AKEBONO IN HIS OWN WORDS
The Life and Times of a Sumo Giant by Fred Varcoe - TJT 2/12/00
Q. Go overa typical day in the life of Akebono
A. I get up at 5:30 in the morning and get to practice at about 7. I come down into the practice area at about 8:30, practice till about 10 or 10:30 and take a shower.
Our first meal of the day is about 11:30 and after that I take care of all the responsibilities I have outside. If I have nothing to do, then I go to the gym and work out. The evenings I basically spend at home.
Q. You live at Yokata Air Base in Fussa - during tournaments in Tokyo do you return home every day to your wife or do you stay in town?
A. I stay in Tokyo.
Q. Is that tough?
A. Yes, it is, but that's the sacrifice my wife makes. As the wife of a yokozuna, I know it's real tough on her.
Q. What kind of exercises do you do?
A. I try to work out as frequently as possible in the gym. Being big and heavy you can't do too much stuff, so what they have me doing is stuff in the water, in the pool.
At one point, they even had me holding my breath under water and swimming the length of the deep end of the pool. They said it was to help me get aerobic stammia.
When you wrestle sumo you're supposed to wrestle with one breath because when you breathe out, you lose all your power.
Q. What about your intake of food.
A. When we're practicing, we basically have two meals, lunch and dinner, but it depends. You basically just eat when you're hungry.
Q. Former ozeki Kirishima, a relative sumo lightweight, says he ate five times a day.
A. For him it's different; I just breathe and I gain weight. Every breath I take in is like 500 grams.
Q. Is your weight ever a problem?
A. Getting into my elderly age in the sport, it does become a hinderance once in a while, just in everyday basic life.
In your early 20s, you can do anything, you're Superman; you start reaching your 30s and it don't go that way any more.
Q. What was your main reasons for taking Japanese citizenship?
A. In order for you to become oyakata in this world, to have your own stable, you have to be a Japanese citizen. I've learned a lot being in sumo - good stuff, bad stuff - and if possible, if I'm able to do it, I would really like to pass on what I've learned to the next generation in some form. So just for a sense of security I took Japanese citizenship.
Q. Did your mom object?
A. When I changed my citizenship, the first person I asked was my mom. She said: "That's the road you've picked, so it's your decision. Even if you change your citizenship, you're still my son. Just because you've changed your citizenship, it doesn't mean the person has changed."
Q. Do you think you might be able to take over from your stablemaster Azumazeki?
A. I have no idea. I don't know if I want to be a stablemaster, but in some form I want to be connected with sumo and be able to teach.
Q. Any chance of going down Konishiki's road to television fame?
A. I doubt it; I cannot do what he's done.
Q. So what do you think you'll do after you've hung up your mawashi.
A. The first thing is I'm going to sleep the first week after I retire, not even get out of bed, just sleep. I'm going to hibernate.
Q. Will you opt to stay in Japan, Hawaii or both?
A. Japan - I don't think I'll be able to go back home and live.
Q. How's you Japanese?
A. It's enough to order udon or sushi - just the necessities.
Q. You say you've gained a lot from being in sumo, what exactly?
A. First of all, coming away from home, you learn how to grow up real fast. Being at home, your mom is always there to take care of you if something goes wrong.
When you come to sumo it's a man's world. You do everything: cooking, cleaning, washing. For me the biggest point was it made me grow up real fast.
Another thing was I got to do something (become yokozuna) that up until now only 67 other people have had a chance to do out of how many hundreds of years of sumo.
And the other thing is I got to see the world whne most people are lucky if they even leave their rock. I thought Hawaii was big growing up. You catch the bus from where I live to downtown, that's like one hour.
Q. Any particular highlights from any of your overseas trips?
A. One thing I remember is me and Musashimaru being country hicks from Hawaii in France. We went to the Tour d'Argent in France.
Our dream was to go to the most expensive place and eat caviar. We went in and we sat down an we order caviar.
You're sitting there and you know these guys don't know how much to bring out; it's the first time they've had sumo wrestlers there.
They bring it out on a big plate with a cover on top. We're thinking maybe we'll just get a little bit in the middle, but they opened it and there's caviar all over the place: a mountain of caviar and two dummies sitting there trying to eat the whole thing.
We don't want to be rude, so we're trying to finish all the caviar. We had like shovels for spoons and then everything you looked at started looking black, everything looked like caviar and you get black spots in front of your eyee.
I never had caviar after that.
Q. What's the favorite place you've been to?
A. (Deadpan) London (bursts out laughing).
London was good. It's nice we've been all over the place, like Spain, Austria, Germany, Canada, Australia. Even my first trip to (continental) America was doing sumo when we went to San Jose.
Q. Is it hard to go out for a social evening, or does it just prove irritating with people pointing at you, coming up to you and disturbing you?
