Nana Abe is 12 years old and a true sumo champion: she has been practicing since she was 8 years old and rarely loses games. In Japan, club sports are an important part of adolescence, and how many students keep in touch with their classmates. Sumo is a martial art with a long history in Japan, and it has long been Japan’s favorite sport. It is only open to professional men, but this does not stop some girls from practicing it as a club sport.

Tokyo photographer Yulia Skogoreva has been photographing girls and young women practicing sumo for many years. “Japanese traditions are complicated,” Skogoreva said. “When people come to visit the country, that’s why they love a part of the country so much, because so many traditions are still preserved today. But there is also the issue of gender equality. Can we find a way to balance both?”

Shinzo Abe’s dream is to continue his career, but currently, under the current system, women cannot move on after graduating from university. Club-level female sumo wrestlers are passionate about this sport, and have devoted sweat and tears to prove that they are worth participating in the competition. “I hope these girls have the opportunity to continue their careers,” Skogoreva said. “At present, even in Japan, few people know about the existence of female sumo wrestling. I hope my project will one day help these girls gain more attention and achieve their goals.”

Skogoreva, who has lived in Japan for more than 10 years, understands the dream of professional sports. Her goal is to capture motion and space in still images. She grew up in Moscow and often went to watch ballet. She eventually enrolled in the Japanese Academy of Photography in Tokyo and continued to shoot dances. “I like the natural state of people moving,” Skogoreva said. Dancers forget the camera, they just do what they want. When watching various sports, I started to see dance moves. “

She is particularly interested in sumo, which has a lot of rituals before fights, which usually look like dancing-professional wrestlers sometimes walk up to the ring in colorful dresses to show their ranking, while competitors lift up in front The dohy? (raised ring) is a to-foot match and is shown off in a ceremony choreographed as “dohy?iri”. Skogoreva was initially curious about the world of male sumo wrestlers because she had never heard of women participating in the sport. Then a friend sent her an article about female sumo wrestlers, which aroused her interest. “This is an incredibly close connection and a closed world. It took more than a year to take pictures there. I reached out to the Russian wrestlers, and then when I returned with the pictures of the Russian wrestlers In Tokyo, things became much easier.”

She plans to continue working on the project, taking photos of sumo wrestlers in Japan and elsewhere, and continuing to take photos of Nana and her sister Sakura. They are growing and changing every year. I really want to keep taking pictures of her until she graduates from university and even afterwards. “