While the title of yokozuna was created in the late 18th century, Thompson argues, it came to adopt its current meaning only in the 20th century, when there was much pressure for sumo to reform its system of recognizing supremacy. Thompson writes, "The yokozuna emerged as a rank only in the last hundred years, well into the modern period. Yet the yokozuna rank now symbolizes sumo's "traditional" status and is subsumed within sumo's alleged '2,000-year' history" (1998:177). Moreover, alongside the yokozuna system, the modern championship system developed, which is entirely based on statistical performance, and, in a way, presents a "modern-day" counterpart to the more "traditional" and subjective system of naming yokozuna. In Thompson's work, the complex interaction between the championship system and the rank of yokozuna exemplifies the link between what is represented and believed to be traditional, and the pressures of modernity.
It is possible, using Bolitho's and Thompson's works as a starting point, to present a historical argument about sumo that disorients the assumption that sumo today embodies the unbroken legacy of the past, and instead to present a much more contextual and problematizing account, focusing on the role of social and political pressures, as well as individual agency in the creation of sumo "tradition.".
To do this, I believe it is appropriate to use the methodological trope of "invented tradition," first coined by Eric Hobsbawm, and used by many authors, including Vlastos and Thompson, in a variety of contexts to reveal the ideological and constructed nature of tradition. Hobsbawm defines "invented traditions" as a "set practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values or norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past" (1983:1).
