SYNOPSIS

"Sumo East and West" is a feature documentary about the cultural changes facing Japan as more and more foreigners enter the ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling. In Japan sumo is not only the national sport but a centuries-old cultural treasure. Yet this highly traditional world is facing profound changes due to the postwar influx of foreign images, ideas, and influences—foremost among them the arrival of bigger, heavier American wrestlers of Polynesian descent from Hawaii. At the same time, sumo is growing in popularity in the West, where its advocates are lobbying for its inclusion in the Olympics and staging amateur sumo tournaments in venues like Las Vegas casinos—events that bear little resemblance to the sport's Japanese forebear.

"Sumo East and West" takes us into this world through the story of Wayne Vierra of Hawaii, whose promising professional sumo career in Japan was cut short by injury, but who rebounded to become a champion in the burgeoning world of amateur sumo. The film also features the Hawaii-born superstars of pro sumo who were at the forefront of the controversial transformation of the sport: Konishiki, Jesse "Takamiyama" Kuhaulua, and Akebono (the first non-Japanese sumo wrestler to reach the exalted rank of Yokozuna, or Grand Champion). Also featured in the film is Emmanuel Yarbrough of New Jersey, the 750 pound 1995 World Amateur Sumo Champion; and Judge Katsugo Miho of Hawaii, a lifelong sumo aficionado who negotiated the contracts for the Hawaii wrestlers who went to Japan.

Filmed in Super 16mm in Japan, Hawaii, Los Angeles, and Atlantic City, “Sumo East and West” was produced, directed, shot, and edited by Ferne Pearlstein, winner of the 2004 Sundance Documentary Cinematography Award for her work on “Imelda,” and produced, written and edited by Robert Edwards, winner of a 2001 Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his script “Land of the Blind,” which is scheduled to begin production in January 2005 starring Ralph Fiennes.

“Sumo East and West” was funded by ITVS, Pacific Islanders in Communications (PIC), the National Asian American Telecommunications Association (NAATA), the Japan-United States Friendship Commission, and the Japan Foundation. The film had its World Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City in May, 2003, and has since screened at dozens of film festivals including the IFP/Los Angeles Film Festival, AFI’s SilverDocs, Director’s View Film Festival (where it won FIRST PRIZE ), and for a crowd of 6000 people in Honolulu at Sunset on the Beach in association with the Hawaii International Film Festival.

“Sumo East and West” will have its nationwide Broadcast Premiere on PBS’s Independent Lens series on June 8th.

(*Please check local listings, as times and dates vary widely from city to city).

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

“Sumo East and West” grew out of my experience as a documentary photographer in the late 80s, working for the New York bureaus of the Japanese newspapers the Tokyo/Chunichi Shimbun and the Chugoku Shimbun. In the summer of 1991, the New York bureau chief, Tsutomu Tajima, arranged for me to go to Japan to live and work with the newspaper’s photo editor and his family, an experience recorded in a weekly photo series called “An American Woman in Japan,” published in the fall of 1992. The people of Japan treated me with a warmth and a hospitality that I had not encountered anywhere else in the world. But at the same time, there were the undeniable reminders that I was still an alien in a world that I could never fully understand. “Sumo East and West” expands on this theme of the outsider, and of community, culture, and belonging.

As a cinematographer, I was attracted to the visual possibilities of sumo, with its supernaturally huge naked bodies colliding with a surprising combination of violence and grace. For that reason, we elected to shoot in the wide aspect ratio and superior image quality of Super 16mm film rather than on video, which has become the norm in documentary. My partner Robert Edwards and I and our crew spent approximately six weeks filming in Japan in the summer of 2000, as well as shooting in LA, Atlantic City, and Hawaii. In Japan I was stunned by how pervasive foreign influence had become in the ten years since my last visit. Now I found teenaged Japanese girls with bleached blond hair, images of American pop culture plastered all over Tokyo, foreign tourists and expatriate residents at every turn, and the elder Japanese generation wringing its hands over the loss of longstanding traditions. We also had the opportunity to view our own culture from a different perspective as we followed sumo’s growing popularity in the West, and explored the history of sumo in the US beginning with the Japanese immigrants who brought sumo to American soil when they came to work on Hawaiian sugar plantations in the early 20th century.

As Westerners, we realized that it would be foolish to think we could make the definitive film history of sumo; indeed, it would be presumptuous even to imagine that an outsider could capture the essence of sumo on film. We did not attempt to do so. But it is precisely the perspective of outsiders—both the filmmakers and the foreign wrestlers—that is critical to the changes that the sport and Japan at large are undergoing. “Sumo East and West” is a study in cultural collision, a portrait of Japan through Western eyes, in which the quintessentially Japanese institution of sumo becomes a symbol for the profound and ongoing changes in how Japan and the West relate to one another.

ABOUT THE WEBSITE

This website is being expanded to include a section for EDUCATORS with classroom materials and a TIMELINE, with clips and outtakes from the film including archival materials and historical documents illuminating the relationship between Japan and the West as seen through the prism of sumo wrestling.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT AMATEUR SUMO:

USA Sumo; California Sumo Association
http://www.usasumo.com/

Cranford, NJ Sumo Association
http://www.cranfordjkc.com/