A delegation from the All-Japan Student Sumo League presented itself at the Welfare Ministry yesterday to register a protest against a proposed exclusion of professional sumo wrestlers from the biannual athletic tourney at the Meiji Shrine Stadium next fall, reports Domei.
    The Physical Education and Athletics Inquiry Commission recently recommended to the Welfare Ministry that professional athletes should not compete against the simon-pure in the national tournament. This, the sumo delegation charged indignantly, is a shallow emulation of foreign conceptions of sports in flagrant disregard of the traditional Japanese spirit on which the Shrine games were founded.
    The Dai-Nippon Sumo League, which conducts professional sumo tournaments, has no particular objection to wrestlers affiliated with it taking part in amateur contests for trophies and glory. Heretofore, it seems, there has been no objection from amateurs against competing with part-time professionals.
    Welfare Vice-Minister Fumihide Okada heard the student sumo league's petition yesterday, which Domei gives in substance as follows:
    "This league has been charged with arranging the sumo contests, in the Shrine games, which include five categories - army and navy, collegiate, secondary schools, Young Men's Associations and professional wrestlers.
    "The last-named has put on a series of colorful contests and is inseparable from the others, even though its contestants sometimes wrestle in commercial tournaments. This way of regarding sumo men from the standpoint of their professionalism is not only unjustly influenced by foreign ideas emphasized in the Olympic Games, but it is also irrelevant and arbitrary. Letters to that effect have deluged the offices of this league.
    "In weighing his final decision, under the influence of the revered spirit of the Meiji Shrine, will the Minister please leave the program unchanged, especially in view of the present times."