Culture : Japan’s Sumo Stars Weigh In With Sex Appeal : The ‘Taka-Waka’ brothers attract legions of female fans to the ancient sport. Now, there are sumo calendars, dolls and even a TV series.

The groupies have been here for hours. Young schoolgirls and elderly matrons alike clutch cameras, eyes darting for celebrities.

Suddenly, they shriek and lunge forward. A man of regal bearing is passing by, and hands flail for a touch. After he leaves, the women heave sighs, spent from the unbearable exhilaration of the three-second close encounter.

Takahanada has just made his stadium entrance at this seaside city’s main cultural event. He is not a rock star, nor a movie idol, but his celebrity invites comparisons with both. He is a 286-pound hulk in a greased topknot who earns a living rolling in the sand with other nearly nude wrestlers--the brightest star of Japan’s sumo world.

“He felt muscular,” swooned Hitomi Ueno, a 22-year-old office worker who waited two hours to touch Takahanada’s back. “I’m never going to wash my hand. I’m going to put a vinyl bag over it!”

Sumo is at least 2,000 years old, steeped in myth and tradition as entertainment for the gods and, until recently, considered a stodgy sport for old folks. But the emergence of Takahanada, 20, a baby-faced athlete with a relatively compact build, along with his affable brother Wakahanada, 21, has changed that image. The “Taka-Waka” duo, as they are called, have given the sport a heady shot of sex appeal, attracted legions of new young female fans and set off the hottest sumo boom in memory.

“The crowd reaction to Taka-Waka is absolutely astounding,” said David Benjamin, author of “The Joy of Sumo.”

“They are the reason for the sumo boom. Without them, sumo would just be another pastime.”

Where stadiums used to go begging for bodies, sumo has enjoyed a string of sellout crowds going back nearly three seasons. Non-reserved tickets, once easily acquired the same day, now draw two-day waiting lines. Sports newspapers, which used to place sumo stories on their cover only a few times during each of the six tournaments a year, now rabidly promote coverage: For the first time in its history, the leading Nikkan Sports tabloid made sumo its cover story all 15 days of the grand tournament last January.

A new TV drama has been launched, centered on a young woman who quits school to join the sumo world, selling king-sized clothing to wrestlers. And sumo TV audiences are steadily growing, to an 18% share, or about 18 million viewers during the latest tournament last month, up from an 11.5% share, or 11.5 million viewers, in 1989, according to the Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK) network.

Riding the boom, sumo souvenirs have expanded from the traditional handprints of wrestlers to an astonishing array of stuffed dolls, calendars, erasers, stationery, towels, aprons--even jockey shorts--adorned with lovable caricatures of roly-poly, pink-cheeked, topknotted athletes.

At the Sanko gift shop in Ryogoku, the sumo center of Tokyo, Fumie Sakata’s sales of stuffed sumo dolls and other toys have doubled each year for the last three years. The area, a melange of sumo training “stables,” sumo specialty restaurants, gift stores and the National Sumo Stadium, is now placed on many group tours to Tokyo, she said.

The sumo furor reflects a startling shift in popular interest. In 1988, an NHK poll found sumo ranked as the public’s fifth favorite sport--after high school baseball, pro baseball, the marathon and volleyball. But a similar poll in July this year found sumo had climbed to No. 1, the sport of choice for 53% of those surveyed.

And sumo mania is not confined merely to Japan. Earlier this month, the American Wrestling Assn. announced it would begin training football players in sumo and hold its first tournament in January in Los Angeles and other cities. In what will surely be perceived as blasphemy in Japan, the U.S. wrestlers will forgo much of the sport’s traditional ritual, including topknots, and wear boxing trunks and sneakers.

Japanese fans have taken to the Taka-Waka pair not only because of their boyish good looks but also because of their diligence, sumo techniques--and a father who was also a popular wrestler. Beyond Taka-Waka, however, the sumo boom reflects a resurgence of interest among Japanese youth in their cultural traditions: Kabuki and Noh theater, kimonos and traditional furnishings such as tatami mats and tansu chests, said scriptwriter Makiko Uchidate.

“Young people threw away their own culture in favor of European and American culture, but now they are beginning to appreciate their culture’s own goodness,” she said.

To be sure, many die-hard fans look askance at the sumo boom. To them, it is fueled by star-struck neophytes with no clue about sumo’s techniques nor any appreciation for the thrill of watching two behemoths collide, engage and cleanly decide a match in a matter of seconds.

“It’s a nuisance,” said Yasuhiro Okubo, a 23-year-old office worker who has avidly followed sumo for 11 years. “Because of the boom, all of these people who don’t know anything are coming to tournaments and real fans like myself can’t get tickets.”

And unlike real fans, the fringe groupies rarely join support groups to make regular financial donations that are the lifeblood of sumo “stables,” or clubs, said Mitsuaki Murakami, a former wrestler.

Murakami heads the Matsugane stable support group of 600 members, who contribute from $8 to $400 a month. All money is turned directly over to the stable master, known as oyakata, to defray the considerable expenses involved in feeding his troops or clothing them in expensive kimonos.

“There is no advantage to fly-by-night fans, because sumo needs money,” Murakami said.

But the wrestlers themselves don’t seem to mind. “Having young women in the audience is better than grandmas,” joked Akio Matsuda, who wrestled under the name of Wakanoumi, became an oyakata and now runs a sumo specialty restaurant.

