The Go Player's Guide

The Go Player's Guide to Japan
December 2, 2002
by Chris Garlock

The Ojima Collection

Koji Ojima screws up his face thoughtfully, smoke wreathing up from his cigarette. "Over two thousand," he says finally. "Maybe more than 3,000, including books."

Ojima's "Go Ku Raku" go club in Sasayama contains Ojima's extensive collection of go-related objects, including bowls, cups, sculpture, prints, scrolls and unusual finds like a metal yatate, a strange-looking ancient pen and ink case. A short drive into the countryside outside Osaka, the town of Sasayama is a pastoral scene of rice and soybean fields (the black soybeans are a highly-prized local specialty). The town of 40,000 has about 200 Go players, fifty of whom are active, according to Mr. Ojima. A dozen or so show up daily at his club and, like go players everywhere, they seem utterly oblivious to their surroundings, intent on their games while the walls are filled with Ojima's amazing go art collection.

Ojima's collection started thirty years ago with the innocent purchase of a go-themed scroll on a trip to China, and "just sort of grew" from there. A giant wood carving of go players sits in a window not far from postage stamps featuring yet more go players. A ship carved from an elephant's tusk turns out to have tiny go players hunched over a board on the deck. On a table is a stack of go prints several inches thick. The go here is almost as thick as the cigarette smoke and most of the objects have a thin film of smoky dust. When I step into the bright sunlight outside it feels as though I've emerged from another era. Strings of drying persimmons glow orange in the sun.

Big Moves at Iwami No Kami

In 1609, two Osaka-area village chiefs settled a land dispute the old-fashioned way: by playing a game of go, an event commemorated at the Iwami No Kami shrine in Kaibara, a small town just up the road from Sasayama. Iwami No Kami, chief of Nii, was a weaker player than Kuge Suragamo Kami, chief of Kuge, but Iwami came up with a winning plan. The game was played outside, with the players shielded from the sun by servants holding umbrellas. One of Iwami's servants was a strong go player and he guided Iwami to victory by using a tiny hole in the umbrella to reveal the best moves.

Over 400 years later, as the sun drops behind the once disputed Mount Ishido, six of us play a game of rengo on the shrine's giant outdoor goban, a 5' by 5' stone board with 2" wooden go stones. The local team fields Hakusei Honjo, Yasuo Harada and Shieji Toshiyama; the visitors are Shunichi Hyodo, Harumi Takechi and myself. When things get complicated, Honjo-san brings over the umbrella and poses with it poised above me, as Hyodo-san (who I've dubbed Kurosawa-san) videotapes the action.

A maple tree blazes crimson in the sunset as the mountain's shadow creeps over the black and white patterns on the huge board. In the end, like an oldtime baseball game, this ancient contest is called because of darkness and we clear the board in the last few lingering shreds of twilight. Later, after an evening of food and song at his home, Honjo-san presents me with a signed and dated pair of the oversize stones which now sit half a world away on the goban in my study.

Komi at the Kansai Ki-in

At the Kansai Ki-in in Osaka, I get a tour, lunch and a lesson on komi. The new 6.5 komi in Japan is being phased in gradually because of ongoing tournaments pre-dating the change. According to Ryuji Ieda, 8p President of the Kansai Professional Player's Association and Ryo Maeda, 6p, professionals agree that 6.5 is a fairer komi but that 7.5 (as in China) is too much, although, they say, maybe in another decade or so, further developments in understanding the game could change this. They're very curious about whether the AGA plans to increase komi as well and my description of the passed-stone rule winds up being more confusing than helpful, possibly because it probably has nothing to do with komi (although I'm not sure and make a note to make sure smarter people at the AGA follow up on this).

The Kansai Ki-in boasts 118 professionals, including 14 women and Daisuke Murakawa, an 11-year-old from Hyogo prefecture who's the second-youngest Japanese pro (by just two months) since child prodigy Cho Chikun in 1968. The Kansai Ki-in has 86 chartered branches throughout the region, and nearly 300 members in the downtown Osaka headquarters overlooking the Tosaborigawa River. More than fifty players a day show up to play at the Kansai Ki-in, which is open six days a week from noon to 9P (closed Sunday). Lessons are held twice a day and Sunday morning, thanks to the "Hikaru no Go effect", more than 100 kids show up for a special kid's class.

It's quiet in the pro playing room on the seventh floor of the Kansai Ki-in, but it's an intense quiet. One of the eight players is swaying back and forth hypnotically while his opponent ceaselessly runs his hands through his hair and mumbles softly to himself. The rest sit nearly immobile, cross-legged on low-backed chairs with pillows on tatami mats before thick 6-inch kaya gobans (there's another, Western-style playing area with tables and chairs next door). These are tournament games and clocks tick away the seconds mercilessly while the white noise of the air system hisses over the quiet sighs and mumbles at the boards.

Three floors down, students in a beginner's class follow along on their own boards as the teacher demonstrates on the big board in front. Outside the sun beckons invitingly but is ignored as the black and white stones fall in identical patterns.

In the coffee shop next to the playing area on the Kansai Ki-in's first floor, pro player President Ryuji Ieda is pessimistic about the state of go in Japan. "If things continue as they are, I doubt there will be progress for Japanese go," he says. "Japan is not as strong as we used to be and there is not as much interest among young people," he says, adding that interest among the general population is down, too, despite the popularity of Hikaru no Go. Maeda-san stirs his coffee and says quietly that he's a bit more optimistic, citing the hundreds of kids turning out every week for the Sunday classes. "Five years ago, there were just four or five students," he says.

My Guide to Go: Shunichi Hyodo

Shunichi (not Susumu, as reported in last week's E-Journal) Hyodo was my indefatigable guide and host for the second leg of my recent trip to Japan. My inexcusable error gives me a welcome chance to expand on Shunichi's incredible generosity and kindness to this first-time visitor. Regular U.S. Go Congress attendees will remember Shunichi well: he's organized and led the Japanese tour group for years and we spent a pleasant evening in his home in Kakogawa looking through his well-organized Congress scrapbooks and reviewing his videotape from this year's Congress in Chicago. It is a rare privilege to be invited for a "home stay" with a Japanese family, as space is extremely tight. Shunichi not only welcomed me into the warm and cozy home he shares with his wife and son, but arranged for me to stay with fellow-Congress attendee Harumi Takechi in Kawanishi, providing a comforting touch of home and home-cooked meals in a visit where so much was strange and new. As Shunichi wrote me upon my return last week, the reason he took the time and effort to help me explore his country is because he loves go and therefore simply loves anyone who loves go. I don't know how I missed him all these years but I'm proud to call Shunichi Hyodo a good friend now. If I could be half as generous, or a quarter as good a go player, I'd be a happy man indeed.

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