Sumo, yakuza, and gambling–What started as a scoop by weekly magazine Shukan Shincho revealing a somewhat imaginable connection between the three has blown up into a huge scandal that has lost several wrestlers their jobs and cost the sport sponsorship, TV slots and, worst of all, face. Foreign media have given the issue more than ample coverage while Twitter has been full of cynical and firey commentary ranging from why a yakuza hand in the sumo world even comes as a surprise to why sumo wrestlers aren’t allowed to bet on baseball.
Jake has much to say on the subject, of course, and has offered his underworld knowledge to various media as they rush to cover what is looking to be a major turning point in Japan’s largest traditional sport.
From AFP:
Experts point to a shortage of money that has made sumo wrestlers and stables vulnerable to organized crime. Sumo’s popularity is falling as baseball and football have become the country’s most popular sports.
“The yakuza have always been huge supporters of sumo, financially and in other capacities,” said Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice and a specialist on organised crime in Japan.
“Many sumo wrestlers have yakuza ‘patrons’ who give them money under the table to supplement the sumo wrester’s meagre income and reward them for their victories or encourage them to train harder.”
And The Observer:
Jake Adelstein, author of Tokyo Vice and an authority on organised crime in Japan, said the scandal was connected with a fresh crackdown on a notoriously violent faction within the Yamaguchi-gumi that also had strong ties to the sumo world. “The media haven’t suddenly decided to expose the relationship between sumo and the yakuza,” Adelstein said. “The details were leaked to them by the police.
“Failed sumo wrestlers often end up as yakuza enforcers. The sumo world and the yakuza world have long been intertwined. Some ex-sumo wrestlers have even become yakuza bosses.”
Jake expounds on the topic:
The current scandals involving Japan’s organized crime groups, the yakuza, and the Sumo Association, and the sport of sumo itself shouldn’t be seen as an aberration in Japanese society or something that has never existed before–that would be missing the point. It simply is one battle in a war between Japan’s National Police Agency and Japan’s most powerful criminal organization, the Yamaguchi-gumi, that began in September of 2009. The damage inflicted on the image of sumo as Japan’s national sport and the careers of many wrestlers–they simply are casualties of war. And in the case of the Sumo Association, some of those wounds are also decidedly self-inflicted.
Continue reading Dirty diapers: How the sumo scandal is a casualty of the National Police Agency war on the yakuza →
