Last year, a Japanese sumo wrestler named Onosato became the seventy-fifth athlete to be awarded the sport’s highest honor: the title of yokozuna, or grand champion. His achievement was a particular cause for celebration among many Japanese sumo fans, given that the sport, despite its historical Japanese roots, has been largely dominated by Mongolian wrestlers for decades. 

The fervor around Onosato, perhaps not incidentally, has coincided with the remarkable electoral success of Japan’s far right. This has been best exemplified by Sanseito, an insurgent political party with a platform rooted in the demonization of immigrants at a time when Japan has a higher percentage of foreign-born residents than ever before. 

In the March 2026 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Joshua Hunt delves into the world of sumo—and the nationalist impulses it can inspire—in an attempt to take stock of contemporary Japanese identity. I spoke to Hunt recently about the national and international appeal of sumo wrestling, the success of Japan’s anti-immigrant right, and why he, as a foreigner living in Tokyo, decided to leave the country behind. 

Matthew Sherrill: At the core of your exploration of sumo is its status as Japan’s “national sport.” This is interesting to consider in light of the fact that baseball—“America’s pastime”—is at this point considerably more popular in Japan. Yet sumo seems central to Japanese identity in a far more profound way. How would you describe the role that sumo plays in contemporary Japanese culture?

Joshua Hunt: Baseball does enjoy a much broader viewership than sumo in Japan, particularly when it comes to the national high school tournament known as Koshien. When the championship is on, it’s rare to pass by a television set or radio that isn’t tuned in. But sumo offers something much deeper, and I think even those who prefer baseball would tend to agree with this, in that it is distinctly Japanese. It has roots in Shinto religious practices that stretch back thousands of years, and in the hundreds of years since it transformed from a ritual into something more like a martial art or a sport, it has proven to be remarkably adaptable to the spirit of the times. One basic way of explaining how deeply Japan’s most ardent sumo fans connect with their national sport is that very few contemporary rituals, not only in Japan, but anywhere, can claim such a direct connection with the founding myths of a nation and its people. To do that while also enjoying such mass appeal is truly remarkable.

Sherrill: When we first conceived of this piece, we talked principally about the dominance of Mongolian wrestlers and the challenge this has presented to certain varieties of Japanese nationalism. But I was shocked to learn through your reporting that there are professional sumo wrestlers of any number of ethnic and national backgrounds. In particular, you write about a Ukrainian wrestler who has been quite successful. Can you say more about how non-Japanese wrestlers find their way to sumo, and the particular hurdles or challenges they face as foreigners?

Hunt: Because Mongolia has become such a rich source of sumo talent, the country is home to a whole ecosystem of specialized “feeder” schools, sumo clubs, and recruiters focused on identifying young wrestlers. But wrestlers from countries like Georgia, Ukraine, or Romania tend to find their way to the sumo world by starting out in a Japanese martial art like judo, or another form of wrestling, then transitioning to sumo as a function of their physical attributes like physique, weight, and height. 

The challenges that foreign wrestlers face are, in a way, not unlike those that any other immigrant faces in Japan, except that they are more extreme. In general, non-Japanese speakers are not coddled, and in a rigidly hierarchical sport like sumo, foreign recruits must prove themselves not only by winning but also by showing that they can adapt to both sporting and social rules and customs. Those who don’t make an effort to learn at least very basic Japanese go nowhere. And because the life of a sumo wrestler is relatively communal, with most meals cooked and shared in the dormitories where those of the same wrestling stable live and train, they must adapt not only to a Japanese diet but to one developed especially for sumo; chanko nabe, for instance, a stew made with meat or fish and vegetables in a dashi broth, is the standard daily meal eaten by wrestlers, along with heaps of white rice. The hierarchy of the sumo stable also dictates that a rikishi—a professional wrestler—cook and clean for more senior wrestlers until he works his way up the sumo ladder. And these lower-ranked wrestlers not only do the cooking but also eat last. Depending on where a wrestler comes from, that can be tough to adapt to, and that’s to say nothing of the vicious hazing and bullying scandals that emerge from time to time in the press. 

