"Well, goodbye, Morgana-san," said Kyūri Sensei as he dismissed the vision in the scrying pool. The old kappa sighed. Morgana could be pushy, but she did seem to care about the fate of his heya (as sumo schools were known). He waddled out of his home and glanced at the two riverside buildings that made up the two halves of his school, Kyodainayokai-beya: the male wing and the shiyūdōtai wing. Kyūri considered it very important to keep the males and the shiyūdōtai apart at all times aside from the annual tournament between them. Shiyūdōtai weren't even allowed to look males (aside from Kyūri) in the eye and vice versa.
Kyūri headed toward the shiyūdōtai building. He saw his best student, a tanuki named Humiya, emerging from the dormitory wearing nothing but hir loincloth. Shi was quite a specimen, her tubby body weighing in at 420 pounds. Hir bare breasts bounced wildly with every step and hir massive cock and even more enormous balls strained against hir loincloth.
Humiya spotted Kyūri and bowed to him. "Greetings, Kyūri Sensei! I just finished meditating in my dorm. May I help you?"
Kyūri smiled at the tanuki sumo. As gruff as he could be, he couldn't help but be fond of his most skilled pupil. "Hello, Humiya-san. You've no doubt heard of the changes around here."
"Of course," said Humiya. "All of us are so excited to see America. Imagine meeting vampires who don't hop! They sound so different from our native kyonshī!"
Kyūri chomped on his cucumber. "I'm glad one of us is happy about this, Humiya. I would not alter centuries of tradition if I did not see that it was necessary. I had two hundred students in 1922. Now I have twenty, and that's counting the six new arrivals."
Humiya raised hir hand, asking for permission to speak; Kyūri nodded. "That reminds me, Sensei. Kijo and Misaki are full females. They'll need penises before they can begin their training. Also, Misaki's a human. She needs to become a yokai as well."
"We'll need a witch," said Kyūri still nibbling on his cucumber. "Morgana would probably do it, but she's in America. I'll have to find a local one, I guess."
"There's probably one up in the mountains," Humiya said.
Kyūri idly stirred his head water, brooding on what he had agreed to. "Witches are almost more trouble than they're worth. I almost don't know how I let Morgana Faye persuade me that this heya can only survive if I open it to foreigners."
"Yes, that's quite a major development," said Humiya. "When was the last time you admitted a foreign student?"
"1603," said Kyūri. "A Dutch werewolf, if I'm not mistaken. But its not the more than four centuries of foreign absence from this heya that troubles me. It's why these three Americans wish to come here. They find plump bodies attractive, and they wish for me to transform them into their personal ideal of beauty. I fear that they may not respect the ancient art of sumo as anything more than a means to an end."
Humiya placed a comforting hand on the old kappa's shell. "You can't blame that on admitting Americans, Sensei. Some of the new Japanese students are the same way. Maruko Futobara came here because shi lost hir appetite (and most of hir fat) after a breakup. Akane Inarimago always wanted to be chubby, but being a kitsune got in the way. Perhaps Japan and America have more in common than we realize."
Kyūri smiled a bit. "Perhaps so, Humiya. You are wise beyond your seventeen years. Well, I won't let them get away with any foolishness. Furthermore, Morgana decided that it would help these three American sumo hopefuls if a student exchange program were set up. She's hard at work using geises to manipulate the American and Japanese governments into setting up an exchange program in Jefferson County, Washington. I'm thinking about including three schools in this program. Our very own sumo academy, Kyodainayokai-beya, shall obviously be one. Another shall be the high school in the tanuki village of Toyoda. Lastly, the high school in the kitsune village of Inamura wants to participate. One student from each school."
"The competition will be pretty fierce," said Humiya.
"I think a lottery will be the fairest method," said Kyūri, finishing up his cucumber. "If the program's successful in its initial outing, we can expand it to include other schools."
"I hope so," said Humiya. "There's a bunch of schools in Tokyo and Kyoto that have a mixed population of humans and yokai. I was enrolled in one before I joined this heya. Oh, maybe you could also include Takarazuka Music School!"
Takarazuka Music School was the academy that trained performers for the Takarazuka Revue, Japan's renowned all-female musical theater troupe. Noh and Kabuki may have been Japan's traditional drama forms, but they loved a good splashy Broadway-style musical as much as anyone. Takarazuka existed to scratch that itch, staging opulent, Western-style musicals and stories adapted from films, novels, shōjo manga, and Japanese folktales with an all-female cast. The performers, often called Takarasiennes, were divided into otokoyaku (male-role) and musumeyaku (female-role). This was based on ancient theatrical practices from the time when kabuki had been all-female rather than all-male as it was in the present. Japanese girls trained to become otokoyaku and musumeyaku in the Takarazuka Music School, a prestigious school famous for the quality of its music training and the strictness of its rules. Unbeknownst to the general public, several of its students were yokai (especially kitsune).
"Agreed," said Kyūri. "Considering those American-style spectaculars they're training to star in, those Takarasiennes would probably relish the chance to study American theater up close. They'd likely get along very well with those werehyenas. A lot of otokoyaku are secretly shiyūdōtai kitsune."
"It'd be great for them if you could get one or two of them over here right away," said Humiya. "Wait, aren't Ellie, Beck, and Kristi bringing their mates with them?"
"Correct," said Kyūri.
"Then won't we need to send six exchange students to America rather than three?" asked Humiya.
Kyūri slapped his hand to his forehead, nearly spilling his head water. "Sweet Susanoo! I forgot to factor the girlfriends in! I have to go tell Morgana we're sending six girls rather than three!" The kappa sumo master then went scampering back towards his home's scrying pool as fast as his girth would allow.