When describing efforts by foreigners to gain a foothold in Japan, author/commentator and former president of ASI Market Research (Japan), Inc., George Fields, liked to apply the analogy of pro baseball players and sumo wrestlers. The former, for reasons we shall see, were held up as outsiders who forever remained so; the latter were outsiders who became insiders.
Twenty years ago, the most prominent foreign rikishi (sumo wrestlers) tended to be from Hawaii, which has a large Japanese-American population and close cultural ties with Japan. More recently, however, most foreign rikishi have hailed from Mongolia (Asashoryu), as well as Bulgaria (Kotooshu), Russia (Rohou) and other former Soviet bloc countries. Frequently appearing in TV interviews, the wrestlers do, of course, make the occasional error -- but when they speak, they sound like sumo rikishi, and they express themselves in a manner remarkably similar to their Japanese counterparts.
This language proficiency, particularly among foreign grapplers from countries with only tenuous historical and cultural ties to Japan, has become a topic of academic study. Dr. Satoshi Miyazaki, a professor at the Graduate School of Japanese Applied Linguistics, Waseda University, began his field work in 1997.
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