The women called out of the ring at the sumo event included a nurse from the audience who rushed onto the dohyo, as the straw ring is known, to administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to the fallen politician.

Ryozo Tatami, the mayor of Maizuru, a city of about 84,000 people in Kyoto prefecture, was giving a speech when he had a brain hemorrhage and collapsed.

In the video, it appears that several male sumo staff members gathered around Mr. Tatami before the female nurse arrived to start CPR. Three other women also rushed to help. When the referee told them to leave, the women backed off, causing confusion and scuffling around the patient.

It appeared from the video that a man took over CPR before male emergency workers from the Fire Department arrived. Mr. Tatami was taken to a hospital for surgery, where he remains in stable condition.

Most of the reaction on Twitter criticized the referee for calling the women out of the ring. “This seems to present the crazy image of Japanese values that old-fashioned Westerners fantasize about,” one Twitter user wrote.

But some commenters defended the tradition, even if they acknowledged that the referee should have made an exception for the emergency. One such Twitter user fretted that “crazy feminists will take advantage of this.”

Historians trace sumo’s roots to harvest rituals associated with the Shinto religion. Various theories exist as to why women are barred from the ring. One theory suggests that sumo matches were originally put on to entertain the goddesses of the harvest, and farmers believed that women in the ring would invoke the jealousy and rage of the goddesses, who would spoil the harvest.