Women Barred From Sumo Ring, Even to Save a Man’s Life

TOKYO — Sumo wrestling, one of Japan’s oldest and most hallowed sports, has all kinds of inviolable rituals. The wrestlers must wear their hair in carefully coifed topknots. Before every match, they scatter grains of purifying salt. And women are never, ever, allowed in the ring.

Even when a man’s life is at stake.

Sumo’s discriminatory practices came under new scrutiny after a referee shooed women out of a ring at an exhibition match in Kyoto on Wednesday when they rushed to offer lifesaving measures to a politician who had collapsed while delivering a speech.

The news dominated television talk shows and social media on Thursday, with a video of the episode — in which a referee could repeatedly be heard over a loudspeaker yelling, “Women, come out of the ring” — attracting more than 800,000 views on YouTube and a fusillade of criticism.

“Believing that tradition is more important than human lives is like a cult that mistakes fundamentalism for tradition,” Yoshinori Kobayashi, a popular comic book artist, wrote on his blog.

In a country that consistently ranks low among developed countries on gender equality in health, education, the economy and politics, the episode was seen as a metaphor for how women are regarded in Japan.