The Sumo Legend Who Thinks America Has No Culture
· Vice
The latest VICE Culture Club episode makes you rethink everything you thought you knew about sumo. “Two big a– white boys in diapers” is still how a lot of people talk about the sport, and Konishiki’s response is basically, grow up.
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Konishiki, born in Honolulu, became the first non-Japanese-born wrestler to reach ōzeki, sumo’s second-highest rank. At his peak, he weighed 287 kg (about 633 lbs). Host Jackson Garrett calls him “legendary,” and Konishiki doesn’t make a big show of it. He’s funny, candid, and surprisingly professor-like, with a chip on his shoulder and a real devotion to tradition.
The sumo wrestler keeps coming back to one point. Sumo doesn’t work if you strip it down to “combat sport content.” “Sumo is not a sport, it’s a culture,” he says, and means it in the most literal way, down to rules that swallow your whole life. He describes living in a sumo stable in Japan, where wrestlers live under strict house rules. “10:00 lights off…you’re not allowed to look at phones,” wearing traditional robes in public, the hierarchy, the apprentices cleaning rooms and carrying luggage, the idea that you commit and that’s it.
That’s also why he’s so unimpressed by Western sports culture. America loves violent spectacle, but it also loves the corporate pageantry that comes with it. Konishiki hates that part. “People are tired of the bulls–t that comes before and after” big-league sports, he says, drawing a line between sumo’s ritual seriousness and the spectacle machine around American pro games. For him, that annoyance isn’t just about games. It becomes a broader critique of how Americans celebrate anything. At one point, he goes full existential about it: “I’m 62 now, and the thing I’ve seen…I don’t know if America has a culture.”
Konishiki’s point is that sumo holds your behavior to the same standard as your performance. If you cause a public scandal, even a minor one, you can get punished. “Tiger Woods…LeBron James…Michael Jordan…no f–king way,” he says, contrasting that with how American icons usually get protected. That seriousness follows him everywhere, even when joking about his own limits.
Konishiki discusses his own mortality with a wild mix of humor and blunt honesty. “I’ll be lucky. Just make sure you say goodbye to your friends…kiss his wife goodbye.” It’s funny for a second, then reality sets in, because his larger point never changes. Sumo rewards commitment, not aesthetics, and it’s brutally unforgiving about that.
By the end, the episode turns into a sneaky thesis about what Americans actually crave right now. It’s not just “look at this weird niche.” It’s a glimpse of a culture that refuses to sell its soul, even when the world keeps asking for it.
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