Born in England and educated at Cambridge, she found her true calling on Japanese television analyzing the quintessential Japanese sport.
She was born in England, studied theology and classics at the University of Cambridge, and taught school in Singapore.
Yet Doreen Simmons found a remarkably different world to explore — as an expatriate sumo wrestling expert in Japan, analyzing matches in English for NHK, the country’s public broadcaster, for a quarter-century.
She adored sumo, the quintessential Japanese sport. She lived in a part of Tokyo known for its sumo stables where wrestlers live, eat and practice. She loved how they tossed salt in the air before their matches as a purification ritual. She prized the sport’s ancient history and its enormous but surprisingly fast athletes in topknots and loincloths.
“It’s a whole world of its own,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Network in 2016. “Professional sumo is not like anything else. I mean, even sumo wrestling itself is different from almost every other kind because in nearly every other kind you’ll grab your opponent and drag him into yourself, pull him into yourself. Sumo is basically pushing outwards.”
Ms. Simmons, who last worked on television in March, died at home in Tokyo on April 23 at 85, according to St. Alban’s Anglican-Episcopal Church in Tokyo, where she was a congregant. Father William Bulson, the church’s rector, said in an email that the cause was a pulmonary condition.
“The thing about sumo is that it’s so simple,” Ms. Simmons said during a TEDx talk at Meiji University in Tokyo in 2016. “The first time you see it, you know what’s going on. But when you start learning more about it, there are so many extra things, so many details.”
She was teaching at a British army school in Singapore when she read a newspaper article in 1967 about a 13-year-old wrestler — already quite big, agile and talented — who had been recruited to a stable. She was fascinated. She began to read about sumo, an education that was accelerated when she moved to Japan in 1973 to teach at an international language center.
