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Mega earthquakes, sumo wrestling, trad hairstyles, boxwood combs!

The asago morning glories can be seen from late July to September!

This past month has been a bit messy in Japan. The prime minister resigned (scandal!) but before that, just before that, his seismologists or earthquake experts announced that a megaquake could hit the coast of the Honshu Island between Nagoya and Hiroshima more or less! The news hit the New York Times in less that 12 hours and suddenly it was Armageddon in Japan and Godzilla quakes on the horizon.

To be honest, no one knows when the next big one will hit the southern coast of Honshu (Tokyo included) or San Francisco, but one thing is for sure. If the earthquake is really deadly and also wipes out a lot of Japan’s (or California’s) key industrial infrastructure, then the entire world economy will experience a financial quake of serious proportions. Afterall, megaquakes aren’t personal. It’s not like the tribe next door is using them against you. Earthquakes, floods, fire and hurricanes are part of life, literally!

In other news, Japan’s cuisine & restaurant scene is increasingly going the way of South Korea’s restaurant scene: no one answers the phone anymore! It’s true! More than 50% of restaurants in South Korea are in Korean and even when you press zero or one nothing happens. To reserve in the current North East Asian foodie world is increasingly a webpage experience, someone else’s webpage! More and more restaurants are outsourcing their reservation staff to AI chatbots and table booking engines.

I’m a telephone guy and have been for nearly 50 years now! I love calling, in whatever language I speak fluently, and reserving tables and other services. Recently I made two reservations with a chatbot AI, one in Tokyo and one in Osaka. Was super easy!

However, the online table reservation booking sites are not easy to use in English or any other foreign language. They were built for South Korean people or for Japanese people. That’s the problem! I don’t mind using these booking engines at all but only if they are usable! So do be aware of this on your next foodie trip across Japan . . . OK?

The rest of this blog post is devoted to:

Sumo wrestling for the gods & for mortals too

One of the delights of Japan for many short-term visitors and long-term residents is sumo, Japan's "national game" and a sport that manages to be popular among modern Japanese while firmly maintaining its traditional Shinto ways. If you happen to be in Japan during one of the six fifteen-day tournaments held each year, turn on the TV to NHK between four and six in the afternoon. If you give it a chance, you will discover a fascinating sport that is rich in strategy, psychology, and surprise, and peopled with a variety of wrestlers with their own distinct strengths, traits, and personalities.

The object in a sumo match is to either push one's opponent out of the ring or to make some part of his body, besides the bottom of his feet, touch the ground. No punching, hair pulling, or eye gouging is allowed, but other than that, almost anything goes. Wrestlers can be roughly divided into two types: pushers and belt wrestlers.

Pushers charge straight ahead, using slaps and shoves to the body to try force their opponent back and out of the ring. A match between two pushers is often quite exciting. Belt wrestlers try to get an advantageous hold on their opponent's belt (mawashi) and use leverage to throw the opponent down or lift him out of the ring. In a match between a pusher and belt wrestler, the belt wrestler will try to penetrate his rival's defenses and get a firm grip on his belt while the pusher tries to prevent this. Though it may not be obvious to someone who hasn't watched a lot of sumo, the technique involved in top-level sumo is extremely complex, refined, and difficult. If this were not so, one would not see, as one often does, a small wrestler send a much bigger opponent sprawling flat on his face.

The actual matches, which are often over in a matter of seconds, are preceded by three or four minutes of ritualized actions that may look like mere formality but that actually involve important psyching up (of oneself) and psyching out (of one's opponent). The wrestlers enter the ring, face each other, stretch out their arms and stamp their feet, crouch down and stare at each other, go back to their corners, drink "power water" (chikara mizu), throw salt into the ring, then face each other again. This process is repeated three or four times until the referee indicates that it's "time" to fight ("jikan desu"). One can tell when it's "time" by watching the position of the referee: before "time" he faces to the TV viewer's left, but when it's "time", he faces straight toward the camera.

The match is initiated by the two wrestlers themselves. They are supposed to sense and communicate via eye contact some mutual "rhythm" which allows them to charge each other at the same time. It doesn't always work, though, and there are occasional false starts, with one wrestler charging and the other not moving. This inevitably produces a nasty frown on the faces of the black-clad judges, former wrestlers who sit at ringside and who apparently feel that false starts are an embarrassment to the sport.

Some, including many Japanese, find the pre-match rigamarole slow and boring, and prefer to catch "Sumo Digest", a thirty-minute nightly wrap-up of the day's matches that shows only the fights themselves. If you have the time, watching NHK's live, leisurely-paced afternoon broadcasts can be quite rewarding. More than anything else, it gives you a chance to observe the wrestlers closely, and to get to know their personalities, which are sharply revealed, perhaps because they're so naked up there and have no shelter from the TV camera in their moments of absolute victory or defeat.

Rank is extremely important in the sumo world. There are several divisions of wrestlers. Beginners start at the bottom and, if they win more than they lose, work their way up. Performance-wise, the most important thing for a wrestler is to get kachikoshi, at least eight wins in a fifteen-day tournament. Wrestlers who do so can move up in rank for the next tournament, while those who lose eight or more matches (makekoshi), are demoted. Higher rank means higher earnings as well as various privileges such as being the first to eat and enter the bath and having a younger wrestler assigned as one's personal "servant."

