What is the national sport of Japan?

Sumo, which is less a sport with religious decoration than a religious rite that became a sport. The ring is purified with salt before each bout, the roof suspended above it is modelled on a Shinto shrine, and the referee's costume is a court dress from centuries ago. Matches were originally performed for the gods to ensure a good harvest.

The bouts themselves are usually over in seconds, and everything surrounding them is long. Wrestlers live in stables under near-total control of their daily life, eat an enormous stew called chanko-nabe and sleep after eating to gain weight, and rank determines almost everything - who bathes first, who carries whose bags, who is allowed to wear which clothing in public.

It has had a difficult modern history: match-fixing scandals, a hazing death in 2007, and a long argument about foreign wrestlers, since Mongolian and Hawaiian competitors have dominated the top ranks for decades in a sport treated as a national institution. Women are still not permitted to enter the ring, which produced an ugly moment in 2018 when female nurses climbing in to give first aid to a collapsed official were told over the public address to get out.