JUST NOTICED ANOTHER GAIJIN HAS DIED: DOREEN SIMMONDS

Doreen Simmonds 2010

Fujiland knows everybody in Japan, by which, of course, we mean the country's tiny ex-pat community. We don't keep tabs on them on a day-to-day basis, but occasionally we check in on them to make sure they're doing well or have rounded off a well-spent life in the Orient.

The latest one we can offer an "update" on is Doreen Simmons, NHK's English sumo commentator. Fujiland had the briefest of interactions with Ms Simmons, when apparently she vetoed a piece we wrote on sumo for Kansai Time Out, for whom she was the be-all-and-end-all of its sumo coverage. Luckily the piece saw the light of day at Metropolis and Japan Today, where it caused quite a stir by focusing on the rampant drug abuse in the Japanese sumo world, a subject that Ms Simmonds was unable to countenance due to her "embedded" state with the Japanese sumo world.

It is no surprise to find out that nearly six year ago she has now shuffled off the mortal coil and ascended to the great sumo stable in the sky, as she was born in 1932.

Anyway, here are a few extracts from the Times obituary, which is very unhelpfully pay-walled and rather more helpfully archived:

Often to be found seated in a restaurant in the heart of Tokyo’s old sumo wrestling quarter, Doreen Simmons appeared an unlikely regular customer. A small, silver-haired lady with a trace of a Nottinghamshire accent, she was in fact one of the greatest experts on the ancient sport and its history.

Dubbed the sumo “godmother”, Simmons was the English language commentator for matches broadcast on a popular Japanese TV network. “The thing about sumo is that it’s so simple,” she once said. “The first time you see it, you know what’s going on. But when you start learning about it, there are so many extra things, so many details.”[...]

Simmons chose to live among the old stables of Ryogoku. Every morning she passed apprentices praying to the statues of greats who had gone before them. Despite her small size, she relished the wrestlers’ chanko-nabe, a Japanese stew that contains 17 ingredients, including seafood, chicken, tofu and beef to help weight-gain. “It’s very good. It makes you strong and gives you a lot of protein and vegetables.”[...]

Modestly, she maintained that the sport was never more than her hobby. She held down numerous other “day jobs” in Tokyo and was a colourful figure in the expatriate community [...]

Doreen Sylvia Clarke was born in Nottingham in 1932. Her father, George, was a civil servant, and her mother, Elsie, was a store manager who promoted stationery to women by making paper flowers [...]

After graduating from Girton College, Cambridge, Simmons trained as a teacher of Latin and Greek at Hughes Hall. She was briefly married to Bob Simmons, but it ended in divorce and she rarely spoke about him to friends.

In the early 1960s she was given a job in Singapore in a British Army school and went on a trip to Japan. She found herself on a farm where she saw her first sumo match on television — it was also the first time she watched a programme in colour. After a spell back in England teaching classics, during which time she was a contestant on the BBC’s first series of Mastermind, she said she could not forget Japan.

In 1973 Simmons returned to Tokyo with a teaching post at the International Language Centre in Jinbocho. She later joined the staff of Tokyo’s Foreign Press Centre, editing translations of Japanese government press releases.

She began going to sumo matches at the weekend. “I’ve been going every Saturday, Sunday and public holiday since.” At first she simply enjoyed the ancients rituals such as the throwing of salt, which she recognised straight away as a purification. “My original interest was in its survival from the past, but after a while I got to know some of the middle-ranking wrestlers, along with some extremely knowledgeable Japanese fans, who fuelled my interest,” she said. She started to write for Kansai Time Out magazine, which was in English, and then for Sumo World. In 1992, NHK hired her for its English-language sumo broadcasts. She said she loved the “good rapport” with the other commentators, who are known as “play-by-play men”[...]

Simmons was multilingual and had a gift for voiceovers — “raucous male impersonations, ultra-sweet, throbby animal voices”. She provided the voice for Miss Marple on an Agatha Christie tape, while other roles over the years included a soccer hooligan, a dying rhinoceros and a transvestite geisha [...]

Last year, aged 84, Simmons received the Order of the Rising Sun, one of the Japanese government’s highest honours.

Doreen Simmons, sumo commentator, was born on May 29, 1932. She died of pulmonary causes on April 23, 2018, aged 85