I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.

Yeah see that's why I can't ever take anyone's opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It's like, only a step away from "oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?". Which itself is about two steps away from just like, "Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.", which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It's like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren't faked.

Nah, man, it's a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don't care about too much anymore. It's more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don't question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC's involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC's, it's basically garbage.

The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There's already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I'm not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport's overarching regulatory structure.