OK, so it is Friday after a long week and it’s been a while since I carefully, or even, haphazardly, searched the online sites for the best of the best photographs of the week.  Well, it’s not going to be the US elections today or even anything particularly profound. But, really what is more fun than a sumo wrestler and what’s more photogenic than a baby?

There is a Japanese proverb that “Naku ko wa sodatsu”, which means that “crying babies grow fastest.” Hence, we have the Nakizumo festival, where amateur sumo wrestlers compete to see who can make a baby cry the loudest and the longest. Some Japanese parents believe that the event brings good health to their children, although this might seem contrary to convention. I think that part of the appeal here is that the babies remind us of sumo wrestlers or maybe it is the other way around. It definitely brings smiles to people’s faces – although not so much the babies’.  There are lots of wonderful pictures of this year’s festival, held at the Sensoji Temple in Tokyo. I particularly like one by Kiyoshi Ota for the EPA where the baby is wearing little yellow horns, clinching its fists, and crying it’s heart out. The nerve of some sumo wrestlers!