Sumo rigged?

Wakako and Hanako are lounging in front of TV with a preprandial.

Wakako: Ah, so nice to come home and watch a bout of sumo. So graceful. So Japanese.

Hanako: Centuries old.

Wakako: Aah.

Hanako: Final bout. Dejima?

Wakako: Oh I like Dejima, There they go. Oh no, unbelievable! Dejima lost again?

Hanako: Could be rigged.

Wakako: Rigged? Sumo rigged? Does Dejima look like he’s deliberately losing? No, it’s such a traditional sport. So clean. Look at all the salt they throw.

Hanako: Those Freakonomicists went through the data. Some pretty compelling stats.

Wakako: No!

Hanako: Oh, and two whistleblowers who named names and had been sumo wrestlers themselves, suddenly and mysteriously died within hours of each other, in the same hospital, both of respiratory malfunction. And get this, just as they were about to hold a press conference at the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents’ Club.

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Sumo wrestlers, swimsuits and tattoos in the bath

How fat is fat would you say?

Like when he jumped in and the water all flowed out?

He’d have to be a sumo wrestler.

You don’t know that.

But he was big.

And what’s this? We have to wear swimsuits? In a Japanese bath?

Inside you don’t have to but that pool outside is for males and females. It make a sense.

Translation’s a bit odd. ‘Please wear a swimsuit without fail, in the case that it enters into the swimming pool.’ What’s ‘it’?

And I thought tattoos were not allowed.

Well, it would be a brave bath-house attendant to turn away a yakuza. And sssh. Did you ever see a tattoo that just said ‘Tattoo’?

Hmm, very McLuhan.

As in the medium is the massage?

Very apt. Looks like he has 50 year old shoulder in bad need of some therapy.

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