Count rank tenure from one official banzuke row per tournament. Report consecutive tenure, career total and separate spells rather than one ambiguous number. If an absent wrestler remains listed at the rank, that tournament counts as banzuke tenure; tournaments with an actual appearance belong in a different field.
A profile’s highest rank cannot tell you whether the wrestler held it for one basho or many. Build a chronological ranking history from official banzuke pages, retaining east/west side and numbered position. Publish both tournament count and calendar span because cancelled events and changing schedules can make those measures diverge.
Consecutive and total tenure answer different questions
Suppose a wrestler holds ozeki for five tournaments, is demoted, then returns for three. Career total is eight, longest consecutive tenure is five and there are two spells. Give each spell an identifier so the return is not counted as a second first promotion. A combined sanyaku measure should remain separable into komusubi and sekiwake.
Retirement after a banzuke announcement exposes another choice. Include the tournament if the question is “How many published rankings carried this title?” Flag it separately if the question is “In how many tournaments did the wrestler appear at this rank?” Removing absent tournaments silently changes official ranking history into a participation measure.
Join a person, not only a shikona
Use a stable wrestler identifier across name changes. A new shikona or stable transfer does not restart tenure. When rank structures or tournament frequency differ across eras, mark the boundary and avoid describing six modern tournaments as an automatic equivalent of six tournaments under another calendar.
An audit-friendly summary includes first and last banzuke at the rank, career total, longest consecutive spell, number of spells, tournaments with a recorded appearance and published-rank tournaments containing absence. Keep the underlying tournament rows so every total can be rebuilt. Freeze the population by target rank, interval and extraction date; report an unavailable banzuke row as missing. Treat an active spell as right-censored at extraction rather than completed, and retain both published-rank tenure and appearance tenure as reproducible specifications.
Time accumulates on the page
Stacking banzuke rows reveals that remaining at the same title is not the same tournament repeated. Before the next bout, resist translating long tenure into automatic stability. Watch one choice of distance or first contact. Rank tenure is not merely the length of a label; it is a layer of time in which a name was printed, challenged and printed again.
Counterevidence and the Update Trigger
The result is limited to the stated period, population and missing-data treatment. An official correction, a newly completed tournament, a changed exclusion rule or a failed recalculation is an update trigger. Preserve the previous value, reason for change and recalculation date; do not strengthen a conclusion using only convenient new records. Falsify the ranking by switching between publication and appearance definitions and shifting the interval boundary by one basho. If the ordering reverses, withdraw a single long-versus-short verdict and publish definition-sensitive as the alternative conclusion.
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, banzuke table, wrestler search, and annual schedule (checked 3 September 2026; append after each ranking announcement).
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 banzuke tablePrimary source (as checked for this article)
- Japan Sumo Association wrestler searchPrimary source (as checked for this article)
- Japan Sumo Association annual schedulePrimary source (as checked for this article)