David Plotz, from Japan. (1) - By David Plotz

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Posted Monday, April 8, 2002, at 12:56 PM ET

David Plotz, Slate's Washington bureau chief, is currently on a Japan Society media fellowship in Tokyo.

I just returned from playing with my daughter Noa in the kiddie park next door. This was, as usual, a somewhat mortifying experience.

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The playground is across the street from our lavish, spacious, and (except for us) utterly vacant apartment building. The building offers short-term leases for foreigners, but it's been struggling since the Japanese economy went south. In a jampacked city like Tokyo, its emptiness is eerie. I sometimes feel like I'm in The Shining, especially tonight, as the lobby lights have decided to blink on and off, and all we can hear is the muffled sound of the church organ next door, playing "O God Our Help in Ages Past."

The playground, by contrast, is all bustle, all the time—senior citizen croquet in the morning, kids all day, homeless at night. Our visits are embarrassing because Noa is by far the filthiest child in the park, the Pigpen of Tokyo. Parents stare at her sympathetically. I suspect they think we're child abusers. Not that Noa is so dirty, but Japanese kids play boisterously and still look dry-cleaned. Today, while Noa dug in the sandbox, a 4-year-old girl meticulously swept sand off chairs and back into the box. Those kids who do dig in the sandbox all wear supercute little smocks. These are totally unnecessary, because the kids never actually touch sand. When they play on the ground, they squat. We had a hellish time yesterday trying to play Ring-Around-the-Rosie with a Japanese boy. He refused to fall down. We would say, "Ashes to ashes, all fall down," and tumble into the dirt. He stood there, staring at us like we were nuts.

This is why I am mystified about the lousiness of Japanese diapers. Today, as ever, I find myself with damp spots on my pants where Noa had been sitting. The Japanese, who have taken every Western product and made it smaller, better, and more reliable, can't make a diaper that works. I have two theories about this. The first, pure American chauvinism, is that puny Japanese diapers can't handle the vastness of the great American bladder. But in more logical moments, I suspect the inadequacy of Japanese diapers is intentional, analogous to the near absence of public trash cans in Japan. Because there are no trash cans, people don't think of the street as a place to dispose of trash, and so streets stay clean. (This is a country where such discipline works. Needless to say, Manhattan would not cotton to this.) Perhaps diapers have limited capacity so that kids learn bladder control.

I always assumed that sumo wrestling—because it is such a cliché about Japan—must be as passé and nostalgia-ridden to the Japanese as, say, cowboys are to Americans. In fact, everyone follows sumo. During big tournaments, televisions in every office are on, all the time. This is why I jump at the chance to spend yesterday morning with Doreen Simmons, who must be one of Japan's greatest characters. A witty, cheerful, fast-talking Englishwoman of perhaps 60, she is, incongruously, a world authority on sumo and the color commentator for the English-language broadcasts of sumo tournaments.

Doreen takes us (me and a sumo-crazed husband and wife who had traveled from England to see a sumo tournament, and who keep pausing to snap pictures of apartment buildings where some modestly famous wrestler once lived) to one of Tokyo's 50-odd beya—or "stables"—the gymnasia/barracks where wrestlers train and live.

Sumo practiceWe arrive at 8 a.m., and practice has been going for two hours. Wrestlers are divided into six ranks, and only those in the upper levels make a real living. The lower ranks—kids in their teens and early 20s—are essentially indentured servants. They get room and board and training but must serve as body men for the successful wrestlers. They do everything from shopping to cleaning to cooking to wiping off the boss' sweat. If they win in the lower ranks, they graduate and get their own kids to kick around. And so it goes for 200 more years.

The kids we see are not the rawest recruits, but they are still juniors. There are a dozen of them, all wearing loincloths—mawashi—in a room the size of, oh, a large living room, with an open platform on the side where the coaches and spectators sit. There is a dirt floor with a sumo ring in the center, and a polished tree trunk in one corner that the wrestlers smack for practice. The training consists of stretching, then lots of weird-looking exercises such as running without lifting your feet, then bullrushing, in which one wrestler pushes another across the ring, and finally dozens of practice matches.

A few of the kids are simply fat, and they're no good. One is wiry, and he's no good either. The better wrestlers are fireplugs—5-foot 8-inches, probably 230 pounds, with enormous thighs and calves. Their torsos are hugely muscled, though covered by that famous layer of blubber. Their flexibility is staggering—all of them can do a full splits (during which they pound their own thighs with their fists. Hardcore.).

Practice is a ritualized and no-nonsense affair. Wrestlers don't talk or smile. The coaches yell at them, saying quite brutal things, according to Doreen. One coach whacks the wiry youngster with a wooden club. Another, a long-ago champ, strips down and joins the workout. He's 30 pounds lighter and 30 years older than the kids, but he pummels them, spraying at them as he tosses them to the ground. He picks out one kid in particular for abuse. He has the kid charge him, and each time the kid is flipped to the ground. When he falls, the coach kicks him, again and again, till he stands up and resumes the fight. When the youngster falls again, the coach kicks him again. Finally, after perhaps 10 minutes of this, the kid manages to push the coach out of the ring. That kicking, Doreen says later, is a sign of respect, a sign that the coach thought this wrestler might make it.

Can you pick out the diarist?We sit silently in the corner for two hours. I can't imagine what the wrestlers make of us. At the end of the practice, the coach orders four of the wrestlers outside to pose for pictures. The wrestlers, freed from duty, starting hamming it up and cracking broad smiles—though not, I am sad to say, for the photos.