(Japanese title: Shiko Funjatta)

Directed and written by Suo Masayuki; 105 mins. colour film rated PG; distributed by Ronin Films, PO Box 295, Broadway NSW 2008, Tel 02-281-2455.

This film was inspired by the actual case of the revival of the moribund Sumo Club at Rikkyo University, director Suo's alma mater, and the team's subsequent success (shortlived, as it happens) in the intervarsity sumo competition. It appears on first sight to conform to that well-known genre of Hollywood movies in which a motley group of no-hopers is taken in hand by a maverick coach, and moulded into an efficient team that ultimately triumphs over its adversaries. Here too it is not just winning that counts, but the character building of individuals who in the process learn to overcome their feelings of inadequacy, and acquire self-confidence and self-validation.

Many social commentators have noted the nexus between baseball and American nationalism. In like manner, sumo can be seen to function mythologically in Japan, to generate an "imagined community" that is archaic and pastoral. If baseball is as American as apple pie, sumo is as Japanese as the tea ceremony. Like baseball in American national mythology, sumo draws its heroes and rituals from remote corners of the land and ancient rural traditions. The film plays its nationalist card lightly, but it is there in the background: the Japanese university student of today may be more tempted by scuba diving, American football and international wrestling (baseball, the most popular sport in Japan, is conveniently out of the picture) but sumo is the only truly Japanese sport. In the current climate of internationalization, even gaijin want to do it and can do it. The film team's gaijin is in fact a `natural', a well-built and well-coordinated specimen - unlike the Japanese conscripts, who are too flabby or too skinny and totally unfit; but he doesn't have the requisite Japanese attitudes: he won't work overtime; and he's hung up about baring his body in public. However, when the final reckoning comes, team spirit overcomes these obstacles to his  participation in the team triumph.

It is not only the choice of sumo as the sport at issue, nor even the inclusion of the issue of Japanese and gaijin learning to work and live together, that allows one to read this film as a national allegory. Apart from the foreigner, the Japanese teammates are all losers, outsiders or in it for the wrong reasons. Their ultimate reformation and success  suggest a utopian view of Japanese society, one in which everyone has a place. With a little self-discipline, training, good will and motivation, any Japanese no-hoper can find social acceptance and contribute productively to Japanese society.

If the message sounds rather trite, and the ultimate triumph somewhat too predictable and cheerful, there is another aspect of the film that makes one squirm for other reasons and is worthy of note. It is already there in the untranslatable Japanese title, which puns on the homophonic words for stamping and shitting; and raises the issue of cultural differences in representations of the body and of bodily functions. Two of the teammates are handsome types who could be found as romantic heroes in teen movies, but the other three major characters are targeted for victimization as comic butts. One of these cannot control his bowels at strategic public moments of tension; the other two (one male, one female) are grotesque mountains of blubber with ugly piggy faces. All three are victim personalities, used by the film for inducing humour and pathos. Neither their ultimate redemption, nor their triumph over adversity does completely remove our feelings of discomfort, the physical distaste aroused by their uncivilized bodies.

There is a long tradition of literal toilet humour in Japanese popular culture; and grotesquely obese sumo wrestlers have, at least since Edo times, been national heroes in Japan. So representations that western academics who have read Kristeva would describe as disturbing irruptions of the abject body may in Japanese culture not be read or experienced as abject. However, I would want to make an important qualification to this generalization. The fact that even sumo wrestlers select slim, trim, petite Japanese girls as their mates suggests that the grotesquely obese and ugly female body remains abject.

Though it received critical as well as popular success in Japan, Sumo do ,Sumo don't is not in the same league as Akira or Tetsuo II artistically.  But it would be a useful discussion starter for courses in Japanese Sociology, Japanese Popular Culture and Japanese Culture.

Freda Freiberg