But the shadow of fraud hangs over this spring's sumo tournament in Osaka. The event is taking place in the wake of a weekly magazine's accusations that Japan's national sport is scripted, alleging that a stunning run of tournament victories by Asashoryu, the unassailable grand champion who hails from Mongolia, has been greased by bribes.

Most of those filling the seats here at the Osaka Gymnasium during the sumo world's annual sojourn outside Tokyo, which began Sunday, won't accept that the sport might be fixed. And even if Asa, as he is nicknamed, has paid off other wrestlers, they say it won't ruin their enjoyment of a pageant that depends in large part on artistic showmanship.

"If they were amateur athletes, I wouldn't be able to forgive fixing," says Yoshihide Shiramizu, 47, a former amateur sumo wrestler who says he can tell when competitors are holding back, which he acknowledges they might sometimes do, if only to avoid injury. "Of course money is a key factor for professionals. But it doesn't mean they win or lose for it."

The sumo world is facing the question of whether artistic showmanship has evolved into an artistic license to cheat. The trouble began last monthwhen the Shukan Gendai magazine reported that it had sources spilling secrets from behind sumo's opaque curtain.

Reporter Yorimasa Takeda said he became suspicious at how Asashoryu kept winning tournaments without appearing to train very hard: 20 and counting, a number surpassed by only five wrestlers in recorded sumo history.

How, he asked, could Asashoryu lose so rarely when he was spending most of his time back in his native Mongolia, running businesses?

"He shows up here only to earn money and leaves scars on the sport," Takeda said in an interview.

In publishing its allegations that Asashoryu was paying off other wrestlers, Takeda's magazine cited a cabal of Asashoryu's fellow Mongolians and other foreigner wrestlers who have arrived in recent years to impose a cosmopolitan stamp on the top level of Japan's homespun sport.

But the magazine also named Japanese wrestlers, asserting that the handful of "clean" wrestlers were being cowed into silence by the sumo governing body's anxiety to avoid a scandal that could threaten its tax-free status.

Aggrieved wrestlers angrily denied the charges. And the sumo association responded with a swift investigation of the allegations, pronounced itself clean and sued the magazine for $4 million.

Takeda stands by his assertion that sumo is founded upon a system where prize money accrues to a wealthy few top athletes. As a result, Takeda says, the sport always has had an informal system of "redistributing" money to keep lower-ranked wrestlers happy and the industry alive.

That depiction is seconded by Keisuke Itai, a former professional sumo wrestler in the 1980s who said in an interview that he spent his career throwing matches for money against some of the most famous fighters in the business.

"Even the best wrestlers want some insurance against losing," Itai says. "The fixing used to be much worse than it is now. But I can tell by watching that they are still doing it."

With the wrestlers under greater scrutiny, Osaka's spring tournament has taken on heightened significance. Most observers expected Asashoryu's speed, strength and aggression would see him through despite the scrutiny.

Then Asashoryu went out and lost his first match in Osaka, in humiliating style.

"Asa Loses! Why?" read the headline of the Nikkan Gendai, an evening tabloid, over pictures of Asashoryu in the grip of an opponent who had wrapped him up from behind and was marching him out of the ring.

Still, the Osaka Gymnasium was hardly the place to find skeptics on Day Two of the 15-day tournament Monday.

"I don't think there's fixing," said Noriaki Tokuchi, 60, president of a manufacturing company, as he watched the action. Then he softened a bit.

"If they did serious fixing, it would be bad," he said. "But it's a matter of degree. If they do fix, it's within an accepted range."

There was nothing in the crowd's behavior to suggest they felt duped or that they were ready to see sumo lumped with the acting hams of professional wrestling. No cries of "Fix!" have come down from the (relatively) cheap seats in a venue where decent seats cost more than $100. No wide-eyed kids have implored "Say it ain't so, Asa."

Instead, teenage girls still squealed and snapped pictures with their cell-phone cameras when the wrestlers entered the arena . The regulars still settled onto mats around the ring with their boxed lunches, and the tourists still paid the hefty ticket prices to get a taste of Old Japan.

Then it was all eyes on Asashoryu for the last match of the day. His opponent was massive Japanese wrestler Miyabiyama, at 29 struggling to earn his way back into sumo's upper ranks.

"I just wanted to keep him at bay," Miyabiyama said later.

Instead he rocked Asashoryu's world. The two wrestlers slammed away at each other until Miyabiyama staggered the grand champion with a straight arm and, to ecstatic cheers, hurled Asashoryu out of the ring like he was throwing him out of a burning building.

The Mongolian had been defeated in the first two matches of a basho, something that had not happened to him in the four years since he had become a yokozuna. The newspapers would be full of headlines the next day, asking what had made the sport's supposedly strongest man suddenly "go weak."

"These were more serious matches, the wrestlers fought to the end," said Hikaru Masuda, 56, after the last cushions had been thrown in the traditional celebration to mark a yokozuna's defeat.

Masuda comes to the Osaka tournament every year and says, "I've seen some lethargic matches, and I can recognize see fixed ones."

So what about this year, he was asked. Is this basho fixed?