Do not store only a final tournament count. Preserve professional debut, first banzuke, entry route, every tournament rank, destination decision and absence or cancellation state. Official additions, transcription repairs and changes to the clock require separate reasons.
Each new banzuke extends an active wrestler’s path by one row. A longer observed path does not necessarily mean slower promotion, because active careers may be right-censored and entry routes differ. Overwriting an old starting point or tsukedashi classification with a current summary makes earlier rankings impossible to reproduce. Keep input, rank path and aggregate tables as separate releases.
Keep three tables in sync
The wrestler table stores ID, professional debut, first banzuke, entry route and official URL. The path table stores tournament ID, rank, number, side, participation or absence and banzuke version. The aggregate table stores start definition, destination definition, calendar, held and competed tournament counts, plus censoring state. Freeze the population by entry period, entry route, destination and extraction cutoff; report profile-to-banzuke joins that cannot be established as missing. Treat active wrestlers who have not arrived as right-censored at the cutoff, not as failures.
The atomic unit of a promotion-speed update is one wrestler-by-tournament path row. Do not mix the banzuke announcement date with the tournament opening date as arrival. If a profile cannot join to the banzuke, the start is missing, or an active path was treated as complete, quarantine that wrestler from the ranking. After correction, recalculate calendar, held-tournament and competed-tournament clocks separately and trace the change to one input row and one method version.
Five reasons for change
Separate a newly announced banzuke, official profile update, transcription correction, path-join correction and aggregate-definition change. A mistaken tsukedashi class is a join correction. Changing whether an absent tournament advances the clock is a definition change and rebuilds every affected career.
If rankings move, preserve former positions and republish cohort size and tie treatment. Bundle article text, tables and structured data in the same release so a repaired number cannot leave an outdated “fastest” claim behind.
Current public baseline
- 3 September 2026, v1.0: professional debut, first banzuke, entry route and tournament-by-tournament rank are separate.
- 3 September 2026, v1.0: calendar, held and competed tournament counts appear together.
- Next checkpoint: after the next banzuke announcement, append new path rows and recalculate arrivals and active censored careers.
Copyediting alone does not advance the data release. A new version is required when start, destination, cohort, tournament count or ranking changes.
History keeps the middle of the path
A promotion matters, but so does a tournament spent holding the same rank. Revisit a bout from that apparent pause and you may find a technical change invisible in the rank line. The update log is not only for records; it prevents one wrestler’s pace from being erased by the destination.
A Comparison Does Not Prove a Cause
A visible group difference may coincide with era, rank, opponent strength, absences and recording detail. This comparison alone cannot conclude a causal explanation. Compare an arrivals-only run with a right-censored run, try another defensible start point and vary missing-data handling as falsification checks. If the pattern disappears, retract the first story; if cohorts cannot be made comparable, the alternative conclusion is that no speed difference has been established.
Freeze the Question Before Reading the Result
The research question is whether the defined metric differs under the article’s stated conditions. “There should be a difference” is a hypothesis, not a conclusion entered before counting. Preserve a contrary result, and treat a small difference, heavy missingness or incomparable conditions as grounds to hold the conclusion.
Sources
- Japan Sumo Association wrestler profiles, banzuke and annual schedule (checked 3 September 2026).
Source links used for verification
Each link was used for the corresponding claim in this article; inclusion is not a blanket endorsement of the whole page.
Article verified:
- Japan Sumo Association wrestler searchPrimary source (as checked for this article)
- Japan Sumo Association banzuke tablePrimary source (as checked for this article)
- Japan Sumo Association annual schedulePrimary source (as checked for this article)