Part Five:
Today would be our last day with our “tour guide”. The original plan was to do the fish market in the morning; do some walking around/sight seeing and then the sumo wrestling tournament. Though we decided to change those plans on the way home from Hakone yesterday. Instead of leaving the hotel at 8:30 to catch the end of the fish market (business stops at 9 AM), we decided to be picked up at 10:30, see the Imperial Palace and then the sumo tournament.
Unbeknownst to us, in order to actually see the Imperial Palace, you need to reserve a spot on a tour before hand. So instead, we got to see a watchtower and the moats and bridges around the estate. The area did seem very nice, but without actually getting gin to see the palace, it seemed like a waste of time.
From the Imperial Palace, we took the JR line to the sumo-wrestling tournament and did a quick walk around the immediate streets to see the statues of the champions. The days events start at 8:30 go until 6:30 and we arrived around 11:30. The earlier bouts of the day are the lower tier fighters and as the day progresses, the tiers go up (think A, AA and AAA in baseball). When we arrived, the stadium was very empty as the bouts were “no name’” wrestlers. We went to sit lower down for a bit before we got sent back to our original seats.
The whole sumo experience was very interesting. From the entrance to the fighting platform and the warm-up moves/dancing beforehand was very interesting. As everything was in Japanese, it was a bit hard to follow what exactly was happening (our tour guide seemed to have regressed in the amount of English he spoke and was of no real help), but we definitely enjoyed just watching. The fighters leave very little to the imagination in their “uniforms” and most bouts are over in less than 30 seconds. Was very interesting to see how there is strategy involved when smaller wrestlers would occasionally best the much larger opponents and even send them tumbling off the fighting platform. We were not planning to stay the whole day, but stayed long enough to watch the salaried sumo wrestlers perform their entrance dance in their ceremonial flaps (some kind of cloth that covers their loin cloth I guess…) After the entrance, we went down and was able to get some pictures with some of the wrestlers in the hallway and then went back up to watch a few matches before leaving. As we were leaving, we noticed a big line of people waiting to take pictures with some man. Apparently he was a grand champion and has since lost an incredible amount of weight (he looked like a skinner and little bit shorter Yao Ming).
After we left, we went back to the hotel to rest up and secure a babysitter so we could go out that night. We were able to get setup with one from the Chabad of Japan and had them meet us at our hotel. Once the sitters arrived (two sisters), we ran to catch a taxi as we were late to check-in for the Robot Restaurant show. This show is unlike anything I have ever seen, ever will see and still can’t believe I saw. I am not even sure how to put it in words it was that bizarre. The show may not be for most people as there are a lot of women in the show who are not fully clothed, very loud crazy music and stuff that may give you (hopefully not me) nightmares. Aside from all that, it was a crazy experience, very cool and we really enjoyed whatever it is that we did see. Maybe some of the pictures can shed some light on what it is, or you can probably Google/YouTube it and see for yourselves.