At 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, Jenelle Hamilton doesn't look like a sumo wrestler. And when Hamilton, 34, tells people what she does, most have one of three responses: "[That] I'm not big enough to do sumo, I wear a blow-up suit or I wear that 'diaper thingy,'" the soft-spoken brunette says.

None of which is true, by the way, except for that "diaper thingy," called a mawashi, a traditional loincloth wrestlers wear during training and competition. Hamilton dons one every time she steps into a dohyo, or sumo wrestling ring.

Jenelle Hamilton is a single mom to 10-year-old daughter, Marie, and works as a secretary for L.A. County. Sumo wrestling is just her "side" passion. Courtesy of Jenelle Hamilton

For the past six years, the single mom and secretary for L.A. County has been pursuing her passion around the world in places like Taiwan, China and Russia, and earning accolades along the way: She is the defending U.S. national sumo women's lightweight champion and U.S. Sumo Open women's lightweight and open-weight champion.

Most recently, Hamilton shelled out for a ticket to Osaka, Japan, to compete in the 11th Women's Sumo World Championships at the end of August -- before she even qualified for a spot on the U.S. team. "I said, 'Screw it, I'm either going to Japan to compete or I'm gonna go to Japan and see my friends and cheer them on. One way or another, I'm going.'"

Luckily, she did qualify, defending her title in the lightweight division by placing first -- and earning the trip for which she'd already plunked down $700.

Hamilton's introduction to the sport happened in her native Southern California when a co-worker and former sumo champ, Troy Collins, set up a makeshift dohyo on a Venice Beach basketball court and invited her to participate.

"I saw a lot of what everyone else saw that day: a lot of weird people taking over the court and people sitting around watching these naked men with a loincloth wrapped around them just muscling each other around in a circle," she recalls. But after her first bout, she was hooked. "I figured, after that match, that wasn't so bad, you know? Three or four or five seconds and all the pain was gone. The match is so short."

She was also drawn to sumo's culture. "The sport demands respect, always," she says. "[After the match finishes], you are to go back to your side of the ring and bow out of respect for the soul and the spirits that have won and lost during the fight, so the egos are always checked at the door."

Soon enough, she was hitting the mat, training with Collins and learning the ins and outs of a sport steeped in tradition and still relatively taboo for women: At the professional level, the sport is restricted to male wrestlers in Japan, and women are forbidden from even stepping into a dohyo.