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This got high billing on the news yesterday. Firstly Eh? What surprised me even more was hearing Steven Segal speak fluent Japanese in a TV interview. Now I know why - Japanese ex wife and martial arts schools.

You know, Sumo is a great sport. I think it should be a much more popular sport across the world than it is. Like all the best sports the premise is simple to understand and fun to watch. During the recent fifteen day tournament in Fukuoka the last few weeks, I sat transfixed day after day as a series of two large men battled in an effort to push the other wrestler outside of the ring or onto the floor.

It`s because of the costumes and robes the wrestlers and judges wear as well as the traditions and ceremony of it all that it`s not as popular as it deservedly should be. Watching obese yet suprisingly manoeuvrable near-naked men fight along with a judge dressed up in a large robe surrounded by ceremonial draping flags and traditional Japanese songs/wailings sung is almost ridiculous. Take that all away though and you have a great sport.

You get the cheap laugh of seeing fat people fighting but when you delve down deeper there is a complex and interesting sport underneath it all. Well of course there is. The Japanese, though steeped in (and dare I say blinded by) their traditions, aren`t stupid. Though, dear Americans, I hate seeing the Americanisation and Westernisation of the world and its institutions, I think if you stripped the whole thing down and started again, take away the flags and robes, make the wrestlers wear outfits which don`t resemble nappies and put the judges in different refereeing gear you would have a sport respected and practiced throughout the world instead of being largely confined to a small corner of Asia. I realise that feeding up the fighters gives them a low centre of gravity and makes them harder to be pushed out but you could perhaps make the wrestlers lift weights in a gym to lose some of that flab. Surely you could have large muscular men doing it just as well. I`m not asking for individually tailored heavy metal or drum and bass music with accompanying flashing lights to be played as the sumo wrestlers enter the arenas as in American wrestling and even the darts nowadays, but a bit of modernisation would be good for the sport as a whole.

Perhaps the Japanese would find it disgraceful to have their sacred sport chewed up and spat on but the Japanese are losing their grip on the sport anyway. A lot of the better sumo wrestlers are Mongolians, Hawaians and even one from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Having only been in Japan since June and being a novice in the world of sumo I may need some of the finer points ironed out but what I want to say with this post is that sumo is a great sport. Although not as good as football (how could any sport be as good!) or even baseball, in my opinion it is supremely better than American wrestling (not tricky) and is as complex a sport as judo or any of the martial arts. I just think a revolution is needed to make it more respected instead of ridiculed in order help bring it to a wider audience. Join me.