A. I just like being around people, so I don't really care. Sometimes you get frustrated with people so you just tell them "leave me alone" or "I'm trying to eat dinner" or something, but that's all part of the job, you've got to be able to cope with it.
It would be very strange if you got up one morning and nobody knew who you were.
Q. Do you have many friends in sumo?
A. You have people you started with and the people you practice with all the time, and the people from Hawaii tend to be closer to each other, but now there's only two of us.
Q. What about Takanohana and Wakanohana?
A. We sit down an talk, but it's not like we're best friends or nothing.
Q. Apart from your fellow yokozuna, do you have any other great rivals?
A. When you get up on the ring, every one you fight is your rival. You don't want to lose to anybody.
Q. Do you feel pressure from the young guns trying to make a name for themselves?
A. Now I know how the yokozuna felt when we first came up.
When you're young and dumb, you don't think of anything. But as a yokozuna it's: "What if I lose to this young kid? They're going to write about me in the paper." But in order to carry on the sumo tradition, every so many years there's got to be a changing of the guard.
Q. Sumo's been tarnished recently by claims from ex-komusubi Itai that some fights were rigged. He particularly targeted yourself, your stablemaster and Kotonishiki. Does he have a particular ax to grind against these people? What's the story here?
A. I have no idea - I'd like to ask him myself. I've never met this guy, I've never talked to this guy before - in fact when I was first coming up, he was already retiring. Most of the people who are wrestling now don't know the guy.
Q. He claims that at one stage, 80 percent of the bouts were fixed.
A. Shit, if that was the case then we don't need to practice.
Q. You performed at the opening ceremony of the Nagano Olympic Games - was that a big moment for you?
A. Very much a big moment. It was big for me, but it was a lot bigger for my hometown and my parents. Being from Hawaii, who the hell would think that their son would be opening up the Olympics.
Q. There's been talk of sumo attempting to get Olympic status. Do you think that's a good thing?
A. If you're looking at it just sportswise, yeah, it would do very good internationally, but for us the sumo profession is more a lifestyle. If you take the sport out of Japan, it will just become a regular sport.
Q. What have been the other highlights of your career?
A. Getting your first tournament win, that's something you never forget.
But for me the biggest highlight of my career was the first bout I ever wrestled with Takanohana. That was like 12 years ago. We were two young guns with short hair wrestling at 7 o'clock in the morning, nobody in the statnds!
Q. Who won?
A. (Smiles) That was the happiest day of my life (laughs).
Q. Do you enjoy fighting Takanohana?
A. Yeah.
Q. What about your fellow Hawaiians?
A. In the beginning, it's hard; the first time I wrestled Konishiki, this guy you look up to, was very hard; it was very uncomfortable.
When we joined he woul take care of us, take us out, teach us. We were always by his side.
And then, all of a sudden, you're up on the ring fighting him. In practice he beats you up and throws you all over the place and then it's like, what are you doing up here?
I couldn't look him straight in the eye.
Q. Did you win?
A. I was lucky enough to win that bout.
Q. Did it get easier?
A. Once you get over that first bout, it's all right. You realize that's your job.
Q. Did you have a close relationship with him?
A. Konishiki was like a big brother that I never had when I got to Japan. He's a real family-oriented person so even if he don't know who are, if he just knows you're from Hawaii, you were under his wing.
For us the age gap was like five, six years and when I joined he was already ozeki, and he was like a godfather with all his little hitmen.
Q. Do you want to be like that?
A. Oh yeah, every day.
Q. As you're become older and more senior in the sumo world, has your relationship with your oyakata, Azumazeki, changed or is it still very much the master and the student?
A. Before I got married it was still master and student, but since I got married and I have a child, I tend to think that both of us have changed a lot. We can communicate now more openly. It's easier to talk to him now.
Q. Are you surprised by what you've achieved?
A. Right now, I cannot grasp what I do - maybe when I'm 50 or 60, when I'm retired.
Right now, being in the sport, I just do what I like doing, I do what I get paid for doing - I love the sport.
It's a very good sport, it's a very good lifestyle and I learned a lot being here.
Q. Is trying to gain your 10th title a big thing for you?
A. It's big, but to me, I try my best every tournament. If I can win it, I'll take it. All I want to do when I do plan on going out is for nobody to say I never tried. If I win 10, hey, that's good, but if not, nobody can erease what I've done so far.
Akebono Snippets
"They have a real funny way of showing their love, especially in this sport. The way they think is if they pick on you and beat you up, that is the way they show their love for you. I think that is really fucked up."
quote - July 1998 ©kawika
"Ho, gotta write one WHOLE CHAPTA 'bout cousin Nate, brah."
quote - May 12, 1999 ©kawika
"He really had it today!! The looks, the attitude-everything!! He blew his way thru like an express train-like the good old days.. Is this Koenkai -thing working already?? Has he been told? &nbps He better look out..He might surprise everyone.."
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