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Tokyo. One of Japan’s top sumo tournaments began in Nagoya Sunday without live TV coverage and with fans staying away in disgust at a scandal over illegal gambling.

The 15-day event opened only days after police raided 13 sumo stables and dozens of offices and houses for evidence linking wrestlers and stablemasters to gambling on baseball organized by mobsters.

In Japan, betting is permitted only on horse racing, bicycle races and some motor sports.

Hundreds of would-be spectators canceled their tickets to the Nagoya tournament, one of the six competitions held every year in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka city in the west and Fukuoka city in the southwest.

Major corporate sponsors have withdrawn from the tournament along with public network Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), which for the first time in half a century has not offered live coverage of the event.

To clean up the sport, Japan Sumo Association has fired, demoted and suspended dozens of wrestlers and stablemasters who routinely bet in the illegal gambling ring or failed to supervise wrestlers. The association also banned 18 wrestlers from the Nagoya tournament.

In a show of remorse, the association has declined to award the coveted Emperor’s Cup, Prime Minister’s prize and other awards regularly given to tournament winners.

Japan’s 2,000-year-old national sport has rapidly fallen from grace with recent revelations of drug use, extortion and the 2007 death of a trainee tortured during hazing.

The gambling scandal followed news that top members of the Yamaguchi-gumi crime syndicate had been given ringside seats at recent sumo tournaments, apparently to send silent messages to jailed gangsters watching in prisons.


Agence France-Presse