is simply some stuff going on that we haven't heard about yet violence and bullying inside Sumo Stables is still a common problem though and always has been in fact it is part of a much larger debate regarding sumo's penchant for keeping up its Traditions which has proven to be a double-edged sword on one hand as I mentioned in the beginning of the video sumo's connection to the into religion along with its countless rituals and traditions give the sport a unique atmosphere it can't be found anywhere else on the other hand things like inhumane training sessions the countless health risks and frequent injuries as well as the ruthless ranking system in Sumo make it hard to justify the sport avoiding any significant changes in the future of course that is my opinion and while I am certainly interested in the sport and occasionally like to tune in to watch a few fights I am by no means an expert of the sport and understand that this discussion in particular might be a bit too complicated for me to talk about it's also not completely fair to single out the sport of sumo regarding ties to the Yakuza of course as regular viewers of my channel know all too well pretty much every part of Japanese Society has had some connection to the underworld at one point in time this includes some of Japan's biggest companies and even politics in the case of sumo though these ties might seem especially shocking to the public because because the sport is considered so culturally important and traditional Sumo has also suffered greatly in terms of popularity both in terms of attracting young fans as well as new Talent the problems mentioned just a minute ago along with all the controversial headlines mentioned throughout the video surely contributed to the unfortunate downfall of sumo however out of all the things that Japan is so good at finding a balance between the old and the new between tradition and the future is one of the country's biggest strengths and who knows we may just see some very positive changes in the world of sumo as well before I end this video I want to recommend two very special channels to all of those who may have become interested in sumo wrestling in the last 20 minutes Sumo stew produces some of the most beautifully edited Sumo content out there covering everything from legendary wrestlers to the super complicated ranking system of the sport Chris Sumo on the other hand provides detailed coverage and match highlights of current Sumo events are there any Sumo enthusiasts among live viewers who would like to share some good content with the rest of us let us know in the comments also don't forget to like this video If you enjoyed it and subscribe if you haven't already either way as always thank you so much for watching foreign [Music]

Channel: ANIKI

Views: 9,642

Keywords: sumo, wrestling, japan, japanese, history, yakuza, crime, sport, illegal, criminals, true crime

Id: 8ExTgSEgRUg

Length: 19min 25sec (1165 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 03 2023