Sumo [Scroll 9]
Junko Yamamoto, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan (Exchange Student, Brown 2002-2003)
![[Sumo]](https://library.brown.edu/jpegs/1232121402765625.jpg)
The ninth panel showed a sumo performance that the Japanese government presented to the American troops in 1854 as entertainment. There are many Japanese caricatures of this period that depicted sumo wrestlers throwing Westerners. The scene must have appeared funny and entertaining to Japanese viewers, who saw popular heroes defeating the taller and bigger foreigners. Because the Japanese had almost no opportunities to see Westerners outside Nagasaki, it is easy to imagine that they encountered the Westerners with some degree of fear. In addition, the whole of Japanese society perceived the American government's pressure to open the country as a threat. Considering these elements, sumo must have been highly favored as a performance to present to visiting Westerners the strength of the Japanese. The majority of the pictorial space is occupied a blue and white striped canvas. It appeared to be a type of barrier used to keep out curious on-lookers that the Japanese would erect at places where they held meetings with Americans. While several wrestlers conducted matches on the ground, three other wrestlers in colorful kimono watched from the building on the right. The wrestlers that participated in the match wore only a mawashi that covered their loins. On the ground, two samurai in formal kimonos judged the matches, and an American cabin boy played with other Americans. In the background, an American officer is touched another wrestler. Perry's report, The Expedition to Japan said that one famous wrestler was especially brought to the Commodore and the Japanese Commissioners insisted that Perry should examine the wrestler by touching him.1
Sumo has a long history in Japan, appearing in myths and in the Kojiki written in the eight century. In the late Edo period when the Americans arrived, sumo was at its peak. Because daimyou (feudal lords) took care of the wrestlers financially and because the status of wrestlers was as high as samurai, their life in the Edo period was relatively stable. Considering sumo's popularity, it is easy to imagine the importance of the canvas that shut out the on-lookers. After Perry's arrival and the subsequent Meiji Restoration (1868), however, Japan shifted to drastic Westernization and industrialization. The general attitude toward sumo shifted and the sport became unfashionable. At the same time, daimyo no longer supported the wrestlers, which created a financially and socially unstable situation for sumo wrestlers.
Although the Japanese believed sumo would demonstrate Japanese cultural sophistication, the sport looked savage and brutal to the Americans. The Expedition to Japan compared the sumo presentation to the American exhibition of railroad and telegraph technologies. While Perry's report described sumo as a "brutal performance" with people who looked like "fierce bulls," it proudly referred to the American exhibitions as "triumphs of civilization."2
Even though The Expedition to Japan describes the wrestlers as "overfed monsters" or "enormously tall in stature and immense in weight of flesh,"3 they appear much smaller than the American observers. From this, one can get a sense of how intimidating the Americans must have looked to the Japanese who had had hardly any contact with foreigners. More than the sumo performance itself, the foreigners in the audience captured the attention of the Japanese painter and, as a result, occupied a larger space in the panel.
References
- Rodger Pineau, ed., The Japan Expedition 1852-54, The Personal Journal of Commodore Matthew C. Perry (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1968), 190.
- Robert Tomes, The Americans in Japan: An Abridgment of the Government Narrative of the U.S. Expedition (New York: D. Appleton, 1857), 237, 239.