The parts of sumo that are not on the scoreboard
Chanko is sumo slang for whatever wrestlers eat — curry, fried chicken, anything. The stew that tourists queue for in Ryogoku is chanko-nabe: one enormous pot shared by the whole stable. The pot is the point, not the recipe.
It is cooked by the junior wrestlers, on rotation. In sumo the kitchen is the bottom of the ladder: the lower your rank, the more of the cooking, cleaning and errands you do, and the less time you have to train. Wrestlers eat twice a day — around 11am and around 6pm — and the morning practice happens on an empty stomach.
Sources: The Japan Times, “Sumo 101: Chanko” · Web Japan, “A Day in the Life of a Sumo Wrestler”.
We counted this ourselves. In the most recent tournament (the July 2026 tournament) the 42 men of the top division averaged 159.1 kg and 184.7 cm. The lightest was 121 kg, the heaviest 199 kg — a gap of 78 kg between two men who may be drawn against each other tomorrow, because sumo has no weight classes. That single fact explains more about the sport than any statistic: a smaller man has to find a way, every single day.
| Decade | Records | Average weight | Average height |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1960s | 112 | 122.2 kg | 180.6 cm |
| 1970s | 365 | 127.9 kg | 181.5 cm |
| 1980s | 307 | 142.6 kg | 183.5 cm |
| 1990s | 399 | 152.8 kg | 184.8 cm |
| 2000s | 411 | 151.9 kg | 184.5 cm |
| 2010s | 208 | 157.4 kg | 185.6 cm |
Counted from the height and weight recorded for top-division wrestlers at each tournament in our own database. ⚠️Coverage is uneven — the source data carries measurements for some tournaments and not others, so read these as the shape of a trend, not as a census. The last row of the table and the figures above come from different parts of the data and are counted differently; we would rather show you both than blend them into one clean number that hides the gap.
The line that matters is sekitori — the top two divisions, juryo and makuuchi. Cross it and almost everything changes:
| Sekitori (top two divisions) | A monthly salary from the association. Junior wrestlers assigned as attendants (tsukebito). Allowed to live outside the stable and to marry. |
| The four divisions below | No salary — a small allowance per tournament. Communal life in the stable, and the chores: the cooking, the laundry, the errands, and attending on the sekitori. |
There are around 600 wrestlers and only about 70 sekitori places. That is the whole ladder, and it is why the banzuke is read so closely.
Source: The Japan Times, “Sumo 101: Sekitori”.
Sumo attracts a lot of confident trivia. Plenty of it is wrong, and some of the rest is impossible to check. We have left out the claims we could not source to something better than a travel blog — including several you will find repeated everywhere about what wrestlers are supposedly forbidden to own or do. If we cannot show you where a fact comes from, it is not on this page.
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