Sumo Ring Ban Spurs Gender Debate
TOKYO — Sumo wrestling, one of Japan’s oldest and most hallowed sports, has many inviolable rituals. The wrestlers must wear their hair in carefully coifed topknots. Before every match, they scatter grains of purifying salt. And women are never, ever, allowed in the ring. Even when a man’s life is at stake.
Sumo’s discriminatory practices came under new scrutiny after a referee shooed women out of a ring at an exhibition match in Kyoto on April 4 when they rushed to offer lifesaving measures to a politician who had collapsed while delivering a speech.
The news dominated television talk shows and social media the next day, with a video of the episode — in which a referee could repeatedly be heard over a loudspeaker yelling, “Women, come out of the ring” — attracting more than 800,000 views on YouTube and a flood of criticism.
“Believing that tradition is more important than human lives is like a cult that mistakes fundamentalism for tradition,” Yoshinori Kobayashi, a comic book artist, wrote on his blog.
In a country that consistently ranks low among developed countries on gender equality in health, education, the economy and politics, the episode was seen as a metaphor for how women are regarded in Japan.
Women in Japan face myriad obstacles to equality. A law requiring that married couples share a surname means that the vast majority of women must give up their names after their weddings. Japan has one of the world’s worst records for women in politics. Women cannot sit on the Imperial throne. Also that week, news emerged of a day care center where a supervisor scolded a female employee for getting pregnant before it was her “turn.”
The women called out of the ring included a nurse from the audience who rushed onto the dohyo, as the straw ring is known, to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the fallen politician.
Ryozo Tatami, the mayor of Maizuru, a city of about 84,000 people in Kyoto prefecture, was giving a speech when he had a brain hemorrhage and collapsed. He was taken to a hospital for treatment.
In the video, it appears that several male sumo staff members gathered around Mr. Tatami before the female nurse arrived to start CPR. Three other women also rushed to help. When the referee told them to leave, the women backed off, causing confusion around the patient.
Some defended keeping women out of the ring, even as they said an exception should have been made for the emergency. A Twitter user fretted that “crazy feminists will take advantage of this.”
Historians trace sumo’s roots to harvest rituals associated with the Shinto religion. Various theories exist as to why women are barred from the ring. One theory suggests that matches were originally put on to entertain the goddesses of the harvest, and farmers believed that women in the ring would invoke the rage of the goddesses, who would spoil the harvest.
Sumo is very popular among women, who make up about half of audiences.
After the outcry, Nobuyoshi Hakkaku, the chairman of the Japan Sumo Association, issued a statement thanking the woman who “quickly provided emergency measures” and apologizing for the referee who told her and the other women to leave the ring. “It was not an appropriate response,” Mr. Hakkaku said.
But Mari Miura, a professor of political science at Sophia University in Tokyo, said, “Such sexist conduct shouldn’t be forgiven.”