As we’ve covered in recent articles, it’s pretty hard to get tickets to a sumo tournament. This has been made even tougher, obviously, with the promotion of Kisenosato and the rise of several native Japanese wrestlers after a long period of flagging interest within Japan itself. This will have ticket prices for the six annual hon-basho (main tournaments) at very high prices, available mostly through middlemen. So, those of us sumo fans who cannot shell out much for a tournament, there is hope in the form of the promotional tours (Jungyo).

お台場で初の巡業を８月開催「大相撲ＯＤＡＩＢＡ場所」

One such tour was just announced. As the headline reads, August will see the first Odaiba Basho! Odaiba is a big development built from re-claimed land in Tokyo bay that contains a large convention center, mall and restaurants and is scheduled to host several events during the 2020 Olymipic games. There’s a light rail line, the Yorikamome, that takes people out there and it’s accessible by car via Rainbow Bridge. I’ve watched summer fireworks over Rainbow Bridge which is pretty spectacular. Those fireworks are a major reason to brave the heat and go to Japan in the summer. I will keep a lookout for scheduling to find out when those will be this summer.

８月

August: Just to reinforce our temporal lesson from a few days ago, this means August but if you add (間) and make it 8月間, then it means something lasted 8 months or it took 8 months to do something.

初の巡業…開催

“First Tour…will be held”: So much of this headline is at a basic level of sumo Japanese. You should recognize “hatsu” from “hatsubasho,” the first tournament of each year held in January. You should also recognize Jungyo. The only real new vocabulary in this entire headline is “kaisai” (開催). Many headlines don’t put the full form of the verb, especially verbs like “suru.” But here we would imply the passive form of the verb, “kaisai sareru,” or will be held.

「大相撲ＯＤＡＩＢＡ場所」

“ODAIBA Sumo Basho”: Often, Odaiba is written out like this in the roman alphabet because it’s a tourist center. They want tourists to go there, especially for the many conventions. The kanji was what started off the headline (お台場). With the hiragana de, we get “At Odaiba.”

General tickets go on sale June 4. The specific venue for the sumo tournament is supposed to hold 4500 people. There’s mention of a priority lottery on April 23, so I will research for more details.