Four Years Ago, He Fled Ukraine for Japan. Now He’s a Sumo Superstar.
Tokyo
On the dohyo, the sacred mound of straw, sand, and clay where sumo wrestlers ply their trade, the most unlikely star in the sport goes by Aonishiki.
Though he has only practiced the ancient art of sumo professionally for two years, he already sits just one notch below the immortal rank of yokozuna. Just two more tournament victories could clinch him that title. But that is far from the most remarkable thing about Aonishiki.
The real surprise is that his actual name is Danylo Yavhusyshyn—and he’s from Ukraine.
“I never expected to get this far this quickly,” he said in an interview, now speaking fluent Japanese. “I’ve always felt that once you enter this world, there’s no point in doing it unless you aim for the very top.”
At 5-foot-11 and 310 pounds, Aonishiki isn’t the biggest fighter, or rikishi, to step onto the dohyo, nor is he the most classically trained. As a child growing up in Vinnytsia, a city of around 350,000 in central Ukraine, Aonishiki—then just Danylo—was first exposed to sumo as a six-year-old at judo practice.
He started sumo wrestling, too, and as a preteen was mesmerized by a YouTube clip he saw of a famous match between sumo legends Takanohana and Asashoryu.
In 2019, he had his first taste of sumo in Japan when he participated in the World Sumo Championships in Osaka. There, he met a Japanese university sumo team captain who would help him get to Japan in 2022 from Germany, where he fled when the Russian invasion began in 2022, joining his mother who had been working there.
“I simply didn’t want to have any regrets before I died,” he says. “I had wanted to become a wrestler since I was 12.”
What is striking about Aonishiki, said Murray Johnson, an Australian sports commentator who has followed sumo for 30 years, is his youth and how rapidly he’s risen through the ranks.
The Ukrainian won his first championship, in sumo’s lowest division, in 2023. It has taken him only 14 tournaments in total to clock up enough victories to reach the rank of ozeki, the second-highest rank after yokozuna.
“If you’re in the top division within five years, you’ve done really well. And he’s done it in two years,” Johnson said. “It’s just unbelievable.”
Aonishiki isn’t the first non-Japanese wrestler to make waves in sumo. Notable champions have hailed from Hawaii, Estonia and Georgia. The yokozuna that Aonishiki defeated in November was born in Mongolia.
Non-Japanese rikishi, particularly those from Europe, often rely on their physical stature and strength to compensate for the technical skill of their opponents. But Aonishiki, who stands 5-foot-11 and weighs 310 pounds, isn’t enormous by sumo standards. He has risen to the top on the strength of his old-school technique, sumo experts say.
“Since I’m not that large, I try to wrestle by getting underneath my opponent, forcing them upwards, and moving inside their space,” Aonishiki said.
He crouches unusually low in the ring to maintain his balance. He has mastered an array of twists, trips and throws to allow him to overcome bigger opponents, some of them gleaned from studying older wrestlers.
“The traditional techniques he employs are, in fact, rapidly disappearing from the world of professional sumo,” said sumo writer and commentator Katsuhiro Nishio.
Aonishiki learned those techniques at a prestigious stable for promising fighters. It’s also where he came up with his Japanese moniker, which combines the name of his stable master, the university friend who helped him find refuge in Japan, and the word for the color blue, one of the colors of Ukraine’s flag.
Five thousand miles from his actual home, Aonishiki says that he constantly hears from friends in Ukraine who have taken to following sumo results. With the war still raging, he hopes his achievements can stand as one more source of Ukrainian pride.
“Ultimately, I am a rikishi,” Aonishiki says. “The only way I can give back or make people happy is on the dohyo.”
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