Overview & History

Thousands of years ago, in the legends of the Kojiki period, sumo wrestling was conducted when it was time to plant rice, sumo wrestling matches were performed as a way to pray for a bountiful crop or to predict whether that year's harvest would be good, during that time, though Sumo Wrestling was for the rich people's entertainment. The Sumo Wrestling that we currently know started in the early 1600s during the Edo period. Then, during that time, the events were set to raise money to construct shrines and temples or to replace bridges. 

Sumo Wrestling has been greatly popularized in Japan, much so that it caught the attention of other countries. The sport began to spread to other countries around the 1910s. The first country that Sumo Wrestling landed in was Brazil then, in the 1990s, Brazilian sumo organizations made an effort to interest Brazilians without Japanese ancestry in the sport. In the early 2000s, another country that was inspired by Sumo Wrestling was the United States. In the US, there are amateur Sumo Wrestling clubs that have regular matches in major cities across the country like Los Angeles, Honolulu, New York, Dallas, and San Francisco. For the United States, Sumo Wrestling was founded by Andrew Freund. He loved the sport overseas and returned to the U.S. He founded the California Sumo Association to promote the sport, and he established the US Sumo Open, an amateur sumo tournament that features competitors from various countries.