Sumo's own historical tradition traces the sport's origin to ritual contests performed before the kami as divination for the year's harvest, and wrestling matches are recorded in Japan's earliest chronicles as connected to imperial court ceremony centuries before sumo took the organised, professionalised form recognisable today, a long documented history the Japan Sumo Association and sumo's own institutional culture treat as central to the sport's continuing self understanding as something considerably more than ordinary athletic competition. The gyoji, sumo's referees, wear elaborate traditional dress modelled on historical Shinto priestly and samurai era costume and carry out their role using ritual language and gesture alongside their functional refereeing duties, another point at which sumo's sporting and religious dimensions are structurally inseparable rather than merely juxtaposed.
Modern professional sumo operates as a highly organised, commercially significant national sport under the Japan Sumo Association, with wrestlers, rikishi, living within a strict hierarchical stable system, heya, that governs training, diet and daily life, a demanding institutional structure that coexists with, and in the association's own presentation actively upholds, the sport's continuing identity as a living expression of Shinto ritual practice rather than a purely secular athletic contest that happens to retain some decorative historical trappings.