For all the normal accouterments, the fourth floor of Jesse Kuhaulua's spacious Tokyo residence is less a living room than an expansive, memory-packed career museum.

There is an impressive bronze bust. There is a wide selection of paintings, glass-encased memorabilia and tributes from presidents, prime ministers, ambassadors and Olympic heroes crowding his All-Maui Interscholastic League football recognition.

Together they and dozens of other items make for a vivid walk down a memory lane stretching 45 years. They are testament to 20 years in the competitive ring and 25 more as a coach and elder, a remarkable, soon-to-officially-end career in Japan's national sport of sumo by the former Baldwin High athlete.

Yet, the man who competed under the ring name Takamiyama — or mountain of lofty view — said he never saw this life, or the riches it produced, coming.

"In the beginning, I never thought about a career in sumo or becoming a (ranking sumotori)," Kuhaulua told a recent visitor. The reason he took the recruiting trip in 1964 at a sumo stable owners' urging was "just to see Japan with my own eyes. I was just coming over to see what Japan was like."

This week the acquaintances made in the course of a trailblazing nearly half-century stay will gather to celebrate his mandated retirement. By June 16, his 65th birthday, and per regulation, Kuhaulua must formally hand over control of his stable and officially step out of the ruling Japan Sumo Association.

Thus will end a career that began at age 19 when, as 6-foot-3, 270-pound raw amateur sumotori in Happy Valley, Maui with a bare-bones resume, he arrived wide-eyed — and shivering — to a Tokyo winter welcome. He stepped into the alien land with as few words of Japanese in his vocabulary as dollars in his worn pockets.

In the first halting months, Kuhaulua acknowledges, he would many times contemplate returning home. More than once he bought a ticket on the Yamanote rail line that rings the city and rode it around in circles pondering his plight. Then, the reality that the stablemaster had his passport locked in a safe and he had not enough money to buy a return plane ticket set in. "I wanted to go, but I couldn't," Kuhaulua said.

Instead, in an education measured in sweat and pain amid many an early morning on the hard-packed earthen practice ring, he learned the full measure of the term "gaman" or perseverance. "Sumo was all I had; I had to work harder to make something of myself," Kuhaulua said.

By dint of that hard work, he gradually climbed the ranks of the sport, winning respect in Japan and making a name for himself in Hawai'i. When he rose high enough to accompany a touring group of sumotori to exhibitions in Honolulu in 1966, the enthusiastic response of the home crowds gave him the will to press on. "They gave me more confidence in myself. That told me I could be a success," Kuhaulua said.

He became the first foreigner to scale the salaried ranks and, in 1972, the first to win the Emperor's Cup symbolic of a tournament championship. Not merely content to make history, he did it with an ironman passion competing in a record 1,231 consecutive matches in the top division. Only a month short of age 40 in 1984 did a freak elbow injury finally bring down the 430-pound man mountain from competition.

But as the tears flowed amid the ritual snipping of his top knot in ceremonies witnessed live by more than 10,000 fans and carried on national TV in Japan, Kuhaulua pioneered another path. He became the first foreign-born stable owner and trained the first foreign grand champion, Akebono.

Next week he will turn over the keys to the lower three floors of the stable building to one of his understudies, Ushinomaru, selling him the much coveted Azumazeki stock in the sumo association. Except for some consulting and advisory work, Kuhaulua will step away from the only full-time job he has ever known. Hardly the career in the Maui police force he had originally envisioned.

"His (Kuhaulua) is an amazing story," said sumo journalist and historian Toshiharu Kyosu. "He is an amazing man."

And much beloved in Japan, where they used his life story as a theme for an English language textbook and dedicated an airplane in his name.

Surveying the living room of a two-story home that sits atop the stable he built, Kuhaulua shakes his head. For all the trappings of the career that surround him, he said, "sometimes it doesn't seem like 45 years. Sometimes it is still like a dream."