The Go Player's Guide

The Go Player's Guide to Japan: The Genuine Article
February 10, 2003
by Chris Garlock

It takes three hundred five years and a week to make a top-grade go board. Three hundred years for the kaya tree to grow, five years to season the wood and a week to make the board. The best kaya in the world comes from the Aya Forestry Reserve in Miyzaki Prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, and during my trip to Japan last November I flew to Miyazaki for a day to visit one of the few remaining traditional go board makers.

Kenichi Kumasu's hands are large, powerful and gentle after a lifetime of working with the ancient wood known to scientists as Torreya crucifera, and to go afficianados as "honbamono", or "the genuine article". Although kaya grows elsewhere as well, Miyazaki's climate and soil contribute to a tree that yields a wood with unique blend of rich yellow color, good texture and pleasing resonance, as well as durability and a fine grain that retains its resin.

That unmistakably resinous fragrance permeated Kumasu-san's work-shop when I arrived on a damp November morning but cutting through the sweet, piney odor was an even stronger smell that was at once familiar and strangely overpowering. The mystery was solved when Kumasu-san explained that after the kaya is roughed out into blocks, the ends are painted with glue to prevent cracking while the wood is seasoned for up to five years. A kaya tree must be at least 300 years old to yield the fine grain that is so highly prized and after centuries of board-making and logging, there are very few of these old-growth trees left in the Reserve; so few that every remaining tree has been identified and tagged and cannot be harvested without official permission, which is why a traditional board-maker like Kumasu-san, who only works with honbamono, only turns out about 100 boards a year.

Kumasu-san's father started the business half a century ago and Kumasu-san
has been making go boards the old-fashioned way for over thirty years. Leading the way to his wood-shop, he shows how the seasoned blocks of kaya are pared down to size on ancient table saws and then the surfaces hand-planed. Cheerful yellow curls of kaya thin as paper fall gently to the floor as Seiji Kuroki deftly draws the plane across the board; picking one up I inhale the bright piney scent. Kumasu-san slips his shoes off, sits cross-legged on the floor and with a few twists of his well-worn knife carves a goban leg into the flower shape known as kuriashi out of a water-softened chunk of kaya. 

Each piece of wood, like the tagged trees, seems almost alive to these men. They discuss the color, grain, sound and even the wood's "flavor", assessing the strengths and weaknesses of each block. Their attention is more than purely aesthetic: even tiny flaws or variations in the number or direction of grain lines means a difference of thousands of dollars in the board's final price (see John Fairbairn's terrific article "A Survey of the Best in Go Equipment" in The Go Players Almanac 2001 for a comprehensive review of this and other fascinating aspects of go boards and stones).

Like everything else, Kumasu-san lays down the board's lines the old-fashioned way, with a sword that's been dipped in lacquer black as dried blood. After three hundred years of growth, five years of seasoning, and a week of shaping, and planing, the lines go down as fast as moves in the final seconds of byo yomi. The front of the small shop is lined with cases holding the exquisite end-products of all this time and labor. Eventually, Kumasu-san says, there will be no more old-growth kaya. When that day comes, he'll reluctantly switch over to katsura, but he's confident that he'll still be able to carve out a living refinishing boards made from the genuine article. "There's no end to this work," he says, quietly surveying the neat rows of table boards and gobans glowing warmly against the chill of the late fall afternoon. "I try to make each board my best." 

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