Shikona: How a Sumo Wrestler Gets His Name
The name announced before a bout, printed on the banzuke and shouted from the stands is, in most cases, not the name the man was born with. It was given to him — and it can change.
四股名 (shikona) is the name a wrestler competes under. Every name you see on the banzuke is one.
Where the word comes from
The 四股 in shikona is the same 四股 as the leg stomp, and the connection runs through the ritual rather than the exercise.
In the past there was a rite in which the ground was stamped on to drive out the evil spirits and bad influences beneath it. That stamping is the shiko, and the men who performed the rite came to be referred to by a shikona — a "shiko name". The word survives today as the name a wrestler is known by in the ring.
It tells you what kind of name you are looking at. A shikona is not a stage name in the entertainment sense, and it is not a nickname. It is closer to a working name attached to a role — one that came from a rite, and that a man takes on when he takes on the job.
Given, not chosen
A wrestler does not usually pick his own. The name is given, typically by the 親方 (oyakata) — the head of the stable he has joined.
That follows from what a stable is. As the article on stables sets out, joining one is joining an institution rather than signing a contract — and the name is part of what the institution gives him.
Not everyone has one, though. Some wrestlers compete under their own family name, and that is a real choice rather than an oversight.
What the names are made of
Read a few and patterns start to show. The characters used tend to be drawn from a small set of ideas.
The last of those is the most useful to a viewer. A stable will often reuse a character across its wrestlers, so two men sharing one are frequently from the same house — and, as the article on stables explains, two men from the same stable do not normally meet in a tournament.
The name can change
This is the part that confuses people following the sport from outside.
A shikona is not fixed for life. A wrestler can take a new one during his career — on promotion, or at some other turning point — and from that day the old name is gone from the sheet.
So a name you learned last year may not be there this year, attached to a man who is still competing. If a wrestler seems to have vanished, this is one of the reasons to check before assuming he retired.
The trap for new viewers
Do not try to translate a shikona literally and read meaning into it. The characters are chosen for sound, for tradition and for the stable's lineage as much as for what they say. A name containing "mountain" does not tell you the man is from a mountain.
What to watch for
Pick two or three wrestlers you have started to follow and look at the characters in their names.
Then look for the same character elsewhere on the card. When you find it, you have probably found a stablemate — and a bout you will never see, because the two of them will not be matched against each other.
The house that gives the name, and why two men who share one never meet.