''I wasn't doing everything a normal sumo wrestler would do,'' Tenta said. ''I was given special privileges. Other wrestlers were jealous. By doing that I was causing my stablemaster to lose face. Face is very important in Japan.'' Indeed, one newspaper reported that 10 wrestlers had left the stable because they resented the dispensations from service granted to Tenta.

He came to Japan in October 1985 at the invitation of Sadogatake, who met him in Canada while preparing a sumo exhibition. Tenta was then wrestling for Louisiana State University. L.S.U., however, dropped its wrestling program and Tenta decided to come to Japan, knowing nothing of the lore and demands of sumo, nor a word of Japanese.

Like all fledgling wrestlers, he was enrolled in the academy conducted by the Sumo Association. He rose each morning at 5:30 and went to school where he learned the rudiments of a sport built upon the simple principle of pushing the other man down or out of the circular clay ring. He learned to push, fall and stomp - sumo wrestlers do a lot of ritualized stomping of evil into ground. He was exempted from poetry recitation, and in the calligraphy course was permitted to write his ring name, Kototenta, over and over again in Japanese. Enjoying New Life

Though he went through a bout of loneliness so acute that he considered leaving, he began taking pleasure in his new life. He became a celebrity. He met the woman he has been seeing. And he quickly became very good at his sport.

Still, there was the feeling that this was not for him, that he was being suffocated by the rigidity the sport imposes upon its wrestlers. ''You're always having to answer to somebody,'' he said, referring to the endless need to ask permission for something so seemingly mundane as going to the movies.

His departure, if anything, confirmed suspicions among the Japanese that a foreigner could never really fit in the nation's game, said Tsuyoshi Iizuka, who covers sumo for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.

''For the Japanese public the sumo world is a very special and peculiar world,'' he said. ''People feel that it's very understandable that this foreigner just couldn't stay in this world. Although we understand that the same thing would happen to Japanese, we can understand that it is especially hard for foreigners.''