[sumo] Buying sumo tickets

[David Luke]

I’m excited to see sumo live for the first time in May. I bought tickets today, and thought I would share the experience in case it might be useful to anyone in the future.

I used the Ticket Oosumo English site (linked from the Sumo Kyokai’s official site). I also attempted two different Japanese sites, and couldn’t even get into either one, so I stuck with the English site. The Web site was horribly unreliable, so be prepared to be very patient and try over and over again. (Phone orders are also possible [in Japanese], but I did not try that.) (There are also lots of resellers and guided tours that take reservations in advance and claim to be able to get good seats. I don’t know if they have some special back door to actually get tickets, or what. I did not try those, either.)

Anyway, on the official Web site the flow is, select masu or chair seating (I went for chair), select a day, select a seating tier (S, A, B, C, D) and number of seats, confirm, enter personal information (I have no idea why they need things like birthdate, but they want it), enter credit card information, confirm, and purchase. Each of those steps are on separate pages, and the connection can get dropped, time out, error out, or just freeze on any of them.

Getting to the second screen (selecting the day) was the first challenge. Over the course of 45 minutes I tried probably close to 100 times. I got through to the “select a day” screen probably 20-30 times, and to the point of entering personal information seven times. Tickets went on sale at 10:00 AM, and I got through to entering personal information for the first time about 10:05. At that point all tiers of seating were still available, so I was excited that I was going to get S seats. Then the web site dropped connection and I had to start over again. By the next time I got through to the seat selection screen S and A seats were all gone (at least for the three weekday dates that fit into my schedule). 

I made it to the next step (entering credit card information) twice, and through to end (actually getting tickets bought) once. I was running two browsers on two machines, and it might just be coincidence, but the two times I got farthest were both with Chrome rather than Safari. YMMV.

Even after getting to the credit card screen, I still got many errors and timeouts, but by reloading the page was able to recover and move forward. I finally ended up with B seats on the West side. The next step is to take the information from the confirmation e-mail to 7-Eleven and pick up the actual tickets.

(FWIW, I just tried the Web site again, 2.5 hours after tickets went on sale, and it seems as busy and flaky as it was earlier.)

So, it was a bit of a frustrating experience, but in the end I got the tickets, and I’m excited to be there in person for the first time!