Nagoya

The evening of July 18, we took the Shinkansen bullet train (Nozomi - the fastest one) to Nagoya to watch some sumo wrestling. We used this website - Japan Ball - to get our tickets. It's a really useful site if you want to watch baseball and sumo in Japan. Our tickets were delivered to our hotel - quite convenient!

Super fast trains!

My nephew Branden loves trains - I made Paul take a photo of me with the train for him

There is a bullet train every 15 minutes

We arrived in Nagoya (130 kilometers, ~81 miles from Kyoto) in under 40 minutes - these are sumo nobori flags

Entrance to the gymnasium

Paul and I competed by trying to pick the winner of each match

These guys are big

Who do you think won this one?

Yup, purple won

Lifting and stomping their legs is part of the shiko exercise meant to scare evil spirits from the ring (dohyo)

They can be quite flexible - Paul theorized that the wrestler that raised his legs higher would win the match

We watched for about 2 hours...

Look how high they can get their legs up!

They seemed to get bigger and bigger

On your mark...get set...

Go!

Silver lost this one

Higashi - East Team of sumo wrestlers gathered around the gyoji (referee) during the ring entering ceremony

Nishi - West Team of wrestlers gathered around the gyoji

This was a pretty intense match

Lots of action

Weren't sure who was going to win this one

Look at the strain on this guy's face

Oh no, he lost!

This was a good match - I thought the bigger guy was going to win

But the smaller guy pulled a fast one and moved away which made the big guy fall

This was the last match we watched before leaving - click here to watch it

Fun times! Paul won 6-5 in our little competition (only after we started to keep track)

We left a little early and ran into one of the wrestlers

The subway entrance looks pretty cool

Streets of Nagoya