Welcome Back to Breakfast with Lisa & Josh!

You’re amazing.

First of all, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who took the time to write the many thoughtful, helpful and super honest responses that we got when we asked for your help last week.Right now we’re at a bit of a crossroads with the films we make, and hearing from all of you shed a ton of light as to what you like, why you watch, and what you want to see next. I’m going to write up our thoughts on it, just as soon as we figure out what those are. We learned a lot, and really want to take the time to process it properly.

We definitely feel like we understand you all a lot more after reading all of these, and I have to say, we’re super lucky to be able to make things for such a wonderful, thoughtful, and kind community. Y’all are awesome.If you still want to have your voice heard, you can get your vote in here - it’s definitely not too late:

We made a Google Form thing so if you want to give feedback anonymously, you can. It’s all good. Click that sentence to get there.Also, anytime you have feedback, or want to see something different, we’re always open to hearing it. We love hearing from you, and we read all of it.

We also asked on YouTube and IG a more specific question - between these 4 video options, which one do you want to see? Here’s the results of that:

Our next video(s) are going to be about our Cruise experience, especially getting it at such a bonkers discount, and then we’re on to the thing that we’ve wanted to make for well over 9 months now, but have also been avoiding because it’s a huge undertaking - our documentary that we think we’re gonna call “Quit Your Job, Travel The World, Start A YouTube Channel”.

It’s a big undertaking, probably well over an hour in runtime, and is going to take us a while to make. It’s going to be a very over-honest look back at our past few years - all the good, the bad, and definitely the ugly that we haven’t really shown a lot of.

More on all that very soon.

ABRUPT CUT TO SUMO

Sorry, I couldn’t think of a good transition there :)

We were lucky enough to be able to go to 2 straight days of a Grand Sumo Tournament in Fukuoka. We had an incredible time, learned so much, and really got to dive deep into the world of sumo. What a world it is - complicated, heavily guided by tradition, and unwavering in it’s steadfastness to the way things have always been done.

Our video about our experience is out now, link is here, and down below.

I wanted to talk about the other side of the experience that we learned a lot about after - the more complex side of sumo. This newsletter should serve as a perfect companion for those that want to learn more about sumo than we could pack into a 15 minute YT video. Read this after you’ve watched the video.

The Complicated World of Sumo

For us, tradition is almost obsolete in our lives. The only traditions we really hold on to are the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, Lunar New Year, and Christmas, but even those over time have become less prioritized over time.

So, being able to take part in a tradition that hasn’t changed for well over two thousand years is absolutely fascinating, and got us thinking about how loosely we hold on to our own.

Sumo is one of the oldest sports in the world and it’s rooted in tradition, religion and royalty. The imperial family often watched sumo as a form of entertainment. Fans ranged from emperors to feudal lords to families with newborn babies hoping to be cradled by one of these gentle giants. It’s said that if a sumo wrestler holds your baby and gets them to cry, the cries reach God and will grow healthy and strong.

The tradition of this sport guides every action, and extends far outside of the ring - to become a sumo means taking on a life of discipline, selflessness, and, most importantly, a very clear, unbending hierarchy.

We learned that rikishi live in stables with other wrestlers in a dorm-like environment, aren’t allowed to use most modern technology, and are expected to wear their unique hairstyle and full dress at all times when out in public.

Following a serious car accident involving a sumo wrestler, the Sumo Association banned wrestlers from driving their own cars. Just ’cause they can, I guess.

It’s not like the world of sumo is without its problems though.

It’s hard to be a sumo wrestler - it becomes your entire life. The injury rate is nearly 100% over any given career, and the pay is just not that good unless you’re the top of the top. We’ve learned since the tournament that there’s not much else many rikishi can do once they’re done wrestling - either you end your career with a bunch of money sacked away, or you try to find a job if you’re not too injured to do so.

This isn’t too different from the problems of any professional sport, except for how incredibly regimented every waking moment of a wrestler’s life is from the moment they choose to become a sumo. Rikishi don’t really get to have personal lives. The sacrifice they make to compete is staggering.

The commitment to tradition comes some problems, of course. The sport refuses to change with the times - an extreme example of this is in 2018. Apparently, a politician was giving a speech before the sumo tournament began, and they collapsed right on the dohyo.

The mostly-female medic team rushed to the dohyo to help, only to be told immediately that they needed to vacate, and that only male responders could help. The dohyo is considered sacred ground, and is only accessible by males. In a life or death situation, the organizers chose tradition over the safety of their own.

They later apologized, but it’s a clear example of the priorities of the sport. Tradition over everything.

We learned from friends we made at the tournament that there are in fact female sumos, but they’re never allowed to wrestle in grand tournaments, and aren’t allowed to wrestle on an official dohyo.

After learning about this, it became clearer why its popularity has waned over time - it’s said that Sumo is Japan’s national sport, but baseball is far and away the most popular, with soccer (football, sorry), golf and tennis quickly overtaking sumo in popularity.

