Aonishiki

I have deep respect for people who come to a foreign country and thrive.

I moved abroad as a child, to a place whose language I couldn’t read. There’s a particular helplessness in not being able to answer a test because you can’t read the questions — of not even reaching the starting line. Looking back, I gained a great deal from all of it, and the fact that I can feed myself today owes a lot to that move. But it was hard.

At my neighborhood convenience store, a woman who I’d guess came from another country gives me a wonderful smile every time. Convenience store work is brutally varied: customers bark cigarette-shelf numbers and expect instant retrieval, the stores now bake bread and fry food in-house, and handling utility-bill payments looks genuinely difficult. Just learning the register seems hard. If it looks that hard to me — a native speaker in my own country — then the gentle smile she manages on top of all of it fills me with something like awe.

This connects, in a roundabout way, to sumo. I started following it last year. At my grandparents’ house, sumo was always on in the evening. I knew the famous names and stories — Chiyonofuji, Takanohana, Akebono — but never understood why the wrestlers glare at each other, back off, and repeat before actually fighting. It was a slightly distant landscape. Then last year I gained a companion I could ask endless questions without embarrassment, and suddenly it all came close. Seeing the wrestlers’ personalities off the ring during the London exhibition, I came to like them as people, too.

And then I found my favorite: Aonishiki. He came from a war zone to a foreign country and is fighting his way through the sumo world, a world dense with custom and protocol. What finished me off was his interview after winning a huge bout. In Japanese that was fully his own — not borrowed phrases — he thanked the people around him. That was it. I was done for.

Having a favorite pulls you in deep. I live and die by his wins and losses; when he took a championship I was shouting at the screen. He was out injured for a while, but he’s back this tournament. I want to hear his words again.

I understand the pre-bout ritual a little better now, but it’s still waiting time. I wanted something to glance at during those minutes — the wrestlers’ backgrounds and records at a glance — so I asked Fable to build it. It’s called shikiri-machi: “waiting out the shikiri.”

Sharing a little of it here: shikiri-machi