Alright people, I’m resurrecting the Japanese sumo headlines with a twist: no translation in the title. Basically, I want to challenge you all to try to find the meaning from the headline alone. Occasionally I retweet stuff from Japanese press and am curious how many of the English language followers can pick up the meaning. Today’s article came from the Mainichi Newspaper.
This one is easy. There are only a couple of sumo terms but the rest of the headline is fairly basic. First thing’s first, let’s decode sumo vocabulary. In this case, there’s only two sumo terms,
1) 十両 is Juryo division.
2) 妙義龍 is Myogiryu’s shikona.
Next, let’s go for level 1 terms.
６月 = June
第１子 = First child
誕生 = Birth
Then, the only thing left are a couple of level two terms.
結婚 = marriage
発表 = announcement
Grammar points:
誕生日: (Tanjyobi) is a beginner word meaning “birthday”. Before you even start seriously learning kanji, you often get taught to recognize this.
結婚式: (Kekkonshiki) is another term, meaning wedding, you also learn to recognize before you really learn the meaning of the individual kanji. The key here is that without “shiki”, “kekkon” means marriage. So in this headline he announced his marriage.
の is often a sign of the possessive. In this case, “Juryo’s Myogiryu” or “Myogiryu of Juryo”.
武士道: (Bushido) is the way of the warrior. And the “Bu” looks a lot like the “shiki” from the above kekkonshiki. This is why learning Japanese throws me for a loop. So many characters look similar.
“Juryo’s Myogiryu announces his marriage; [their] first child was born in June.”
So, Congratulations to Myogiryu. He married his high school sweetheart. They weren’t permitted to date in high school because he was committed to sumo. But they started dating about six years ago and she helped him recover from his injuries. (I wonder if this is the injury when he got KTFO by Hakuho). They will have the ceremony next June.
Lots of wedding bells in the sumo world right now. First Tochiozan, now Myogiryu. And tomorrow the wedding receptions of both Yokozuna Kakuryu and Ishiura take place (with Hakuho now clashing with his shisho for intending to participate in both despite being kyujo).
Attending a wedding or two seems kind of trivial to get all worked up over, I’m pretty sure you can do that with a bum knee. Now if he was, I don’t know, out playing soccer or something, then we would have an issue!
Tell that to the oyakata convention which issued a statement a couple of days ago that rikishi in kyujo should not attend private functions. Miyagino oyakata said that this means Hakuho cannot attend the wedding receptions. Hakuho countered by announcing that he will attend the next two official kyokai events (before the jungyo), which entitles him to participate in the weddings. The trick is that for the first event at least the torikumi is already set, so all he will be doing is a dohyo-iri… In short, what westerners like you and me would consider a complete non-issue turned into a wedding-gate.
Wow, you’re not kidding! This isn’t the first time I’ve heard of Hakuho buttong heads with his shisho either. Hopefully Ishiura didn’t sit them at the same table!
Alright, alright, I’ll study. Can’t have too many hobbies, right?
Thanks for this!
I know that the kanji that looks like a little man is “dai” or “”tai” and mean “big”: and the one with three prongs is “yama” and means “mountain”. That’s my limit, unless the headline involves a big mountain I’m pretty much lost.