of ability to change tack once he had been sidestepped was one of the concerns raised by the Yokozuna Deliberation Committee when he was up for promotion. His peak weight of recorded in March 1996 was the heaviest ever for a sumo wrestler until surpassed by Ōrora in 2017. Life after sumo Konishiki remained in the Japan Sumo Association as an elder for a short time under the name of Sanoyama, before branching out as a Japanese entertainer under the name "KONISHIKI" (the capitalization is an effort to reflect the association's requirement to write his name in the Roman alphabet, after prohibition of spelling it out in Japanese characters after his retirement from sumo). In 2000 Shinichi Watanabe, director of Excel Saga and Puni Puni Poemy, created an anime series called Dotto! Koni-chan, in which Koni, the protagonist, is a fat child who strongly resembles Konishiki. In January 2004 he married his girlfriend of two years, former medical worker Chie Iijima. He had previously married former model Sumika Shioda in 1992, but they divorced amicably in December 2000. In 2006, he played in the film Check It Out, Yo Chekeraccho!! and also made a short appearance in the film The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift. He is the host of an NHK children's program called Nihongo de Asobo (にほんごであそぼ) which teaches children traditional and colloquial Japanese. He is known as "Koni-chan" on the show. Although he continued to DJ for his FM Yokohama show Kony Island, he took a hiatus from Japanese celebrity life for a year in 2007, returning to Hawaii to prepare for gastric bypass surgery. Although he did not have high blood pressure or any heart problems, he had not lost much weight since his retirement, and underwent the operation in February 2008. He announced on his website that the operation went smoothly and that he had since lost . He returned to Japan in May 2008. After sumo, he began to turn his talents to music, most notably with his collaboration with Rimi Natsukawa as well as L-Burna on the song "Livin Like Kings". He often sings and raps in a mixture of English and Japanese. He can also play the ukulele. In 2000, he released a hip-hop album called Kms, including songs "Island Girl", "Sumo Stomp", and the old-school classic "Sumo Gangsta". Following the 2011 earthquake, Konishiki was a high-profile fund-raiser for disaster relief