[sumo] Buying sumo tickets

[R. Brown]

🤩

Enjoy

Kodaiyama


On Fri, Apr 4, 2025 at 11:26 PM David Luke <david42luke at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 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!
>
>
>
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