I kept seeing this pop up in my YouTube feed, but I hadn’t gotten around to watching it because it’s around 80 minutes long.

Gave it a look tonight, and it wasn’t what I had pictured, but it’s the first video by a new creator tired of a lack of English language sumo content.

Creator @aqua_noodle is German, but making content in English. He apologized for being German while trying to speak Japanese terminology in English all at once, but honestly with knowledge of beginner basic sumo terms, I had no issues following along. I had the auto-caption on and that was 10x times more confusing. 😜

So the video started off like what I was expecting, talking about the previous state of sumo, with only 5 basho per year, pointing out going to 6 sound like just one more, but that’s really 20% more, giving them more opportunities to get hurt and less time to recover. Most of the guys were tall and heavy, and there were 4 yokozuna at once and many more guys (55) in makuuchi.

After that, the video goes into a day by day recap of the January basho. I had been expecting a more general explanation of what changes were made to the sport and how it was becoming modernized for a new era or something, but I should have read the description before watching maybe? 😅 It sounds like he’s planning to cover more history, so we may be getting there eventually.

He did a lot of graphs and charts of kimarite, and it sounded like there was much more variety back then. He included visual depictions and descriptions of each move, which really helped since I don’t know any of them for the most part. He had a few clips of matches he was able to find to demonstrate some key moments. He definitely put a lot of work into the video.

I don’t know if I’d tell you guys to watch the whole thing unless you are into sumo history, but if this guy keeps working on videos and refining his work, we could really have a great channel in the making.

In the comments, the @SundayMorningSumo channel was very impressed with the video and asked him to join them next basho to do live commentary! I have been watching a bunch of their coverage of the last 3 basho and have enjoyed it, so that could be nice and should really help his channel get support.

Here’s the video description, so check it out if you think it may be something interesting and maybe subscribe to see how the channel progresses even if this video isn’t for you.

Hello. Welcome to my first video about the January 1958 Sumo Wrestling Tournament. I was very frustrated with the lack of non-Japanese Resources on Sumo Wrestling’s history, so while I compiled statistics I thought, why not post this as an ongoing series. Why 1958? That particular year presents a shift to a never-before-seen 6 tournament schedule. There is actually no set starting date for what constitutes “modern” sumo, but for me this is the defining criteria. On top of that, the tournament itself was a landmark, a changing of the guards of sorts. If you have an hour and a bit, I will make sure to give you all the ever so minute details.