The sumo scandal — Wrestlers Threw Bouts by Text, and 23 Were Expelled

In early 2011, professional sumo confronted in writing the thing it had spent decades insisting did not exist. In February the Japan Sumo Association learned that some of its wrestlers had been arranging the outcomes of bouts for cash — yaocho, in the sport’s own euphemism — and the proof was sitting on their phones. By April 1, 2011, the JSA had pushed nineteen wrestlers into retirement and handed two-year bans to three more; in the months that followed two further wrestlers who refused to go quietly were fired outright. The headline figure that survived the reckoning was 23 men judged guilty and removed from the sport. For the first time, yaocho was not rumor or folklore. It was documented, dated, and signed in text messages.

The mechanism was old and the evidence was new. Wrestlers in the salaried lower division, the jūryō, agreed before bouts on who would win and who would fall, then settled accounts afterward — payments that ran, by the messages investigators recovered, from roughly ¥200,000 to ¥1,000,000 a bout. The logic was brutally rational: in a ranking system where a single win on the final day can mean the difference between a salary and obscurity, a man one win short of safety had every incentive to buy the eighth victory, and a man already safe had little reason to refuse the sale.

What made 2011 different was that the wrestlers had written it all down. Police were not even looking for yaocho. They were investigating illegal betting on professional baseball, a separate scandal tied to organized crime, and in the course of seizing wrestlers’ mobile phones they recovered deleted messages negotiating the results of sumo bouts. The sport that had survived a century of suspicion was undone by the autocomplete on a flip phone.

The institutional response was without modern precedent. On February 6, 2011, the JSA board voted to cancel the March Grand Tournament in Osaka — the first cancellation of a top-tier honbasho since 1946, when the cause had been a war-damaged arena rather than a moral one. What follows is how a sport ran a quiet internal market in defeat for years, and how it was finally caught not by a referee or an informant but by a phone someone forgot to wipe.