"...For the first time since Japan Broadcasting Corp. (NHK) began televising sumo tournaments five decades ago, the public broadcaster said Tuesday it will forgo live coverage of the Nagoya Grand Sumo Tournament scheduled to start Sunday. Billed as a national sport, sumo has been shown live all these years on NHK's nationwide network as a matter of course, generating quite a large following. But now that the sport has become deeply mired in scandals--the latest of which concerns illegal betting on pro baseball games--we support NHK's decision to drop the upcoming Nagoya tournament from its live programming. If the sport is to be reborn and truly reformed, sumo authorities should accept this harsh decision as what they deserve. NHK pays a broadcasting rights fee to the Japan Sumo Association to show live sumo bouts. The amount reportedly exceeds 2.5 billion yen ($28.4 million) a year, which forms a fair chunk of the association's annual revenues estimated at around 10 billion yen. The fee actually comes from NHK's paying subscribers. It is upsetting to think that some of that money, paid as salaries to sumo wrestlers, was being gambled away to effectively support organized crime. Given the suspected involvement of crime syndicates in the betting scandal, it must have been more important for NHK to consider its status as a public broadcaster than to accommodate the wishes of sumo fans looking forward to watching the Nagoya tournament on TV. But the betting scandal is not ...