Sumo wrestlers have always been admired for their strength--one reason many parents ask them to hug their newborns to transfer some of their vitality. But for many young women, the Waka-Taka boom has lifted sumo wrestlers to the status of new national heartthrobs.

Never mind that most of them are obese, tipping the scales at an average 319 pounds. So what if many of them have a junior high school education in a nation fanatic about college pedigree? And who cares if they forgo Italian designer suits for samurai-style garb, including a kimono and a chonmage, or topknot.

At a time when one symbol of manhood here is the mama’s boy Fuyuhiko, a TV character hopelessly afflicted with maza con (mother complex), sumo wrestlers stand out as real men.

Just ask Rie Miyazawa, the enormously popular, 19-year-old starlet who rocked Japan with a book of semi-nude photos last year. In a thunderbolt announcement that sent Japan’s voracious media into overdrive, she and Takahanada recently disclosed their engagement. The betrothal, compared to the American glamour match between baseball’s Joe DiMaggio and actress Marilyn Monroe, seemed the ultimate confirmation of sumo’s ascent to stardom.

“Today’s young men are spineless,” said Akiko Yamaura, 20, a junior-college student, as she camped out with her camera at the recent Grand Sumo Tournament in Fukuoka, a seaside city on the southern island of Kyushu. “But you can rely on sumo wrestlers. I’d like to marry one.”

“There are no mama’s boys in sumo,” said Teruyuki Nishimori, spokesman for the Japan Sumo Assn. “Wrestlers learn to trust themselves and succeed on their own individual strength. Compared to other kids their age, sumo wrestlers are more mentally and emotionally developed.”

Well, maybe. Some people argue that the rigidly hierarchical and tradition-bound system does not encourage independent thinkers. But former wrestler Matsuda said self-reliance is a job requirement, since everyone around you is your rival, even in your own stable, and plotting wrestling strategies and winning techniques is a solitary task.

“You’re really alone. To improve, you can only train,” he said.

And life for the young wrestlers, many of whom are just 15 years old when they join a sumo stable, is a harsh test in endurance and discipline.

Consigned to male-only communal living in simple quarters, they awaken as early as 5 a.m. and, without benefit of breakfast, spend most of the morning knocking heads in severe training exercises.

In a rigid apprentice system little changed over the centuries, the junior wrestlers act as virtual indentured servants. After training, while their seniors relax in the bath, they must prepare the traditional sumo meal of chankonabe, a one-pot dish of vegetables and meat or seafood. Even if ravenous, they eat only after their seniors and then just the leftovers.

After a heavy meal, the wrestlers are required to take a nap to put on poundage. Among sumo eating lore, the wrestler Takamisugi is famous for downing 65 portions, or 29 pounds of beef in one sitting--stopping not because he was full but because his jaw got tired of chewing.

The junior wrestlers also have to clean, sweep, do laundry and wait on their seniors--from scrubbing them in the bath to helping them dress.

All of which is performed without a paycheck. Only after wrestlers advance to the higher rank of juryo do they begin drawing a $6,000 monthly salary; until then, they must make do with a $55 allowance every two months.

But the odds of reaching juryo are just one in 11. And just one out of every 260 makes the highest rank of yokozuna, or grand champion, which carries a $14,500 monthly salary, national fame and a wealth of perks and privileges.

The harsh system, aimed in part at instilling psychological grit, is tough enough for Japanese to adapt to; one-fifth reportedly drop out after the first year. But it can be frightfully difficult for foreigners.

Troy Talaimatai is a 20-year-old Hawaiian who wrestles under the name Ozora in the stable headed by the sumo world’s only foreign-born stable master, Azumazeki (the former Jesse Kuhaulua). At the behest of his Japanese-American health teacher in Hawaii, the 400-pound, 6-foot-tall Ozora chose sumo over a football scholarship at Pasadena City College three years ago and was overwhelmed by an entirely different world.

“The first few months I was tripping out,” he said after morning training at the Azumazeki stable in Kyushu. “I didn’t know anything about sumo before I came, except that I was supposed to push someone out of the ring.”

In contrast with his easygoing life in Hawaii, he soon found himself training, cooking, cleaning and washing--and treating his fellow Hawaiian and stablemate Akebono like a god simply because he had reached the exalted rank of ozeki (champion) , second to the top.

“You gotta be nuts to want to be a sumo wrestler,” Ozora said, although he plans to hang in there.

Benjamin, the sumo author, also said that wrestlers face dangerous health problems, from diabetes to enlarged hearts. But Nishimori of the sumo association said the health problems reflect the general decline in health among Japanese youth and are not directly related to sumo.

Yet there are definite rewards, Ozora and others said. For Naoshi Karino, 23, who wrestles as Takaminobori, sumo has given him the chance to travel, eat at first-class restaurants and drink at fancy bars on the tab of his stable’s supporters.

Besides, he thinks the chonmage topknot and kimono garb are cool.

“Give us a sword and we’d be like samurai,” he said. “There are only 800 like us in all of Japan. Since I have a chonmage, everyone knows I’m a sumo wrestler. If I didn’t have it, I’d just be a fatso.”

Chiaki Kitada, researcher in the Times Tokyo Bureau, contributed to this report.