Brutal Beating Death Brings Sumo's Dark Side to Light

After Saito's death was attributed to natural causes, his stable master, Junichi Yamamoto, encouraged the boy's family to allow him to cremate the body, according to news accounts.

The father, though, insisted on seeing the teenager's body. After he saw bruises and other wounds, he asked doctors at Niigata University to perform an autopsy. They found that shock from a beating had caused the youth's heart to stop.

Police were then pressured by his family and the news media to open an investigation, which found that Saito had infuriated his master by trying to quit his stable.

In Japan, all sumo wrestlers belong to a stable, a gym/dormitory where most of them live and where all of them train under the supervision of a master, himself a former wrestler. These masters, who are the collective owners of the JSA, receive payments from the national association for each wrestler in their stable.

"There is pressure on the masters to keep the trainees because they are a source of income," said Tsujiguchi, the sports lawyer.

Inside the stable where he was the unquestioned boss, Yamamoto shouted at Saito for attempting to escape, according to police. "As he had this vague attitude about whether he would continue in sumo, I flew into a rage and beat him," Yamamoto told police, according to the Yomiuri newspaper.

Police have charged that Yamamoto hit the youth 10 times with a beer bottle and then ordered three wrestlers to beat him. Saito's body also showed signs of having been hit with a metal baseball bat.

Yamamoto was expelled from the JSA in October for "severely damaging public trust."

The three wrestlers have denied any intent to kill Saito. They have said, through a lawyer, that they were under the control of Yamamoto and that they dared not "talk back" to him.

After the beating became public, the JSA sent a survey to the 53 stables in Japan, asking about their training practices. More than 90 percent have used baseball bats or similar implements in training, the survey found. About a third of the stables said bullying and other forms of abuse occurred during training.

Sumo has become a troubled sport -- in ways that have nothing to do with violence in the training stables.

There have been news reports of match fixing. A concern of much longer standing is the number of foreign-born champions -- the best of whom are now from Mongolia. This has hurt the sport's popularity among some traditionalists.

Since Saito's death, disclosures about the workaday brutality inside sumo stables seem to have shocked many Japanese, especially those who do not follow the sport closely.

"I am sure parents will not want their sons to go into such a scary place," said Tsujiguchi, the sports lawyer. "This is going to decrease participation by the Japanese, make more room for foreign participants and hurt the sport's popularity even more."

Special correspondent Akiko Yamamoto contributed to this report.