Sumo match
Sep. 10th, 2005 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The two titans square up, cast an appraising eye on each other's corpus and habitus, and suddenly begin to tussle. Their names are Momus and Marxy, and they're impressive man-mountains of the blogging world, forever disagreeing about the nature of Japan. But, the world asks, is it all fixed? Is the hostility faked? Is this sparring just a form of archaic theatre, or an attempt to bump up the ratings of Click Opera and Neomarxisme? Are the macho, binary, populist poses being struck just a way for our wrestlers to learn the mechanisms of the inner core elite, and join it?These are some of the issues raised by the enormously fat and deceptively feisty comments thread to Freakonomics on Sumo Wrestling, an entry from Marxy (who's currently in New York) prompted by "non-fiction bestseller Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner - a book about using economic methodology to analyze a whole host of social behavior".
I'll let Time Asia supply the background. ""Mysterious. Religious. Philosophical." That's how former wrestler Keisuke Itai describes sumo. If the accusations he is now making are to be believed, it's also crooked.
"Retired since 1997, the 43-year-old Itai recently stepped back into the sumo spotlight with scandalous charges that most of the flesh-to-flesh combat is, in fact, merely show. In his day, he told TIME, 80% of the matches were fixed, and the winners and losers were worked out in the dressing rooms beforehand. That's still happening, he insists, and he can tell by watching when someone has agreed to take a fall. Of a daily slate of 18 bouts, only three or four are fought seriously. "Match fixing was kind of matter-of-fact among the wrestlers, " Itai says. "None of us felt any guilt at all."
"Itai is not the first to cry foul about sumo. A young writer named Shintaro Ishihara made similar claims back in 1963; he's now governor of Tokyo."
Marxy's position on this connects it to his recurring concerns about Japanese society. He sees sumo rigging as symptomatic of a collusion and conspiracy he thinks characterises Japan's education, media and government systems. "These patterns of collusion between sumo stables seem to resemble other kinds of collusion in the Japanese media, political, and economic world," he writes, "but I would wager that fixing "non-scripted" events in Japan can only continue as long as those involved have an informational advantage over the consumers/citizens. Would this practice continue even if sumo fans started receiving open and full information about the topic?" Echoing the reductiveness of Steven Levitt (who analyses culture with economic tools), Marxy adds "the point of my blog is that a lot of what we explain as mystic "culture" is really just information asymmetries and power imbalances."
My position is that "conspiracy and collusion" would better be described as contract and culture. Most people in Japan have heard about the rigging, I argue, and don't care. Sumo has its roots in Shinto rite. It's as much a spectacle as a sport, and knowing it's rigged doesn't detract from enjoying the theatre, although you probably wouldn't want people telling you this every five minutes. Even Brechtians wouldn't want actors to keep turning to the audience in the middle of a play to say "By the way, we're not really these characters..."
Anyway, read the thread yourself, if you have an hour or so to spare. And if you care.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 10:13 am (UTC)But Nick, it does have a permalink:
http://www.pliink.com/mt/marxy/archives/000685.html
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 10:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 11:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 11:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 01:30 pm (UTC)Ooooooorrrr.... Wrestling?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 02:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 03:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 02:31 am (UTC)what does "valium will ich nicht..kapranos !!!!!" mean?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 03:53 am (UTC)As for „kapranos“, the only one I can think of is Alexander Kapranos, the front man of (the band) Franz Ferdinand.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:27 pm (UTC)http://www.roccosiffredi.com/page.php
lean da tower towards da entry.
nickr da teachr. ooooh.
agent provrooooom.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 04:58 pm (UTC)That is a very sad perspective. I hope marxy overcomes this low brow perspective.
an apology
Date: 2005-09-10 05:15 pm (UTC)I believe you overstate the possibilities of relativism; however, the idea of conceptualising without logical coherence (or "habituated thought" as I imagine you would prefer to call it) but with a supratolerent, naive aestheticism is pleasing, unusual and unrestrained.
I was revisiting the site (http://www.iamspoonbender.com) of a band of old I loved hearing, when I found the following statement, which I enjoyed reading and reprint here for the amusement of the sputniki here:
"i am spoonbender admits that everything they've ever done has been :
"everything on our website, for example.
none of that is real - it was all written down.
the pictures? made on the computer; photoshop.
we've gotten all your emails- we're just not
certain that they're the ones you sent! live
reviews? did YOU ever see us play live? oh, you
heard about it... i see.
well yeah, the records were faked too-
we never actually played all the songs in that order
at the exact same time- sometimes it took us 2 years
to do it the way we wanted!... anyway, the worst
thing we faked was the releases. our mistake is
really quite simple: we sold you copies of
the albums- THEY'RE NOT EVEN THE REAL ONES.
"We'll try hrader to be more like ourselves
from now on.
"sorry"
Re: an apology
Date: 2005-09-11 07:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-10 08:36 pm (UTC)It's quite similar to "professional" wrestling here in North America. In the 80s when there was a huge crowd watching the WWF as it was known at the time and although they figured it was fixed, there was still a lingering doubt. Especially when wrestlers were punching out talk show hosts when asked if wrestling was fixed.
Now there is no doubt that wrestling is just a soap opera with tight clothing and flips and people still watch it. I guess it's entertainment for entertainment's sake.
By the way, what is that in your icon? I've seen it before...it looks rather cute!
Also, the text within the images that are on this entry are quite funny.
Take care.
Dammit!
Date: 2005-09-11 08:38 am (UTC)A.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-11 06:30 am (UTC)ps momus, i've had my ways with your Hisae. trick or treak. I walk away with the smell of urine under my nose. ah i feel at home now.