The death, the arrests and the measured response of the JSA have cast a cold light on the closed world of sumo.

After the beating became public, the JSA sent a survey to the 53 stables in Japan, asking about their training practices.

More than 90 per cent have used baseball bats or similar implements in training, the survey found.

About a third of the stables said bullying and other forms of abuse occurred during training.

'That this happened in sumo, the national sport and symbol of Japan, is a serious matter,' Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said last month.

Police initially appeared reluctant to conduct a full review in the case.

Without conducting an autopsy, they ruled that heart disease was the cause of death - a judgment quickly accepted by the JSA.

After Saito's death was attributed to natural causes, his stable master, Junichi Yamamoto, encouraged the boy's family to allow him to cremate the body, according to news accounts.

The father, though, insisted on seeing the teenager's body.

After he saw bruises and other wounds, he asked doctors to perform an autopsy.

They found that shock from a beating had caused the youth's heart to stop.

HE TRIED TO ESCAPE

Police were then pressured by his family and the news media to open an investigation, which found that Saito had infuriated his master by trying to quit his stable.

In Japan, all sumo wrestlers belong to a stable, where all of them train under the supervision of a master.

These masters receive payments from the national association for each wrestler in their stable.

'There is pressure on the masters to keep the trainees because they are a source of income,' said Nobuyoshi Tsujiguchi, a sports lawyer.

Inside the stable where he was the unquestioned boss, Yamamoto shouted at Saito for attempting to escape, according to police.

'As he had this vague attitude about whether he would continue in sumo, I flew into a rage and beat him,' Yamamoto told police, according to the Yomiuri newspaper.

Police have charged that Yamamoto hit the youth 10 times with a beer bottle and then ordered three wrestlers to beat him.

Saito's body also showed signs of having been hit with a metal baseball bat.

Yamamoto was expelled from the JSA in October for 'severely damaging public trust.'

Washington Post

This article was first published in The New Paper on Mar 11, 2008.