THE ancient Japanese sport of sumo wrestling is divided by a schism over one of its most- famous symbols: the nappy-like loincloths, or mawashi, which its athletes wear around their broad midquarters.

Professional wrestlers are outraged at a decision by the amateurs’ association to allow athletes to wear modesty- preserving “sumo pants” under the traditional garment.

The amateurs insist that young Japanese men are put off the sport by the loincloths, which leave them feeling uncomfortably exposed.

“Young people, especially adolescents, don’t want to take up anything they don’t see as fashionable,” Joji Kagawa, the chairman of the Amateur Sumo Federation, said. “So keeping teenagers in sumo is difficult.”

Hidetoshi Tanaka, the vice-chairman of the Japan Amateur Sumo Federation, said: “In this age, young people on school holiday wear swimsuits in public baths. It is understandable that many would not want to wear the mawashi on its own.”

The “sumo pants” are a skin-tight, thigh-length garment similar to cycling shorts, which conceal what for many spectators is one of the great glories of sumo — the thunderous, rippling buttocks of the wrestlers as they crouch down to face one another over the clay of the sumo ring, or dohyo.

The professional Japan Sumo Association is refusing to countenance the pants at the sport’s holy of holies — the Hall of the National Pursuit in the Ryogoku district of Tokyo. The dohyo there is considered to be a sacred spot where women are not allowed to set foot — and certainly not male wrestlers in modish “pants”.

At last year’s high school national championships, modest contestants were compelled to remove their pants and compete in the glorious near-nakedness of loincloths.

“The Hall of the National Pursuit has set rules and customs,” the spokesman for the Japan Sumo Association, a former wrestler known as Takasago, said. “We have no intention of allowing children in shorts into the ring.”

The controversy was aired yesterday on the front page of Yomiuri, Japan’s bestselling newspaper. Behind the shorts-versus-loincloth controversy lies a growing anxiety about the long-term future of sumo in a country increasingly dominated by non-indigenous sports, such as baseball and football.

Not only are the upper ranks of sumo dominated by wrestlers from far-flung places such as Hungary and Mongolia, there is also a drastic drop in the number of young Japanese taking up the sport.

Seventy new professional wrestlers were admitted this year, compared with double that number during the boom in the early 1990s.

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