As Nippon Taiikukai historically had maintained close ties with the Japan Sumo Association, Taiso-Gakko’s students, faculty, and staff members regularly attended their sumo events held at the Kokugikan Arena to cheer on. At the time, different universities had their specific cheering routines, the most notable of which were Tokyo University of Agriculture’s Daikon Odori (Daikon Radish Dance) and Tokyo University of Mercantile Marine’s Ikari wo Agete (Anchors Aweigh). So there was a growing desire among the Taiso-Gakko community to devise its own unique style of cheering not to be outdone by those peers. Hajime Hirai, a Taiso-Gakko student at the time, came up with this great idea of mimicking a person’s movement using a running technique introduced from the U.S., called piston lodge arm motion, to compose a dynamic routine, as he recalled. It included the sequence of arm swings that expressed the contrasting notions of stillness and movement, intensity and gentleness, and fast and slow, with interjecting yells of “Essassa!”
While this is the story of how NSSU’s unique cheering routine came to be, at the student dormitory where Hirai lived, the reason this tradition has successfully lived on to this day is solely because the student dormitory’s residents have been responsible in passing it down from one generation to another over the years.
With the passage of time, the essassa cheering routine would be rearranged little by little, by the dormitory residents that came and went. Through the process, the choreography would become an increasingly heroic representation that expressed the beauty of fission and fusion, as the squad members dynamically came together in one movement and dispersed in the next. The sequence was later construed to represent a pride of lions roaring up toward the moon in moonlight, and achieved its perfection that emphasized the intensity of stillness. The world of essassa, as a piece of performance art even, is perhaps an important part of the mentality that makes us who we are as members of the NSSU community.