What Happens in the Four Minutes Before a Bout
The fight is over in seconds. The preparation takes four minutes. New viewers assume the long part is ceremony and the short part is the sport. It is closer to the opposite.
Watch your first sumo broadcast and one thing will puzzle you more than the rules: the two men keep crouching down as if to start, then standing up again and walking away.
They are not stalling. They are deciding when to begin — and for most of those four minutes, that decision belongs to them and not to any official.
What is actually happening
The four minutes are not empty. They are a fixed sequence, repeated until the clock runs out.
The salt
Each wrestler takes a handful of salt from a basket at the edge and throws it onto the clay. Salt purifies. The ring is treated as a sacred space, and the salt clears it before the two men meet in it.
Some wrestlers toss a small pinch. Some throw an enormous cloud of it and the crowd reacts. That difference is personality, not rule.
The stamping
Each man lifts one leg high to the side and brings it down hard. This is 四股 (shiko). It is a stretch and a warm-up, but the original meaning is older than that: stamping the ground drives out what is bad in it.
The crouch
They squat at the two lines, fists towards the clay, and stare at each other. This is 仕切り (shikiri).
Then — this is the part that confuses everyone — they stand up, turn away, and go back for more salt. They will do this several times.
Why they keep standing up again
Because within the time limit, nothing starts a sumo bout except the two wrestlers agreeing to start it.
There is no whistle. No bell. No countdown to zero. The referee does not begin the bout; he judges it. The two men have to launch at the same instant, and each time they crouch, they are testing whether that instant has arrived. If either one is not ready, they both stand up and reset.
If they find their timing early, they can simply go. A bout does not have to use all four minutes, and some do not.
So the repeated crouching is not delay. It is negotiation, conducted entirely without words, in front of a full arena.
In most sports, an official starts the action. In sumo — up to the time limit — the athletes do. Almost everything odd about the build-up follows from that one fact.
The time limit
Left alone, this could go on a long time. Modern sumo puts a clock on it, and the allowance depends on the division:
- Top division (makuuchi) — 4 minutes
- Second division (juryo) — 3 minutes
- All divisions below — 2 minutes
A judge sitting at ringside keeps that time. When it runs out, he signals the referee, and the referee calls 待ったなし (matta nashi) — "no more waiting". From that point the next crouch has to be the start.
How to tell that the next one is the real one
Two signs, and you can catch both from your seat or your screen.
- The
呼出(yobidashi), the attendant who calls the wrestlers up, hands each man a towel to wipe down with. - The referee calls matta nashi.
The towel is your cue. If you only look up once, look up then.
The charge: tachiai
The start itself is called the 立合い (tachiai). Both men must put both hands down on the clay, and then they go.
Almost everything that follows is decided here. A wrestler who is a fraction late, or who rises a fraction too high, has usually lost before he knows it. This is why the bout can be over in three seconds.
When the start does not stand
English commentary tends to lump these together as "false starts". In Japanese they are three different situations, and they are stopped by three different people.
1. 待った — a wrestler asks to reset
Before anyone launches, one wrestler decides the timing is not going to meet, and asks for another shikiri. That request is the matta. It is deliberate, it comes from one man, and it comes before the charge.
2. The timing simply misses
One man goes and the other does not. Nobody asked for anything; their timing just failed to meet. The Japanese phrase for it is 呼吸が合わない — their breathing did not come together.
3. 手つき不十分 — the hands were not properly down
The third one comes from the officials, and it can arrive after the two men have already collided.
If the referee — or the head judge at ringside — decides that a wrestler launched without getting both hands properly down, the referee calls matta and the bout is set up again. The clash you just watched is wiped.
This is the rule from the previous section being enforced in real time. Both hands on the clay is not a formality. A start that skips it can be taken back even once the bout is under way.
In every case the two men set up again. None of it is a scandal. When a start depends on two people finding the same instant, sometimes they do not find it.
What to watch next time
Stop watching the salt and start watching the breathing.
In the last crouch before the charge, the two men are matching their timing to each other. You can often see the moment it locks: the fidgeting stops, both drop, and neither of them stands back up.
That half-second of agreement is the most skilled thing in the four minutes.
One bout a day, fifteen days, and a line at eight wins that moves careers.