Nothing is Manlier than watching Sumo naked

In a Sauna with a bunch of other naked Japanese dudes

This comment started a fun little comment chain on facebook, so here's a more in depth thing. Every culture seems to enjoy a finesse sport and a brutal sport. America has football and Dancing with the Stars, Canada has curling and hockey, Russia has ballet and brutal free speech crackdowns, etc. For Japan their finesse sport is baseball, especially the graceful manner in which they both play and observe it. Their brutal sport is Sumo.

Sumo has a bad rap as a funny weirdo sport of colliding fatasses, but anyone who's watched sumo a couple times knows that to be untrue. You're not allowed to throw punches or gauge out facial features, but you can do basically anything else to force your opponent out of the ring, or onto his knees. Underneath that armor of fat is nothing but bruising, murderous muscle. The previous Mongolian champion, Asashoryu, regularly did dumbbell curls with fricking 60 pound weights. And not only are they strong, they're also fast. Speed kills, and power drills, and when you combine both, you get a human wrecking ball coming straight at you at 30 km per hour. In an artfully knotted mawashi, aka sumo thong.

So sumo is the football of Japan. Its football without the football. You take away the pigskin, and the artful Jerry Rice catches, and all you have is a brutal skirmish of two sides attacking each other, like dueling phalanxes on a classical battlefield. Sumo is that, but instead of two teams, its two men, mano a mano, in a sport so simple that its genius. Granted, there's long pauses between bouts for Shinto ceremonies and hyping up the match, but any football fan is used to long pauses between plays! If you love football, you've been groomed to be a sumo fan, and you didn't even know it.

So sumo is manly. Being in a sauna is gender non specific, granted, but enduring the brutal heat does make you a badass, male or female. Put sumo and sauna together, and you now have manly badass. Now add a bunch of naked 60 year old Japanese dudes.

There's something about older Japanese guys. I give you full permission to take that out of context. Because of stereotype conditioning through tv and movies, they remind me of either ruthless corporate executives, murderous yakuza bosses, unbreakable karate fighters, or relentless sushi masters. Those are some manly guys. Now put them all in a sauna, wearing nothing but a towel, and put a sumo match on tv. The comraderie is on a level that I didn't think existed outside of the Army. A bunch of men, enduring brutal conditions, in order to observe a brutal skirmish between two men so manly that clothes couldn't possibly contain their power.

That's what I call a good time. A manly good time.