Career
His highest rank to date has been maegashira 7. He has both a lower division jonokuchi and a sandanme division championship. Makoto Aoki first tried out sumo at a dojo outside his school when he was a fourth grader in elementary school.
He continued into junior high school at another dojo then transferred to Meitoku Gijuku High School, which was well known for its sumo program
In his second year there he took an inter-high school championship and in his third year he was in the top 8 group of high school wrestlers. He entered a management program at Kinki University and also continued amateur sumo.
In his fourth year in university he made the decision to join Kise stable and first stepped into the ring for the January 2009 tournament, along with other contemporaries such as Takarafuji, Kimikaze and Takanoiwa. His skill and experience allowed him a string of winning tournaments from his entry into sumo, and he also took the bottom division jonokuchi championship in his debut tournament, followed by a perfect 7–0 sandanme championship in September of that same year.
He was promoted to the makushita division in the November tournament following his championship.
He spent all of 2010 in makushita and had only two losing tournaments until reaching makushita 2 in November of that year. Though on the cusp of being promoted to the salaried ranks of jūryō, he only managed a 1–6 record. He changed his ring name from his surname to his current one in January 2011.
He spent most of 2011 working his way through makushita much has he had in 2010.
In his first jūryō tournament in November 2011 he garnered a lot of attention by winning his first seven bouts, however he lost four in a row after that ending with a 10–5. This was followed by a disastrous 2–13 record for the January 2012 tournament, largely due to a knee injury, which dropped him back to makushita.
He fought back with a 4–3 record in the following March tournament and earned re-promotion to jūryō. From this point on he managed to work his way through jūryō posting mostly winning records.
This was still enough to earn him promotion to the top-tier makuuchi division for the July 2013 tournament.
In the following two tournaments however, he would get two consecutive losing records, just barely managing to avoid demotion.
