Prices here are the yen figures, with today's conversion beside them. When we last checked, on September 4, 2026, ¥157 bought a US dollar and ¥212 a pound.
The short answer
Sumo tickets are sold tournament by tournament. There are six a year, 15 days each, always starting on a Sunday: January, March, May, July, September and November. Three sit in Tokyo, the others at Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuoka. Every tournament has its own sale date, fixed and published well ahead by the federation, and what does not exist is a single lead time that would cover all six: “two months before” holds for Nagoya and Fukuoka, and nowhere else.
Few Japanese spectacles pin into an itinerary this far out. No weather decides the dates and no late announcement decides them either: they follow a stable calendar rule. The federation publishes them three years ahead.
The shiko, that leg raised straight up: a purifying ritual performed before every bout, under the eye of the gyoji, the referee in the kimono. A rikishi is a sumo wrestler.
Photo Alessio Roversi.
The calendar of the next tournaments
| Tournament | City | Tickets on sale |
|---|---|---|
| September 13 – 27, 2026 | Tokyo | August 8, 2026 · on sale |
| November 8 – 22, 2026 | Fukuoka | September 19, 2026 · not yet |
| January 10 – 24, 2027 | Tokyo | December 5, 2026 · not yet |
| March 14 – 28, 2027 | Osaka | February 6, 2027 · not yet |
| May 9 – 23, 2027 | Tokyo | April 10, 2027 · not yet |
| July 11 – 25, 2027 | Nagoya | May 15, 2027 · not yet |
Dates published by the Nihon Sumo Kyokai. Last checked August 19, 2026. Sales open at 10 a.m. Japan time. This table says when sales start; it does not say whether seats are left.
Each tournament opens on the second Sunday of its month and runs 15 days, through to the Sunday after, which is why the dates barely move from one year to the next.
Getting woken at the right moment
Three tournaments in Tokyo, three in the regions
The split has not moved in decades, and it decides which city fills up.
Tokyo takes January, May and September, all of them at Ryogoku, in the east of the city. The arena’s neighborhood fills far more than Tokyo as a whole: across a metropolis that size, 15 days of sumo leave no trace on average prices, but they are very visible around the hall.
The other three spread over the year and change things far more, because the cities are smaller:
- March, at Osaka, just before cherry blossom season.
- July, at Nagoya, in the thick of the humid heat.
- November, at Fukuoka, during the Kyushu maple season.
At Fukuoka and Nagoya, 15 days of tournament weigh on what rooms are left. At Tokyo the effect stops at Ryogoku.
The dohyo-iri, the procession of wrestlers entering the ring before the day’s bouts, on the dohyo, the raised clay ring itself: the Ryogoku hall full, 15 days running.
Photo Florian Hahn.
The date is fixed, the lead time is not
The federation publishes the sale date of each tournament in its yearly calendar, up to three years out. That’s where the table above comes from.
What changes from one tournament to the next is the lead time, the number of days between that sale and the first bout. Across the 36 tournaments recorded between 2023 and 2028 it runs from 29 to 57 days, and it depends on the city: Tokyo and Osaka open late, about a month ahead, while Nagoya and Fukuoka open early, seven or eight weeks out.
The sale almost always opens on a Saturday, at 10 a.m. Japan time. Where you are, that’s 9 p.m. the previous evening on the East Coast, 8 p.m. between November and March, and three hours earlier again on the West Coast.
Four lotteries go before you. The general sale is not the first chance to buy. It is the last. Ahead of it, four successive draws have already skimmed the stock: two reserved for members of the official club, one for registered users of the ticketing site, and a final one at the partner reseller. None of the four appears on the English interface, which offers the general sale alone, capped at 2 tickets a person. In practice a reader abroad has one window, the latest and the most contested.
Sumo sells out completely, tournament after tournament. In 2024 all six tournaments of the year went: not one seat left on sale, for any of the 90 days. And since the federation sells nothing at the door on the day, turning up on the off chance does not work. If your dates fall on a tournament there’s only one useful move, which is to be in front of a screen on the day of the sale, because nothing else will get you in. Be wary of resale sites too, since the federation’s own rules explicitly forbid reselling an entry.
Where to read the exact date, and where not to
The date that counts is the one in the federation’s yearly calendar, in Japanese, under the column 前売り開始日. That’s the source of the table above.
One warning. The English version of the ticketing site carries date errors. For the Osaka tournament of March 2027 it announces a “Saturday, February 8” that is in fact a Monday, while the Japanese page of the federation gives Saturday, February 6. It contradicts itself, and nobody has fixed it. When the two versions disagree, the Japanese one is right.
Buying from abroad, and what that means
Buying happens on Ticket Pia, in English, the counter the federation points foreign buyers to. That’s where the general sale opens, on the date in the table.
Payment is by card only, charged in yen. Visa, Mastercard, JCB, Diners and American Express are all listed as accepted. The ticketing site warns by itself that a card may be refused “depending on its standard”, and the only remedy it offers is to try another one: there’s no bank transfer and no convenience-store payment on the English interface.
Budget another ¥2,000 (about $13) in service fees per ticket. That is not a rounding error. At Fukuoka it is more than the price of a seat in the cheapest category.
The ticket is collected at a Seven-Eleven, in Japan. No printing at home, no ticket on your phone, no postal delivery, and nothing to pick up at the arena counter. You pay from home, but the ticket only exists once you’re on the ground, using the 13-digit number that arrives by email. Collection opens 24 hours after purchase at the earliest, and a lost ticket is never reissued, so entry is refused.
Be careful with what you read elsewhere on this point, including in the site’s own terms: several of its pages still announce collection at the arena counter on production of a passport. That text is out of date, contradicted by the live sale pages, and plenty of guides copy it across untouched.
The English interface does not sell everything. It offers seats and four-person boxes. A box is booked whole. Ringside places and the best boxes carry the note “Only Ticket Oosumo (JPN)” and are sold on the Japanese side alone.
What this does to your accommodation
A tournament books like a show and behaves like a season. Those 15 days press on the hotels of the city it sits in. And the order in which the two open works against you: Japanese accommodation opens its calendars around six months out, while the sumo box office opens one to two months out.
Put plainly, you’ll have to book your room well before you know whether you have a ticket. Book the room first. At Fukuoka in November or at Nagoya in July that’s still the right order, because a cancelable room can always be found again a few weeks later, while the ticket cannot be found at all once the sale has closed.
What you can do today
- Find your tournament in the table, and write down the sale date rather than counting in weeks.
- Find the counter before the day itself: the general sale runs through Ticket Pia, in English, the only interface you can buy from abroad.
- Set a reminder for the evening before. The hour is above, converted for both coasts; the one thing to remember is that a Saturday morning in Tokyo is a Friday evening on either American coast.
- Book your room without waiting for the ticket if your dates fall on a tournament at Nagoya or Fukuoka. Rooms lock months earlier, and our city by city pages say when.