The Kyushu Basho Seating Chart, Seat by Seat

Three kinds of seat exist at the Kyushu Basho, and the official names are worth learning before you book anything: tamari (ringside), masu (box) and isu (chair). Nothing at the Fukuoka Kokusai Center is sold as “arena seating” — that’s a reseller’s phrase, not the venue’s.

Yummy Guide’s tour puts you in the isu class, a chair seat, with an English-speaking guide for the walk-through before you go in. The exact seat location can’t be chosen or requested, and a booking covers up to three guests; a group of four or more needs a second booking and may not be seated together. It’s from $634 on the booking platform when we checked, with no reviews yet.

The seats, from the ring outwards

Tamari, ringside, sits right against the dohyo. It’s for one person, costs ¥20,000 on every date, and is sold only on the Japanese ticketing site. Outdoor shoes, food, drink and photography without the organiser’s permission are all off, and the association’s own rules call the risk from a falling wrestler very high. None of our four listings sells it.

Masu, box seats, hold four people on floor cushions, shoes off, and come as four separate tickets — the Japan Sumo Association names “bought a box, received one ticket” among the resale frauds it warns against, so count your tickets before you pay anyone outside its own channels.

A two-person version of Box C runs ¥19,000, as does a pair seat with its own table, which carries no food. Both are a four-person box’s space split for two.

Isu, chair seats, are numbered and sold one at a time:

Chair C, at ¥2,000 on a weekday, is the cheapest seat in the building. Wheelchair spaces exist too, bookable by phone from 22 October, though we haven’t read their price. None of these figures moved in the price rise the association announced for January 2027; that rise applies to Tokyo and Osaka only, and Kyushu and Nagoya stay exactly as they are.

Box seats mean shoes off and sitting cross-legged or kneeling on a cushion for hours at a stretch, so dress with that in mind, and expect to share the box with whoever else is ticketed into it, family or strangers. There’s no official dress code beyond that, but Fukuoka cools off by the afternoon in November, so bring a layer whichever seat you end up in.

Everyone aged four and over needs their own ticket; there’s no “kids go free” at the Kyushu Basho. Families, and groups that include someone over about 60, can instead buy a kids or senior box, handed over at the venue as an exchange voucher rather than a printed ticket, with the whole party present and ID in hand to collect it.

Yummy Guide’s own listing doesn’t say which chair tier the $634 buys, only that you can’t pick the row, and gotcha Corporation’s $127 half-day visit mentions seat “options” it doesn’t itemize either. Ask either operator to confirm the seat class against your booking before you pay, which compares what each guided listing actually includes.

Travelling as part of a larger group changes the picture slightly: parties of 12 or more can apply to the association directly for block seating, a route that sits outside anything sold through a tour or this site. For everyone else booking a handful of seats, the classes above are the whole menu, and same-day tickets explains why so few of them are left to buy officially this year.

Check dates for a chair seat with a guide

For the dates themselves, see the full schedule, and every seat class across every listing is compared on the homepage.

Sources: Ticket Oosumo’s English and Japanese pricing pages, the Japan Sumo Association’s ticket notes and 2026 Fukuoka guide, and a seat-price table cross-checked against a Japanese ticketing blog. Product details from our own October 2026 data check.