Tachiai would like to congratulate Kotoshogiku on the birth of his first baby, a boy. Today’s news comes from Mainichi, again. Apparently Nikkei doesn’t want to cover sumo during Jungyo. Well, even during a tournament it falls under “Sports\Other,” so maybe my expectations are too high. Glad to see that Mainichi is covering it. Three articles from them today. This one is a great, easy headline. Now that I’ve spoiled the surprise of the headline, we may as well take a look at it:
琴奨菊に第１子の長男誕生「親孝行だ」
First thing’s first, Kotoshogiku’s shikona followed by hiragana “ni” because the baby was born to Kotoshogiku. When counting ordinal numbers (i.e. sequentially) Japanese often uses the character “DAI” (第) and follows up with the appropriate kanji for what you’re counting. Here we’re counting kids (子). “CHONAN” is the word for first son (長男). If you replace the second character (which means male) with the character for female (女), you get first daughter. The first character is usually translated as “long” but it also gets used as leader or “head” as in the head of an organization. The head of a company is the ShaCho, using that character.
Then Tanjo (誕生) is birth. If you study Japanese you learn the word Tanjobi (誕生日) which is birthday. This is an important word to know for anyone studying Japanese. Not just so you can celebrate your birthday, you can fill out immigration forms and other paperwork! If you know your bloodtype, you can even set up a social media profile or blog. If you think I’m joking, I’m laughing but I’m not joking.
「親孝行だ」
Lastly, remember yesterday’s “synergy”? How the sumo assistants, tsukebito, get a benefit from assisting sekitori by being able to train with them? Well, kids provide for their parents by respecting them and being dutiful…doing things, like not dying before their parents. His son decided to be born after the tournament, so Kotoshogiku said, “Oyakoko da.” If he’d been born during the tournament, 困ったね。
I’m hoping I have no issues trying to get a ticket for the Nagoya Basho for when I go to Japan! Does anyone know if you can usually try and get in on the day if you are not able to get a ticket on time?
I accidentally left this on the wrong post haha..
Tom – looking at that situation myself for the May basho. Typically there are a few seats held back for “day of” sales. In the past before the days of Kisenosato, there was a decent chance of being able to walk up in the morning to the ticket window with cold hard yen in your hand and leave with some sort of seat to watch sumo that day.
Now it’s far from a sure thing. In fact, there are some reports of people lining up in the dark hours of the morning waiting for the ticket window to open so they can try to get day-of tickets.
Keep in mind the Nagoya prefectural gymnasium is much smaller than the Kokugikan, so the competition will be higher still.
I had hoped to be on hand when Hakuho broke the all time win record, but his kyujo during March pushed that soonest that can happen back to July – so if you get to go, I hope you can see him put yet another record under his tsuna.
Thanks for the heads up Bruce. It was much easier for me last year too when I went to Tokyo in May last year! I hope you get the chance to go to the Natsu Basho.
I’ve also seen that you have answered my question above in the text so I just need to figure out how to delete all these comments…oops
LOL, don’t worry about deleting them. It’s a great question. :) It also gives others a chance to answer them. I’d be interested to hear others’ experiences as well.