The editor of the paper decided to have a series written on Sumo by a famous international wrestling expert. I'm not exactly a wrestling expert, but what I do on the dance floor is pretty much like sumo.
    Of course I'm not completely unacquainted with Sumo. True, I've never seen a Sumo match, but I met a Sumo wrestler once. I was on my way home from O-some’s bar in Gion on the last trolley-car. Now I am short for an American – just 5 shaku 6 sun and I like Japan because I feel so tall. I was talking about about this to my friend when he noticed that it was time to get off and I turned hurriedly to push my way thru the crown of little people, I turned too fast and without looking and my face crashed into a big mound of something warm and my nose stuck fast. I had met my first Sumo wrestler. He had gotten on at the last stop and my nose had just stuck in his obi.
    Luckily for me, he too had been drinking and he had a base case of the hiccups. Just as I was about to suffocate, he hiccuped and not only blasted my nose free but “oshi-dashied” me and my friend out the trolley door at our stop. I still didn't quite know what had happened but in my drunken haze I imagined I had discovered a lost abominable Himalayan.
    My friend realized who the big hiccuper was and informed me that he was a Sumo. Now in New York slang we have a word that sounds like this, it is “smo” and means and means something like “baka”, except that you never say it to anyone big enough to sock back. I agreed with him that the “big belly” was a “smo”, picked myself up out of the gutter and started down the back street home.

(To Be Continued).