Japan’s Sacred Sumo and the Exclusion of Women: The Olympic Male Sumo Wrestler (Part 1)

The 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo offer a fitting and timely point of departure to consider the religion-based exclusion of women and, by extension, to peer into the nation-culture-religion-gender nexus in Japan. The Japan Sumo Association, a quasi-governmental corporation, champions itself as the custodian of a divine affair cultivated by male deities and mortal men, and exclusive of women. The Sumo Association bans women and girls from entering or even touching the wrestling ring, lest they violate sumo tradition and taint their so-called sacred battlefield. Critics of sumo’s female taboo denounce the Association’s rule as anachronistic and sexist as well as illegal. The opposition focuses attention on the need for change, and justifiably so, but there exists an equally pressing need to think about why the ban prevails even with strong opposition. Olympic presentations of the male sumo wrestler open our eyes as to one such abetting force: persuasive and politically expedient visions of sumo wrestling as an ancient, sacred, and exclusively male endeavor.