Wrestling with gender roles: Women break sumo taboo

The Japan Sumo Association says sorry after women helping a collapsed man were ordered to leave the ring.

Women enter the ring to treat Maizuru mayor Ryozo Tatami, who collapsed while giving a speech on April 4. Picture: Reuters

The Japan Sumo Association has apologised after an official ­ordered women to leave a sumo-wrestling ring where they were giving first aid to a man with a brain haemorrhage.

The incident, in which Japan’s national sport sought to enforce its ban on women in the wrestling ring, called attention to the unequal status of women in some of Japan’s traditional cultural fields such as sumo and kabuki, discrimination that reflects broader ­inequality.

Japan ranked 114th in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index last year. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said making it easier for women to work and be active in society is a “matter of the greatest urgency.”

The centuries-old sport of sumo has held at least since the early 20th century that women must not enter the ring, a policy some historians associate with ­rituals in Japan’s native Shinto ­religion that view women as ­unclean.

The ban was put to the test in the city of Maizuru on the Sea of Japan coast on Wednesday, where an exhibition tournament was taking place. Maizuru Mayor Ryozo Tatami, 67, was giving a speech in the ring when he suddenly collapsed from what doctors later diagnosed as bleeding in the brain.

Videos of the scene broadcast in Japan showed that a woman in the audience rushed up to the ring and started performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation on Mr Tatami as he lay flat on his back. Several other women also entered the ring to help.

At that point, a sumo association official announced over the public-address system: “Women, please come down from the ring. Women, please come down from the ring. Men, please go up.”

The videos showed that the women then left the ring. By the time Mr Tatami was carried off in a stretcher, only men remained. A spokeswoman for the mayor, Noriko Miwa, said an operation to treat him was successful and he was in stable condition at a hospital’s intensive care unit.

Sumo association head ­Nobuyoshi Hakkaku apologised, saying the official who made the announcement was flustered. “This was an inappropriate ­response in a situation where human life was at stake,” Mr Hakkaku said.

A spokesman said the association planned to review its policy on women in light of the case. It has previously barred female politicians from presenting trophies to tournament champions in the ring, something male politicians do regularly. Mieko Nakabayashi, a former MP who is a professor of social sciences at Waseda University, said Wednesday’s case brought to the surface a conservative strain in Japanese society.

“It is an indication of the reality which is unbelievable in the modern day,” she said.

In politics, she said, the discrimination is usually more subtle. “Even female voters sometimes think that politics is for men,” she said. “Women are not seen as serious enough.”

Some sports and cultural institutions in Japan continue to bar women. Kabuki actors are all-male, and the golf club that will play host to the golf competition at the 2020 Summer Olympics in Japan didn’t admit women as full members until pressure from Olympic officials forced it to change the policy last year.

While there has been no official discrimination in the Japanese workplace since gender equality was codified in the mid-1980s, women’s representation lags well behind other nations.

Only 1 per cent of companies listed on Japanese stock exchanges have a female president, according to data firm Tokyo Shoko Research, and only 10 per cent of the MPs elected in last ­October’s parliamentary general election were women.

Mr Abe’s campaign to promote women in the workplace has achieved some successes. In his five years in office, the proportion of women age 15 to 64 in the workforce has risen nearly 7 percentage points to 67 per cent. Big companies are adding more women to the executive ranks, and Toyota last month named its first female board member.

Kumi Yokoe, a professor of media studies at Toyo University, said a handful of women from the first generation to enter career-track jobs in the late 1980s are now reaching the top ranks, and younger women consider it natural to pursue careers. As male leaders from an earlier generation retire, the number of women in senior positions could “go up in a quick burst”, she said.

The Wall Street Journal