Only 20 years ago, Japan’s roaming sumo scouts could be sure of a ready supply of willing, thick-set young recruits from poorer country towns.

Posters of popular wrestlers, such as Chiyonofuji “The Wolf” Mitsugu, and brothers Takanohana Koji and Wakanohana Masaru, adorned bedroom walls.

And the rustic teenage males sleeping beneath them dreamt of nothing but joining their idols at a communal sumo stable, where they could devote their working lives to a charter of austere and sometimes brutal ancient rituals.

But times have changed in Japan and these days.

Lookouts representing the country’s 53 stables are finding that work is thin on the ground.

Last year the Japan Sumo Association approved just 87 novices - down from 223 in 1992.

In June this year the country was shocked when a round of tests for new recruits, held in Nagoya, failed to attract a single applicant. It was the first time in the sport’s history that no one had tried out.

“That was a surprise,” Tokyo-based Australian Murray Johnson, a sumo announcer for more than ten years, told the Syndey Morning Herald.

“The current lack of Japanese-born champions has hurt the sport’s popularity with the parochial public.

“But I think the reality is that kids don’t want this incredibly tough life anymore. They’ve got other things to do.”

Young Japanese, he says, are shunning the discipline and hakinku, or dignity, of the sumo lifestyle and “migrating instead to big cities for part-time day jobs and all-night parties”.

A recent government survey found that the economy was burdened by 1.87 million freeters - part-time workers and unemployed between the age of 15 and 34.

Their lethargy, coupled with public outrage over the recent death of 17-year-old wrestler Takashi Saito, who suffered heart failure after a savage beating by older members of the Tokitsukaze stable, prompted The Daily Yomiuri to declare in a headline: “Scandal casts doubt over future of sport”.

Since Saito’s death, the practice of kiai-ire (initiation beatings) has drawn closer police scrutiny, which some fear could lead to a curb on traditional sumo coaching styles.

The sumo association has already agreed to to review spartan training methods.

As one 35-year-old former junior wrestler from Osaka said: “When you think about the training and the beatings, you can understand why young people would rather enjoy their youth.”