English Dub Review: Hinomaru Sumo “How I Win”

Don’t underestimate Kei!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The tournament continues, but the Dachi High sumo team has a long way to go before they can bring home the win. Their spirit is relentless, however, and they continue to press their momentum. Ozeki fights a young wrestler named Enoki who has a wild and passionate spirit. Like Ozeki, he too fights for his teammates. Enoki, being a relatively thin wrestler, reflects on his past, being trained by Tennoji in sumo despite his weak size. His feelings reflect Ozeki’s relationship with Hinomaru, which gives him the strength to defeat Ozeki with a takedown. It’s a desperate turn of fortune, but Enoki’s technique defeats Ozeki’s sheer strength and experience.

The next match brings Kei up to the ring, but the small wrestler has some reservations about his technique. Thinking back to their time in the locker room, Kei reflects on how he believed that his reversal style made him dishonorable in the world of sumo. Hinomaru talks Kei out of that kind of defeatist thinking, explaining that Kei is actually tremendously brave for adopting this style of sumo to suit his size.

The match begins, and everyone expects Kei to use a reversal, but surprisingly, Kei actually performs a false start; not once, but twice. The crowd boos and jeers, but Kei actually has a secret up his sleeve. His false start is just a part of his strategy. By doing two false starts, he puts his opponent off his game by pissing him off to try and make his sumo sloppy. On the third start, Kei does something unthinkable. As the match starts, Kei turns his back and walks away from his opponent, moving towards the edge of the ring with a wry smile. When his opponent charges him, Kei claps his hands together in front of his face, knocking his enemy off balance. With that opening, Kei pulls off his reversal perfectly and gets behind his foe. With the advantage he has, Kei pushes with all his might and gets his opponent to the floor with a leg sweep.

It’s an incredible upset, but Kei comes out to the victor much to the audience’s disapproval. However, the judges protest the ref’s decision on the victory, and announce the match as a tie, meaning they have to perform the bout again. Without the element of surprise, Kei has no chance, and loses pathetically.

Our Take:

If I was to take all of the episodes of Hinomaru Sumo I’ve watched so far and rank them, there wouldn’t be that many that have inspired a sense of real awe in me. As much as I’ve enjoyed the series for what it is, there have been very few of those powerful moments that I look forward to when watching anime. Those passionate intensities that uplift the soul are all too rare, even in a show like this, and to be honest, those are the reasons that I became a fan of anime in the first place. However, sometimes you get surprised, and I’m delighted to say that this episode has soared to the top of my list as the best episode of Hinomaru Sumo I’ve yet to see.

This is all the result of the incredible second half of this episode that puts Kei Mitsuhashi front and center as the underdog story in a show full of underdog stories. The first half is notable as well, providing an exciting and spirited battle of men who give every ounce of themselves. But the second half, where Kei demonstrates the results of his training, of his insane style of sumo, is what really takes the cake. Kei has already premiered his reversal style by this point, but that trick hasn’t been able to net him a win; his tiny physique is still too great a burden to bear. To overcome this, he sacrifices everything, including the respect of the people watching him, to try and do his duty to the team. His initial victory is such an impossible miracle that his loss by judge intervention feels all the more bitter for it. There is something so despairing about seeing someone try so hard yet get his win stolen from him.

However, these failures are the what bind the audience to the characters the most. Failure can leave an impact much stronger than that of great success if done well, and that’s exactly what happens here. Both Ozeki and Kei lose their bouts, which both raises the stakes for the next few matches dramatically and generates an emotional response in the audience that most of the episodes of this show haven’t been able to achieve. With this, Kei has quickly become my favorite character, not because his matches are as physical as the rest of the team’s, but because they have the most heart and stakes.

Score
9/10