Sherrill: As you were reporting this piece, Sanseito, a newly minted, far-right Japanese political party, enjoyed a surprise electoral victory, making the nationalist politics of sumo feel even more pertinent. What fueled the party’s success? And how do the priorities of the far right in Japan differ from Trumpism and similar movements in the West?

Hunt:  Record numbers of foreign tourists are visiting Japan (about forty-two million last year) and the country has more foreign residents than ever, forcing the Japanese public to come to terms with a change in what has traditionally been a relatively racially homogeneous society. Even though it’s happening incrementally, the very fact that this kind of demographic change is taking place at a time when domestic-consumer spending power is down and that many parts of Tokyo feel like a playground for wealthy foreigners has put some wind in the sails of far-right parties like Sanseito. But there’s still a pretty big divide between hardcore nationalism and what I would call a more diffuse sense of longing for those days when the yen went further and Tokyo felt a bit less like a theme park. I would say that xenophobia in Japan tends toward the latter style, which is why I was attracted to the idea of exploring it through the lens of something like sumo. Unlike someone like Trump, who appeals to anxieties of a threatened white majority, Sanseito appeals to the emergence of a non-Japanese minority. For the very first time, Japan is having to contend with the fact that there will be a sizable element of the population that is not ethnically Japanese. That’s a much narrower racial appeal than something like great replacement theory, but when it erupts into view it can be quite shocking. Five years ago I was traveling in Osaka with an American girl and gave her a closed-mouth kiss on a subway platform, prompting an old Japanese man to point and shout at us saying, “This is Japan! Behave yourselves!” 

Sherrill: One challenge of reporting this piece, as far as I can tell, was navigating the reticence regarding political opinion in Japan. People are just generally less willing to be forthright about it, at least to a reporter. Is that sense accurate? And how do you work around it? 

Hunt: One of the clichés of Japanese studies is this notion that the Japanese are uniquely self-conscious about how the rest of the world regards them. The idea dates back to the end of Japan’s period of isolation known as Sakoku, which lasted between 1633 and 1853 and whose end brought about a realization of just how much other societies had comparatively advanced. And while I don’t believe that Japanese are uniquely self-conscious, I do think a lot of social norms in Japan tend toward making a person less likely to be completely frank with anyone they’ve just met, much less a foreigner, and especially when it comes to politics. In my experience, the best way of dealing with this is to give people a way of talking about something indirectly, which they are much more likely to feel comfortable doing. It also helps to just do some talking yourself, and to use some Japanese words that carry subtextual meanings in a way that makes it clear you aren’t going to misunderstand or misrepresent what they might have to say to you. 

Sherrill: We decided to keep this out of the piece, but you’ve recently decided to leave Tokyo after living there off and on for more than a decade. How has the city changed since you’ve lived there, and why did you ultimately make the decision to move?  

Hunt: Part of it has to do with climate change— Tokyo’s summers have always been hot and humid, but the past two summers have been especially brutal, so much so that I spent most of July and all of August waking in the middle of the night to walk my dog because it was too hot to do so during daylight hours. I also feel, as a foreign correspondent, that I just need a change of scenery, and a chance to feel out of my element again. But another part of my decision does have to do with the massive changes that Tokyo has been undergoing. My apartment, for instance, is near what was once the Tsukiji Fish Market, which was the largest wholesale seafood market in the world, and a hugely popular tourist destination. Now it’s an empty space where a stadium is being built. The Tokyo of today is not the Tokyo I first moved to in 2012, and that’s as it should be, but in the past two years I’ve caught myself feeling much more sentimental than one should feel in a city that is really all about change. I don’t want to live with the same kind of regressive urges that fuel the sort of conservative resentments Sanseito stands for. One of the first things you learn about Tokyo is that it is a relentlessly unsentimental place. Westerners tend to invest in the Japanese a lot of ideas about cherishing traditions—like sumo—but the reason so much of their culture endures, I think, is precisely because of a willingness to move on and adapt.