Chanko: What Sumo Wrestlers Actually Eat
Almost every English article about sumo food makes the same mistake in its first sentence. It is worth fixing before anything else, because once you have it right the rest of the subject makes sense.
Chanko is not a dish
ちゃんこ (chanko) means the food cooked in a sumo stable — whatever it happens to be that day. It is a word for a category, not a recipe.
Curry cooked in a stable is chanko. Grilled fish cooked in a stable is chanko. Fried chicken cooked in a stable is chanko.
The famous hot pot is ちゃんこ鍋 (chanko-nabe) — nabe meaning hot pot. It is one kind of chanko, and by a distance the best known outside Japan, which is how the general word came to be mistaken for the specific dish.
Who cooks it
The junior wrestlers do, taking it in turns. As the article on stables sets out, running the house is part of their job alongside training and fighting their own bouts.
So cooking is not a chore handed to someone who is not good enough to compete. It is done by men who trained that morning and will fight in the same tournament as the men they are cooking for.
Who eats first
Not everyone at once. As a rule the senior wrestlers eat first and the junior ones after them.
This is the same line as everywhere else in sumo: the one drawn on the banzuke, reaching into the meal. The 関取 (sekitori) eat first, and the men who cooked for them sit down afterwards.
When they eat
The main pattern is described in a day in a rikishi's life: training first, on an empty stomach, then a very large meal, then sleep. There is an evening meal as well.
The order is the part that matters. Hard training, then a great deal of food, then rest, is a way of putting on size and keeping it — which a wrestler needs, because sumo has no weight classes.
The trap for new viewers
Sumo food gets described in English as if quantity were the whole story. It is not: what is being built is a body that can hold its balance against another very large man, which is not the same thing as simply being heavy. The training that comes before the meal is the other half of it.
It is changing
Traditionally, nobody designed this. It was what got cooked, in quantity, in a house full of people who needed to be large.
That is no longer the whole picture. Some stables now work with nutritionists and outside trainers, and think about what is in the food rather than only how much of it there is.
You can eat it
Retired wrestlers have opened restaurants serving chanko-nabe to the public — a number of them in 両国 (Ryogoku), the district of Tokyo where the sumo hall stands. It is one of the few parts of stable life that is genuinely open to a visitor.
Worth knowing what you are ordering, though. In a restaurant, chanko-nabe is a specific dish on a menu. In a stable, chanko is simply lunch.
If you remember nothing else: chanko is the word for stable food, and chanko-nabe is one kind of it. Getting that right will already put you ahead of most English writing on the subject.
What to watch for
When a broadcast shows footage from inside a stable and there is a very large pot involved, you are looking at the junior wrestlers' afternoon work rather than a ceremony.
And if you see the same footage and there is no pot — a wok, a grill, an oven tray — that is chanko too.
Where this meal sits in the day, and why the order of the day is the point.