There are less and less athletes wanting to become sumos, and less and less people watching over time. Sumo feels like it’s at an inflection point, and may need to change or it might just disappear into obscurity.

For us, being able to watch and learn about sumo was just such an incredible experience.

There’s something really special about being able to witness something that hasn’t changed for thousands of years, almost entirely unchanged no matter what else in life does.

Our lives are basically entirely about chasing change nowadays, always desperately searching for the newest thing, the hottest trend, trying to follow the latest fad. Tradition can sometimes be seen even as an inconvenience lately, but it’s also something that binds us all together, which I find that we need now more than ever.

Maybe we could all try to connect more with our traditions, but without holding onto them so tightly, so rigidly, being so resistant to change, that we ignore entirely that the world has changed around it, that time has passed and so have our beliefs, and recognizing that that’s ultimately a good thing.

There’s a happy medium in there somewhere, and it takes effort to find the right line, but we really hope that sumo manages to find that balance without losing what makes it great.

Because what makes it great is truly, truly miraculous, and worth holding on to.

How to buy tickets to a Grand Sumo Tournament

Buying tickets for a sumo tournament ended up being way more complicated than we thought - here’s a quick primer in case you want to go -

First, head to the booking website. There’s a bunch of services that provide this, but we like going straight to the source, because then you can pick up your tickets from any convenience store in Japan, of which there are a bajillion everywhere. Getting tickets mailed is just asking for sadness. That’s how we ended up with the first day tickets to begin with - they arrived too late for the people waiting on them, so they gave them to us!

We should also mention that it truly helps to have a local help translate the website for you (and help you translate your very American name into a Japanese character for said website.) For this, we were forever grateful to the staff at our hotel in Osaka.

Then, take a look at the seating chart, and pricing. There are 4 areas to sit in - the front, back, east and west. All seats are good, but the best are in the front. This is the same view that the TV cameras have, which means you have an unobstructed view of the action. If you’re in the back, you’ll have the referee in your way for each match. West and East you’ll see mostly the back…er rear…uh, the front usually sells out first, so make sure to order early if possible. You don’t get to choose your specific seating orientation, but a bit of research on the sumo subreddit showed that they give away seats in the order of front, west, east, back.

There are a few different seating types around the arena - on the first day, we had the cheapest of the cheap seats (which go for 5,000 yen each or about $40 each), these are all the way up at the top and with the exception of our neighbors, mostly everyone in our section were foreigners as well.

On the 2nd day we had a small box with a table. These usually go for 10-13k yen, or about $75-100.

But the best seats of the house? The tiny cushion on the floor right next to the ring cost $150 and come with a very real chance of having a sumo wrestler end up on your lap.

Once you’ve figured out your level and what kind of seats you want, pick your day.

A sumo tournament lasts 15 days, and generally speaking, the matches get more intense and higher stakes the later the tournament goes, and the final day will be the busiest. So if you want better seats and easier tickets, go in the early days, or less available seats and more intense matches, go the last few days.

The final day is a special kind of intense, and you basically have to buy tickets for that the moment it goes on sale. This website is much more fair than ticketmaster, but just make sure to be ready if you want.

Fill in your info, using whichever hotel in Japan you’re at, or going to be staying at, as the number. It has to be a local number.

Choose to pick yours up at a 7-11 shop in Japan - DON’T PICK THE OTHER OPTION, that’s used to ship the tickets to an address, but those came so irregularly / didn’t get delivered at all for foreigners that they are considering removing the option.

Put in your credit card info. Know in advance that basically whatever you do here, your card will get declined the first time. Mastercards work better than Visas for this.

Once you get declined, call your bank, tell them to approve it, and then put through the order again.

Then you’ll get an email that you probably can’t read - throw that into google translate, hit the button, create a username and password, and BAM, you’re all set.

Well, kinda. See, they didn’t actually charge your card. You actually need to go to your closest 7-11 that within 2 days, bringing your confirmation email that comes after you finish the online process.

The friendly 7-11 person will input your confirmation code, you’ll pay the amount with the same credit card you used online, and then, THEN, THEN you get your sumo tickets printed out! Great success!!

It only took us like 3 hours. Totally fine.

The (Near) Future

Meeting back up with the parents in Mexico City :) The dream team, back together again.

Our Latest Videos

Big boys, even bigger stakes.

Up until this point, we’d only tried $1 budget sushi. But we had to know whether the expensive stuff was worth it.

A month around Japan, with the most bizarre and fun vending machines as our guides

See you next Sunday…ish :)

- josh (and lisa)

Oh, and if you want to learn how we afford to take all these trips after quitting our jobs last year, you’ll likely be interested in our Skillshare course on Travel Hacking and Frequent Flier Miles. It’s been really taking off lately, but we still have a few uses of this link left for those of you who want to see the class for free. It comes with a free month of Skillshare, which is more than enough to watch our class and any of the other great courses on there!

Check it out here: https://skl.sh/lisaandjosh02221

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