I went to Osaka on March 8th for the first day of a fifteen-day Sumo Wrestling tournament. A lot of my colleagues from Arizona and Australia went, and we'd reserved our tickets nearly two months prior. It was well worth the preparation, though!
I left for Osaka early in the morning, so that I could spend time admiring the famous plum garden at Osaka Castle. It was a lovely day, and the blossoms were starting to reach their peak! It was quite crowded, but the atmosphere was festive, and once you worked your way closer to the center of the garden the paths thinned out a bit. The people-watching was nearly as amusing as the blossom-viewing, and I heard snippets of many different languages while winding my way through the paths.
This is a photo of one of the outer buildings, over the outer moat. The moat is gigantic!
Osaka Castle was crowded, and it's a modern reconstruction of the original building, but it's still stunning! Although it is tricky to photograph it without the modern attachments showing...
A photo of the approach to the plum garden. You can see some of the crowds and blossoms from here!
Some of the trees were more fully in bloom than others. Some were regular plums, but there were also many of the weeping variety as well.
The distant skyscrapers made for an interesting juxtaposition with the garden.
The last time I went to this castle, I spotted an elderly man walking around with his pet parakeet perched on his shoulders; he would sometimes let it walk along the steps, or offer to let people passing-by hold the friendly bird in their palms. He must regularly hang out by Osaka Castle, because I spotted him again in the plum garden. He was putting his bird up into the branches of the plum trees, so that visitors could photograph the bird among the blossoms. He gathered quite a crowd around him! As soon as I approached with my camera, he picked up the bird and put it in my hands; I was then promptly the focus of a lot of large lenses, and the group photographed the bird on my hand as it ate some seeds. If you ever visit Osaka Castle, definitely keep an eye out for the man with this blue parakeet!
After that, I wandered even further into the garden, and came across another elderly man who was feeding some sparrows. He spotted me trying to photograph the lively birds, so he started casting some of the seeds among the tree branches. He even gave me tips on which angles would create the best photographs. I'm quite happy with how those photos came out!
Around noon I went to the Shinsaibashi Area to grab lunch. One of Osaka's only two Mexican restaurants is located right at the start of the main shopping arcade, and I usually make a point of eating there whenever I can. It's called "El Pancho," and it's basically heaven for all of us Arizonan-ALT's. The food quality is great, and listening to mariachi-style music blaring from speakers makes me totally nostalgic.
The stadium they were having the Sumo Tournament at was about a twenty-minute walk from the restaurant, further down the shopping-arcade in the Namba area. There were crowds gathered outside just to watch the wrestlers as they walked in and out of the place. I might have inadvertently tripped into wrestlers once or twice... and had to ask directions from one of the referees backstage (and then quickly ran out to avoid interrupting the next wrestlers!). I had pretty good seats, and it was a lot of fun watching the matches. Most of the time the bouts finished in the flash of an eye, which probably explains why the pre-fight ceremonies are so long: the wrestlers want to spend every minute they can on the stage! A lot of the professional sumo wrestlers these days aren't Japanese; the most famous, Hakuho, is Mongolian (and yes, he was there, and yes, his fight was awesome!). The ceremonies and symbolism are complex, but the fighting itself is pretty easy to understand: whoever steps out of the circle or touches the ground with any body part other than their feet, loses.
The view of the stadium from my seat. It was easy to see the matches, and I didn't have to sit on a zabuton all night, so it was a win-win!
Some of the highest ranked wrestlers gathered for some ceremonies before their bracket began. They remove the formal belts before their matches begin.
I filmed one of the matches (pardon the quality), and it was one of the better ones, in my opinion, because it was an evenly matched bout that lasted longer than five seconds! If my (poor) video interests you, I definitely recommend researching the sport and finding more videos to watch.
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