The elite are the 30 or so wrestlers that make up the top makuuchi division. During a tournament, the makuuchi wrestlers perform the colorful ring-entering ceremony, for which they don specially made ornamental "belts", at around 4:15 in the afternoon. Their matches then begin, starting with those of the lower ranked wrestlers and ending with the matches involving the yokozuna and ozeki--the highest and next-highest ranked wrestlers--between 5:30 and 6:00.

Traditional Japanese Hairstyles Over The Centuries

The Kompira Kushi Matsuri (Comb Festival) is held every September (Wednesday, Sept 25 in 2024) at Gion’s small but important Yasui Kompira Shrine. The festival was initiated by an association of traditional hairdressers who wanted to pay respect to the tools of their trade. The festival begins at noon, when a museum at the shrine devoted to the history of combs is opened to the public. (It is only open on this day.) At 13:00 a parade of about thirty women, dressed in various traditional costumes and coiffures, departs from the shrine on a winding course which takes about an hour to complete. At 14:00 a Shinto ceremony for old combs is held at the shrine, after which the people in the parade are introduced one by one on stage, and commentaries about their costumes and hairstyles are given. The old combs are then placed on a sacred mound where the spirits of combs reside and are later burned.

A Japanese woman's traditional hairstyle is a calling card of sorts that once clearly indicated her marital and social status. In the old days, and probably still today, women combed her hair with fine boxwood comb (see above), smoothed it down with pure camellia oil (still available in any good shop). Really high-class or elegant ladies in kimono on the move will have an attractive, elegant, smooth, almost shiny quality about their hair. This quality is known as iki. Iki-style hairdos are characterized by smart, smooth lines that make the hair seem almost folded into place. This style, naturally, also exposes the nape of the neck, the most beautiful part of the Japanese woman’s body, to maximum advantage.

The festival begins at 13:00, when about thirty-five women wearing kimono and hairstyles from the 6th century to the 21st century, parade from the shrine to the corner of Shijo/Hanami-koji and then back to the shrine. After the ceremony, each woman is introduced, and her kimono and hairstyle are commented on. By the end of the festival, you will clearly understand why in Japan a woman's long black hair was considered to be her most valuable possession.

Kushi combs used by maiko, geiko & trad women

First time visitors to Kyoto cannot help but be impressed by the contrast between things ancient and modern, interwoven in the very fabric of the city. A venerable shrine may be at the foot of a modern hotel, where traditionally dressed monks or geisha emerge from late model taxis. Equally remarkable is how everyday objects often reveal complex worlds beneath a simple surface. So it is with as humble an object as a wooden comb.

The Kojiki, the Records of Ancient Matters completed in 712, relates Japan's mythology, customs, and ancient history in great detail. One episode tells how the deity Izanagi travels to the underworld to implore his cohort Izanami to return with him. She asks him to wait while she consults with the gods in a cave. Growing impatient, Izanagi breaks off one of the end teeth of his left comb, lights it, and goes in, only to find her 'a hideous mass of corruption', with eight Thunder-Gods dwelling in various parts of her decomposing form. Shocked, he starts to flee while Izanami, equally upset to be seen in such a state, sends a devil after him. Relentlessly pursued, Izanagi breaks off the teeth of the comb in the right bunch of his hair and casts them down. They instantly turn into tasty bamboo shoots, the devil stops to eat them, and Izanagi escapes.

Any object capable of repelling devils cannot, of course, simply be thrown away, but needs to be put to rest with an appropriate ceremony. Such a ceremony takes place annually at the Yasui Kompira Shrine (see below) where prayers are said for used combs and combs with broken teeth. After their honorable spirits have been taken care of, they are then burned in a purifying ritual fire.

Because the Japanese word for comb ('kushi') contains the sounds 'ku' and 'shi', which can mean 'suffering' and 'death', there are several superstitions concerning them. Accidentally breaking a comb or a tooth is considered bad luck. They should not be given as gifts, for then hardship might afflict the recipient, nor should you pick up someone else's comb, lest you be visited by their suffering.

Each comb is handmade according to a procedure little changed in 1200 years. Boxwood trees planted in Kyushu are allowed to grow for 30 years before they are cut. Then another 10 years are needed for drying and curing before the wood can be made into combs. During the seasoning process, the pieces are impregnated with smoke from their own sawdust, which gives new combs their characteristic odor. To make a comb, each tooth is first sawn by hand, then filed smooth. After bringing the body to its final shape, it is laboriously polished in several stages, using natural materials such as sharkskin, scouring rushes, hemp, and finally deerskin. This painstaking process is what gives them their deep luster. Considering the amount of handwork which goes into the making of each comb, it is amazing that a small one can cost as little as Yen 800, though the less expensive varieties are made from boxwood imported from Thailand.

Boxwood combs come in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and even miniature ones for the wigs of dolls are made in the same exacting fashion. Although many of these unique combs are designed for the traditional hairstyles worn by geisha and kabuki actors, others can be used by men or women with any type of hair. Once you use a handmade boxwood comb, gentle to the scalp and non-static, you'll never again be satisfied with plastic!

Kyoto comb shopping: Jusan Ya, in Kyoto, is a small shop on the north side of Shijo Street a little west of Teramachi, Jusan-ya has been making and selling fine boxwood combs since 1875. Jusan Ya also makes a variety of exquisite kanzashi, ornamental hairpins many older women put in their long hair. Tokyo comb shopping: Yonoya (yonoya.com) in Taito City is the best shop in Tokyo for traditional wooden combs. Second would be Jusanya (Taito City, Tokyo) and the third would be Shibuya's Oriental Bazaar.