Birthplace Map

In professional sumo, each wrestler's birthplace is printed on the banzuke, and it is announced together with his ring name and stable during ring-entering ceremonies and before bouts. Wrestlers are strongly seen as representatives of their home regions, and the success of a local wrestler is still big news in his hometown. This page shows how those birthplaces are distributed on maps of Japan and the world.

The depth of color on the map represents the selected metric. "Count" is the number of wrestlers, "Average winning-record rate" is the average share of tournaments in which wrestlers from that region finished with a winning record, and "Sekitori rate" is the share of wrestlers who reached juryo or higher (sekitori). In regions with few wrestlers a single wrestler can swing the percentages, so it is best to read them together with the count.

Switching between active and retired wrestlers shows how birthplaces have shifted over time. Wrestlers born outside Japan appear on the world map and in the country ranking. Because stables are in principle limited to one foreign-born wrestler each, their numbers are small, yet many countries, led by Mongolia, have produced top-ranked wrestlers including yokozuna and ozeki.