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124 C H A P T E R 9 Foreign Territory I think when Perce came home it was such a shock, but, in the same way it was for me. My body was bus’, I couldn’t take any more cortisone, I was taking uppers, downers, steroids. And everything was supposed to be good now. But for me, from high school I was a full-blown ice addict. I stopped in Japan for five years, cold turkey , just to do sumo. I had no other choice. And then when I got to jūryō, everything seemed cool now, ah? I had money, I had rank. And then I just lost everything. The injuries, that was the main part of it. —Tyler Hopkins, June 17, 2007 Percy’s father sat waiting for me, a big stack of photo albums on the carport table in front of him. “It’s just some pictures we took over the years,” he said after greeting me and sitting back down. “And there’s some pictures people sent from Japan, and some papers I collected regarding his sumo career.” I flipped through one of the albums and picked out Percy in his fourth-grade class picture: the tall kid in the back with the glasses and the big smile, green Waiāhole Valley in the background. A young bull of a Mr. Kipapa digging the imu for Percy’s first-birthday luau. The lady-killer shot from his middle school yearbook. Percy in a kimono standing next to Akebono, serious looks on their faces. The odd photo of Kurt or Selisa showed up, but the four thick volumes were clearly devoted to Percy. One might have expected a grieving parent to put together this sort of memorial , but the wax had long since lost its stickiness on most of the pages, 125 Foreign Territory and photos were sliding out everywhere. Percy’s father had been waiting for me as anxiously as his laid-back demeanor would allow, because he had been preparing all of this material not since Percy’s funeral, but since his son had first set off for Japan. That much became clear when I got to the three-inch binder at the bottom of the pile. Mr. Kipapa had taken pages of blue-lined loose-leaf paper, a ruler, and a black ballpoint pen, and blocked off boxes to create a neat monthly log of Percy’s entire sumo career. One entry read, “Jan. 1 31 93 ENTRY HATSU BASHO (SANDANME RANK 92 W-4 L-3)”; another read, “FERD LEWIS INTERVIEWED PERCY IN TOKYO & PHOTO IN ADVERTISER.” A handdrawn graph followed, marking the days of each month that Percy called home. The proud father had cut out newspaper articles in Japanese and English and carefully pasted them onto the next several loose-leaf pages. Another homemade graph sketched the careers of the rest of Hawai‘i’s sumōtori, and the next listed their tournament-by-tournament records (“The Akebono File,” “The Sunahama File,” etc.). Mr. Kipapa had then handdrawn a double line of columns and listed, line by line, the dates where Percy was mentioned in the newspaper. “This is some of the things I wrote down,” he said. “What I did was I just kind of keep track of these guys, the local guys. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” he said with a laugh. I recalled spending hours trying to track down the results of Akebono’s earlier bouts. The fact is, despite my years-long obsession and the three-hundred-page book that resulted from it, I still can’t accurately trace all of the numbers of his career , and here was Percy’s entire record laid out right before me. “I wasn’t too much interested before Percy went up,” he went on. “I was not the kind type who would spend time on sports.” And as if this homemade Daiki encyclopedia weren’t enough, all the stats pages were followed by an inch-thick stack of loose-leaf completely filled with brief diary entries detailing every single telephone call that Percy made from Japan, or that the Kipapas made to Percy, for his entire career. Flipping through the pages, I imagined Mr. and Mrs. Kipapa passing the phone between them, laughing with or reassuring their homesick son, and then Mr. Kipapa sitting down at the kitchen table, putting on his glasses, opening his green binder, and writing down an entry like this...

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