Kyushu Basho 2026: The Full 15-Day Schedule

The Kyushu Basho, the November Grand Sumo Tournament, runs for fifteen days, Sunday 8 to Sunday 22 November 2026, at the Fukuoka Kokusai Center in Hakata-ku. It’s the last of the year’s six tournaments, and the only one held in Kyushu.

If you already know the dates and just want a seat sorted, Yummy Guide’s tour bundles a chair-seat ticket with an English-speaking guide who walks you through the entry process before the bouts start. It’s from $634 on the booking platform when we checked, with free cancellation up to 24 hours out. It has no reviews yet, so weigh that alongside everything else on this page.

The 15 days at a glance

Doors open at 8:45 on days 1 through 12, at 10:30 on days 13 and 14, and at 10:00 on the final day. The lower divisions work through a quiet hall all morning; the crowd fills in for the afternoon.

Weekend dates (8, 14, 15, 21 and 22 November) cost a little more at the official ticket windows than weekdays do. The seating chart has the face values by class.

A sumo ticket, however you buy it, is good for one specific day, not for “sometime in the window,” so settle on a date before you book anything. A full day at the venue runs about nine hours on an ordinary date, from the doors to the bow ceremony, though you’re free to leave and come back as often as you like until 5 p.m. — useful if you’d rather spend the quiet morning divisions somewhere in Hakata instead of sitting through them in your seat.

One date matters more than any of these: the November ranking list, the banzuke, comes out on Monday 26 October 2026. Until then, every name on this site is printed as it stood on the September list, yokozuna Onosato and Hoshoryu, ozeki Kirishima, Kotozakura and Aonishiki, and worth rechecking once the new one lands.

Second-division wrestlers enter the ring around 2:15 p.m. each day, the top division around 3:40 p.m., and the last bout gives way to the bow ceremony around 5:55 p.m. How a sumo tournament works covers what happens between those two ends of the day, and which day is best weighs shonichi against senshuraku against an ordinary Tuesday.

If none of November 2026 fits your travel plans, the next Kyushu Basho runs 14 to 28 November 2027, with its own general sale opening on 18 September 2027 and its banzuke published on 1 November 2027. The format doesn’t change year to year, only the calendar around it.

Whichever date you settle on, carry your passport. Yummy Guide’s own listing asks guests to have photo ID ready if the organiser requests it, and it’s sensible to have some form of it on you regardless of how you end up buying a ticket.

Whichever date suits you, the general sale is already marked sold out, and there’s no box office this year, before or on the day. If a specific day matters more to you than a specific seat class, locking it in through a tour that already includes a ticket is the most direct route open right now.

Check dates for the guided seat

Every listing on this site is compared on the homepage, and same-day tickets goes through why the venue itself sells nothing at the door this year.

Sources: the Japan Sumo Association’s 2026 schedule and Fukuoka timetable, Ticket Oosumo, NHK World and the Fukuoka Prefecture events page. Product details from our own October 2026 data check.