HeavenlyHalberd There are a few options, but unfortunately there isn’t a perfect solution outside of Japan.
Apologies for the incoming wall of text!
The easiest way presently is via midnightsumo on twitch, which is a pirate rebroadcast of the coverage from Abema in Japan. While a tournament is on they show footage for the entire day, including all the lower divisions. Abema only has Japanese commentary however, so you will not hear any English voices. The on-screen graphics in the broadcast make it easy enough to follow with names and win/loss records etc. Between tournaments, midnightsumo will often run replays of old tournaments or classic matches.
NHK also broadcast each tournament, and they have an English commentary team as well as a Japanese one. They produce a highlights package after each day of a tournament which usually has a first run somewhere around midnight Japan time of the day in question. After about another day, they make the VODs freely available. They expire after about a month however.
NHK World have recently been producing a series of videos with one of their English language commentators in an outreach attempt for foreign fans, available on Youtube: Sumo Prime Time. During tournaments there will be a little bit of news and then a few highlight matches in each daily episode. Between tournaments they have lifestyle, special interest, and historical coverage to try and present sumo to a global audience.
If you have a VPN you can use to set your location to Japan, you can access the NHK Plus service, which provides an online parallel stream of some of their broadcasts. NHK G1 carries the sumo, and has options for both English and Japanese commentary. As long as you look like you are within Japan and can work your way through the verification emails they will send you (only containing Japanese, auto-translation does a decent enough job here if you cannot read it), you can sign up for a one month free trial. Given that a tournament only runs for 15 days, this will let you watch the broadcasts with English commentary live. Before the end of that month you can extend the trial to permanent access, but this requires providing them with a valid residential address inside Japan.
There are (or have been) a few people providing daily recaps and highlights during tournaments on Youtube, however this year NHK have been going after them rather aggressively and many have been taken down (which is why most/all of the youtube embeds I have pasted in this channel no longer work).
- Sumo Jason has had a channel for 10+ years that recently got taken down. He lives/works in Japan, and shows highlight matches captured via just pointing a camera at his TV. There has been a community effort to rescue his old videos and host them on archive.org. He has a new channel back up (linked to here, the old one is gone), and is using footage from Abema rather than NHK to try and avoid the takedowns.
- Natto produces daily highlights during tournaments, with a bunch of nice on-screen stats before each match detailing win/loss records, head to head history, etc. NHK have been quite active trying to remove their files, and it is a game of whack-a-mole. As of this posting, the current channel is
NattoSumo7, they already have NattoSumo8 prepared with zero videos as the next backup. When one gets taken down, the number just increments and the next day we’re back to normal. If you cannot watch live and you can find the current channel Natto is using, this is one of the best ways to regularly stay up to date during a tournament. I find the NHK highlights package VOD gets released on too much of a delay, I want to know the day’s results before the start of the next day’s matches.
- Kintayamama used to have a daily highlights package similar to Natto, however I can’t find them any more. They may have given up after one too many takedowns.
- (edit, forgot to mention this one) The JSA upload some highlight matches from each day to youtube, from their own official footage sources before any broadcaster adds their production and commentary on top. If you can recognise the people in the thumbnail and/or the kanji for their names, you can find matches from each day you might be interested in. They aren’t comprehensive however, but usually all the “big” matches are there.
Tachiai.org is a good English language site covering sumo news and results. They have a “how to watch sumo” article that talks about how to get access to things like licenced cable rebroadcasts, which I’m making the executive decision to categorise as irrelevant or out-of-scope here.
I think that about covers it!
Please feel free to ask for more info or clarifications on any of the above.
