A Huge Departure

Hawaiian-born Akebono, the first foreigner anointed a grand champion in Japan’s rarefied world of sumo wrestling, is hanging up his loincloth.

Hobbling on bad knees, clad in a gray kimono and dabbing away tears, Akebono on Monday announced that he will retire from the clay ring, where he has spent the last dozen years winning fame and fortune.

“Before, I would try to withstand the pain, but it is now unbearable, even when I’m not sumo wrestling,” the hulking 31-year-old told a packed news conference. “I’ve lost the motivation to rise to the top again and my body will not move the way I want it to any longer.”

The 514-pound Akebono, who was born Chad Rowan and grew up in the town of Waimanalo on Oahu, became a Japanese legend, winning 11 national titles.

The news of his departure shocked the nation and was eclipsed only by President Bush’s inauguration in Monday’s newspapers.

“I’m surprised. I thought he would hang in there for one or two more tournaments because, after all, he’s a yokozuna,” said Hireki Okamoto, a 30-year-old high-tech worker, referring to the revered “grand champion” title.

Although Akebono was beset by knee problems and had won only two titles between 1994 and 2000, he managed to win two tournaments last year.

He won’t soon be forgotten. Akebono impressed this homogenous society with his quick ability to adopt Japanese ways, even taking citizenship in 1996. In 1993, he became the 64th yokozuna, and the first non-Japanese to earn the title in the sport’s 300-year history, after winning about half a dozen tournaments.

He was anointed the year after the highest honor had been denied another Hawaiian, Konishiki, fueling charges of racism. (Even today, only two members of any of the 53 sumo stables, which generally have five to 30 members each, can be foreigners by the sport’s rules.) Akebono compared his selection as a yokozuna to his childhood dream of being an astronaut.

“I’m sitting on top of the world,” he told one interviewer.

The son of a tour guide and a receptionist, with Hawaiian, Puerto Rican and Irish heritage, Akebono first came to Japan at 18, when he was a comparatively slender 300 pounds. He quickly tried to fit in--as much as any one who is about 6 feet 8 can fit in here.

“He tried hard to learn the Japanese language and listened so carefully to his stable master’s advice,” praised the Mainichi newspaper Monday. “He is now thought to be really Japanese--even more Japanese than the Japanese.”

Akebono arrived in Tokyo after a basketball scholarship at Hawaii Pacific College hadn’t worked out, accepting an invitation to train as a sumo wrestler. His goal: to learn Japanese before returning to Hawaii--which attracts many Japanese tourists--to study hotel management.

While he quickly picked up the language--living, sleeping and eating with Japanese teammates--he found acquiring patience much more difficult. The teenager took the name Akebono, which means “dawn boy.” His required menial chores: getting up at 4 or 5 each morning, preparing meals and washing the backs of higher-ranked wrestlers. He called his master and others by their first names--a no-no in formal Japan, where all but closest friends and family are addressed by surname--and initially couldn’t understand his peers’ admonishments that it was disrespectful. He committed culinary faux pas too, putting ketchup on everything from eggs to rice.

Young Akebono couldn’t even turn for solace to two other recruits from Hawaii.

“You cannot just go up to your senpai [as those with more seniority are known] and talk to him like he’s your friend,” he told the Yomiuri newspaper. “You wait until they talk to you and you answer.”

He had to obey younger but more senior wrestlers who told him to scrub the toilet and take out the rubbish.

“I used to get frustrated because in practice, when they wrestled, they were weak,” he told Financial Times in 1996. “I had to learn to respect them. It wasn’t like that in Hawaii, where the strong one is the top right from the start.”

He added, “Most of us who come here from America think they can change the sport. But it’s not like that. You have to change yourself into the sport.”

Indeed, sumo remains a sport awash in ritual, where hinkaku, or dignity, is paramount. The ring wardrobe is a heavy silk mawashi, or loincloth, the hairstyle a topknot. Wrestlers rinse their mouths out with water, wash themselves with a paper towel to symbolize the cleansing of mind and body, and scatter salt on the raised clay ring before a match to purify it and guard against injuries. Akebono was chosen to perform a sumo purification ritual in the Nagano Olympic Games’ opening ceremony in 1998.

That same year, Akebono’s engagement to a Japanese-American raised eyebrows. His bride, a secretary at a U.S. Air Force Base in Japan, was about a foot and a half shorter, several hundred pounds lighter and pregnant with his child.

“Yokozuna Akebono Has Made an American Woman Pregnant!” sniped the Weekly Post. The couple now has two children.

No one is quite sure what Akebono will do now. Some sports tabloids have speculated that he will go into pro wrestling, a la Jesse Ventura. Others believe he will coach his own stable--and groom a yokozuna, as he once said is his dream. Or open a restaurant serving the chanko-nabe stew that is the sumo staple. He isn’t likely to follow Konishiki into television entertainment, said sumo critic Teiji Kojima, because his demeanor is far more serious.

Akebono’s departure probably will not help sumo’s dwindling popularity, amid tickets priced 20-30% higher than those of other sports and rising interest in soccer. Without Akebono, there will be only two yokozuna left in Japan’s rings: Takanohana and U.S.-born Musashimaru.

Still, he has been an inspiration for the small number of foreigners who compete in the 716-wrestler sumo industry, including about two dozen from Mongolia, Brazil, the U.S., South Korea, Argentina, China and Russia.

“He’s encouraged the other foreign sumo wrestlers that, regardless of nationality, if you try hard you can become a yokozuna,” said Toshiaki Okabe, a 40-year-old trading company employee. “It’s the same as baseball, rugby and soccer, that if you invite good players from outside Japan, you can improve the level of Japanese sports.”

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Rie Sasaki of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.