Trick
tell me again what graham actually meant? i missed it, you were mumbling
Trick
vagabond wrote:Trick
, you were mumbling
GrahamB wrote:Trick wrote:from the wiki on Sumoalthough no info if the contests/performance where ‘stilted’ or had ‘aliveness’ to it as today’s Sumo contestsProfessional sumo (ōzumō) roots trace back to the Edo period in Japan as a form of sporting entertainment. The original wrestlers were probably samurai, often rōnin, who needed to find an alternative form of income.
Learning about Sumo from the podcast was quite a revelation for me. I hadn't realised that it was old, like really old. It goes back before recorded history in Japan.
Each shrine (and there would have been thousands at one point) had its own style of Sumo. So it wasn't one art with a rule set - there were thousands of rule sets, different uniforms, etc. For example in one style winning might be decided by lifting up an opponent from the ground rather than throwing them out of a ring. It was a folk wrestling style inseparable from Shinto.
What we know today as professional sumo was the court sumo style of the edo period. A form of entertainment. Again the Tokugawa suppressed it all down to one regulated style. Sure, it contains genuine competitive resistance training, but it was all heavily regulated compared to what existed before. The origins can still be seen in the rituals before the match, which use similar hand movements you find in a lot of Shamanism/Shinto, but again these are massively simplified.
A handful of old, old sumo styles still survive in Japan, but it's gone the way of Morris dancing in England - something people do once a year at a festival, rather than something people actively practice all the time and get very good at. It's very hard to find info about it (nobody is that interested these days), even on YouTube you can only find it if you search in Japanese.
I've found a couple of clips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR-mf5WCfKc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NkEsWMkiTs
Our sumo podcast episode:
https://www.spreaker.com/user/9404101/sumo
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