No Longer Mere Mortal -- Sumo Wrestler Chad Rowan Earns Godlike Status In Japan

TOKYO, Japan - Legend has it the Japanese emperor is a direct descendant of the sun god, whose offspring eventually became human. The very best sumo wrestlers move in the opposite direction.

From human to god.

The very best sumo wrestler is an American. He has been the best for more than a year, but until January, Akebono was a mere mortal. Now he is a god in Japan.

Akebono, born Chad Rowan, has fellow wrestlers as servants who follow him around, carrying out his every order. When he takes a bath, he goes first, and everyone after him is privileged to use the water in which he has soaked. His kimonos, tailor-made from the finest silk, cost thousands of dollars.

This was a definite lifestyle change for a 23-year-old working-class kid from Oahu, Hawaii.

"The place that I was born, the place I grew up, you live day by day," Akebono said. "Your parents have to worry if you would have enough food for the next day, where your next meal would come from."

Even though he's 6 feet 8 and weighs 466 pounds, Akebono will never again have to worry where his next meal comes from. Instead, he has to worry about a whole nation watching him eat, waiting to see if he'll make a mistake with his chopsticks.

Akebono is the only yokozuna in sumo wrestling, the highest classification in Japan's most traditional sport. His promotion was consecrated on a snowy January day at Meiji Jingu, Tokyo's most famous Shinto shrine. Akebono, bare above the belt and below the knee throughout the outdoor ceremony, maintained the rigid, serious facial expressions that have come to characterize his public appearances.

The contrast between Chad Rowan speaking English and Akebono speaking Japanese is profound. In English, his gravelly voice is surprisingly shy and quiet, but his frequent smiles give him a cherubic, jolly look. In Japanese, though, his face could be made of stone.

"You have to be able to swallow your pride, no matter how much you get kicked down and thrown around," he said in English. "You just swallow your pride and keep working as hard as you can."

A yokozuna must have hinkaku, a mysterious quality usually translated as dignity. A lack of hinkaku prevented fellow American Konishiki from being promoted to yokozuna last year.

And it nearly cost Akebono.

Last May, Akebono won his first tournament by throwing second-place Wakanohana to the ground. He then pumped his fist over Wakanohana in a typically American gesture of celebration, and he later cried tears of joy.

"The happiest thing that happened to me in Japan was when I won my first tournament," Akebono said. "I just blacked out. I didn't know what happened after that."

For a yokozuna that kind of display would never do.

He learned. In January, when Akebono blasted his rival Takanohana, Wakanohana's younger brother, out of the ring like a shopping cart - in a match watched by 62.5 percent of Tokyo-area residents, the second-highest rating in Japanese TV history - he showed no emotion whatsoever. And when they told him he was going to be promoted to yokozuna, his face didn't even budge. That's hinkaku.

He didn't always have it, especially when he arrived in Japan in 1988, fresh from dropping out of Hawaii Pacific University, where he had gone on a basketball scholarship. He was pulling weeds in a nursery for $4.25 an hour when a scout, who had first seen the big kid acting as a pallbearer at his grandfather's funeral, convinced him to give sumo a try.

"For the first half a year when I came from Hawaii, I cried almost every night," Akebono said. "I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home. I was still 18. I thought I was a man but when I came here I found out I was still a baby. What kept me from going home was if I went back, people would laugh at my mom and dad and say that your kids, they're only big for nothing. They have big bodies but they cannot do anything."

The teenage Chad Rowan had to endure a prison-like routine of being abused both verbally and physically in practice. His stablemaster, a fellow Hawaiian named Azumazeki, used to slap him repeatedly with a bamboo pole every time he made a mistake.

Chad Rowan's hardest struggle was not with the sport itself. The hardest part was to become Akebono - to speak and understand Japanese, and to get used to Japanese life.

"When I first came here I didn't know one word of Japanese," he said. "I was calling my oyakata (stablemaster) by his first name. That was the biggest problem.

"The next problem was in sumo everything is sempai - the seniority. They can be younger than you, but just because they trained before you they can rank over you. When I joined I was 18 and I had 15- and 16-year-old kids telling me to scrub the toilet and cook the rice."

In the beginning, before he had his own room at the stable, the spartan rooms were depressing for him. Now, though, he's free to decorate his walls with Bon Jovi posters and to blast his MC Hammer CDs as loud as he likes. Who's going to argue with a yokozuna?

But no more of his mother's beloved meatloaf with ketchup for lunch. It's chanko nabe - a rich meat and vegetable stew - every single day, sometimes supplemented by hamburgers and fries.

"In sumo, everything you do is part of practice," said Akebono, the tallest and heaviest yokozuna in history. "When you practice, you practice hard. When you eat, you eat hard, Then when you finish you just lie down and go to sleep. Then hopefully you get big."

Japanese TV stations make a big deal out of which Japanese foods Akebono likes and doesn't like, because it's expected here that people tolerate foods they don't like to be polite. The fact that Akebono won't eat eel or sweet adzuki bean paste is as well-known here as George Bush's dislike for broccoli was in America. Reporters often ask him if he's changed his mind about those foods yet, when they're not poking their cameras inside his closet to reassure viewers that his futons are properly folded.

"Right now, being a yokozuna, I feel more Japanese than I do American," he said. `When people look at me, I wish they would look at me as not being American, not being Japanese, but as being a sumo rikishi (wrestler)."

In that way, the pressure is just beginning. Gods, or even demigods, are not supposed to lose to mortals - even in practice.

"You outsiders wouldn't understand," said retired yokozuna Chiyonofuji, probably the greatest sumo wrestler this century.

"The yokozuna is the figurehead - the public face - of the Sumo Association. The responsibilities are very great. You have to win. It's a matter of honor. The pressure is enormous."

At every other classification, a sumo wrestler is demoted if he loses. A yokozuna cannot be demoted. Instead, they are forced to retire, in some cases prematurely because they are not allowed to work themselves back into shape from injuries.

Hokutoumi, the last yokozuna, retired a year and a half ago because of injury problems, leaving sumo without yokozuna for the first time since 1932.

"You might say I was spiritually no longer capable of upholding the status of yokozuna," Hokutoumi said. "The pressure was constant for the five years that I was a yokozuna, particularly after I became the only yokozuna."

That heavy mantle now falls on Akebono. Sumo's popularity is arguably higher than ever, with all the matches sold out months in advance even though most tickets cost well over $100. But they worried about having no yokozuna. So nine months after a Yokozuna Promotion Council member wrote that a foreign yokozunas are not needed, the council unanimously recommended Akebono's promotion.

Dewanoumi, head of the Sumo association, later said, "We now have a pillar for others to follow. I hope Akebono will have dignity even in practice bouts."

For now, Akebono is still a happy kid in love with his new fame and fortune. When asked what he would be doing if he hadn't become a sumo wrestler, he said "I think I would be a bum on the beach in Hawaii someplace.

"I don't think I can live in Hawaii now. It seems too slow."