John Agliata – Johnny Boy Marketing

If you happen to be a massive human being, what’s the point if you’re not willing to throw your weight around? This is the why there’s a tachiai.

Pronounced something close to TAK-ee-eye, the tachiai is the first thing you see when a sumo match begins. Well, except for a lot of jiggly fat.

Once both competitors have touched their ground with their knuckles, the two race forward and slam into each other in the center of the ring. That, my friends, is the tachiai.

What you slam into your opponent with sometimes varies. Often, the competitors crash heads, making NFL executives cry out, “Hey! What about them!” Sometimes, a sneaky sumo will throw a forearm shiver into their charging opponent’s chin. That is perfectly legal, and it occasionally (very rarely) leads to a knockout in which a really large, barely clothed man crumples to the clay unconscious.

The sumo bitch move, apparently, is to side-step your charging opponent.

Newton’s First Law of Motion, also known as the law of inertia, states (in part) that an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. And when a charging sumo expecting to meet another charging sumo in a man-on-man tachiai meets nothing but air, he does, indeed, continue in the same direction — often right out the fucking ring.

While not illegal, this move most often leads the announcers to point out in an extremely kind Japanese way that it is essentially a bitch move. They do this by pointing out how not illegal it is, which is to say, “Yeah fine, you can do that, but the dude who did that is just a fat bitch.”

Tachiais done right produce amazing sounds. There’s the smack of flesh on flesh, sometimes a grunt, and then there’s commentary about how good the tachiai was. A good tachiai is a great first step to winning a sumo bout. Slam into your opponent with more force than he delivers to you and he is going to go backwards. Do it really good and you might just knock him out — or at least out of the ring.

Just don’t be a bitch and side-step.

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